Bitter Showdown in Motown

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Detroit's two dailies are locked in a struggle for survival

At the counter of the Anchor Bar, a shadowy grease pit midway between the offices of the Detroit News and the rival Free Press, where journalists mingle in the legendary camaraderie of the trade, a Free Press employee looks up at rows of photographs of Motor City reporters, lawmen and politicians and says, "I think you have to be dead to be up there." That is certainly true of one picture; it shows a building that once housed the Detroit Times, a Hearst daily that shut down in 1960 and threw the city's two surviving papers into a decades-long, unresolved and unfriendly battle for dominance.

The newspaper war in Detroit may be the nation's hardest fought, and it is almost certainly the costliest. Detroit is the nation's fifth largest metropolitan area (pop. 4.4 million); its News and Free Press are the ninth and tenth largest U.S. dailies. The owners of the morning Free Press (circ. 632,000) acknowledge that the paper lost $9 million last year. They assert that the all-day competitor, the News (circ. 643,000), lost twice that much in 1982, even though it has a solid 60%-to-40% lead in advertising linage, largely because the News offers discounted ad and circulation rates. News executives decline to comment. Losses have accelerated during the recession and the deep slump in the auto industry, which have subjected Michigan to an unemployment rate of 17.6%, the nation's highest.

Both papers believe that they are locked in a struggle for nothing less than survival. Moreover, says Free Press Executive Editor David Lawrence, 40, "the victor would be highly profitable." As a result, the News and the Free Press raid each other's staffs, scoff at or steal each other's stories, even copy each other's promotional gimmicks. When the Free Press started handing out copies to breakfasters at McDonald's, the News arranged a giveaway deal with Burger Chef.

Executives of the two papers display little of the courteous approval that journalists typically accord competitors. News Editor William Giles, 55, calls the featurish Free Press "superficial, flighty and frilly." Lawrence says that Giles' paper, which earnestly stresses hard news, is "dull, bland and less complete than the Free Press." Giles and Lawrence live just a block away from each other in suburban Grosse Pointe Park, but as Lawrence dryly observes, "We have certainly not had the opportunity to become close friends."

The Free Press is owned by Miami-based Knight-Ridder Newspapers Inc. (1981 revenues: $1.2 billion), the nation's second largest newspaper chain, after the Gannett Co. Renowned for its liberal spending on both technology and editorial product, Knight-Ridder this year will finance additional Free Press zoned editions, with extra local news for western Detroit and its near suburbs, now the core of News readership. Free Press Editor Lawrence says that Knight-Ridder has the will and the cash reserves to wait out any number of losing years. Says he: "If only one paper survives, it has got to be the Free Press." The News is a local David flung up against Knight-Ridder's absentee Goliath. Founded in 1873 by James E. Scripps, the paper now provides about half the revenues of the Evening News Association, a private company for Scripps heirs that also owns newspapers and broadcast properties in the Sunbelt, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey. Contends Editor Giles: "The family is committed here."

Thus far, the News has not blinked at costly efforts to hold on to its slim, 10,500-paper lead: it sells for just 15-c- on weekdays, vs. 20-c- for the Free Press, and it delivers some 250,000 copies a day at discounted prices, vs. about 63,000 discounted papers for the Free Press. In 1981 the News built a $12 million printing plant in Lansing, 84 miles from Detroit, to compete for distant readers with the Free Press, which now outsells the News in 79 of Michigan's 83 counties.

Editorially, the papers differ sharply. Last Friday, for example, the lively Free Press gave front-page play to the discovery of a black hole in space and to a resettlement plan for blacks in Zimbabwe on the land of a white former rancher. The sober News opted instead to feature an economic analysis from Washington and an auto show in Detroit. The Free Press is stronger on foreign news and lifestyles, thanks in part to the Knight-Ridder News Service, while the News copiously covers the city and state. Both papers have won recent Pulitzer prizes: the News in 1982 for an expose of alleged brutality in the Navy, the Free Press in 1981 for a photographic essay on prison conditions.

Sometimes the competition seems merely peevish. When the News inadvertently distributed a few hundred copies of an edition that erroneously reported a launching of the Columbia space shuttle, whose flight had been delayed, the Free Press gave the error derisive frontpage play. When Free Press Senior Managing Editor Neal Shine became host of a local public TV show, Detroit Week in Review, Giles forbade News reporters to appear as panelists. Giles has not forgiven the Free Press for suggesting, in a 1980 editorial, that a News probe of alleged corruption among black municipal judges was sloppily reported and racially motivated.

Both papers are wooing reporting talent with salaries exceeding $40,000 a year. Boasts Giles: "My editorial budget is $14 million, and I can use it to buy people." Last year, however, the Free Press snared four News employees, including Reporter David Ashenfelter, who was pivotal in winning the News its Pulitzer award. After Ashenfelter jumped, someone sent Free Press Editor Lawrence an elaborate, expensive cactus arrangement and an anonymous note that read, "Thanks for taking more of our dead wood."

Despite their windfalls, many reporters fear a day of reckoning. Says Free Press Columnist Judy Diebolt: "I worry a lot that one paper may not survive, and that it may be mine." Indeed, in Lawrence's office is a display of delivery boxes of the defunct Washington Star and the Philadelphia Bulletin, with the inscription LEST WE FORGET. There is space for a third mailbox, notes Free Press Executive Shine. "And it is not for the Cleveland Press."

--By William A. Henry III.

Reported by Paul A. Witteman/Detroit

With reporting by Paul A. Witteman This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.