detroit free press letters to the editor

#DETROIT FREE PRESS LETTERS TO THE EDITOR CRACKED#
#DETROIT FREE PRESS LETTERS TO THE EDITOR FREE#

Reporters and editors, meanwhile, have complained that the papers are losing their identities, since the staffs of both papers must now contribute to a single, merged weekend edition.Īt the Detroit News, especially, the joint agreement has brought traumatic change. For several weeks after the merger, the letters to the editor columns of both papers were filled with angry missives from longtime readers threatening to cancel their subscriptions.

#DETROIT FREE PRESS LETTERS TO THE EDITOR FREE#

“We will do a little better than break even this year,” agreed Robert Hall, the publisher of the Free Press and the executive vice president of the Detroit Newspaper Agency.īut the merged papers have been successful in one regard-they have managed to anger just about everyone in town.Ĭirculation complaints from readers skyrocketed as the two papers struggled to merge their distinct distribution networks.

#DETROIT FREE PRESS LETTERS TO THE EDITOR CRACKED#

Yet, during the first few months of the joint agreement, newspaper executives here have found that running a monopoly isn’t always what it is cracked up to be. They now publish separate editions during the week and a joint paper on Saturdays and Sundays. In return for the right to form what amounts to a newspaper monopoly, the two papers, now managed by the new Detroit Newspaper Agency, must retain separate editorial voices.

It allowed the papers to merge their business operations under a special exemption from antitrust laws granted the newspaper industry by the federal government. Supreme Court last year after more than three years of legal challenges. The JOA-the largest ever in the newspaper industry-was finally approved by the U.S. The historic newspaper war between the Free Press and the News, two of the nation’s largest and most tradition-rich metropolitan dailies, came to an abrupt end with their merger under a joint operating agreement. It was supposed to be a marriage of profitable convenience, a newspaper merger that only an accountant could love.īut so far, last November’s partial merger of the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News hasn’t really made the accountants-or the advertising salespeople, for that matter-all that happy.

Detroit free press letters to the editor