The Detroit Experiment launches

Tomorrow it begins. The first of a series of news media experiments in an effort to stave off the demise of the American newspaper. The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News will published three and two days a week, respectively. Smaller editions will be sold the other days of the week in the traditional yellow and red news boxes. Subscribers will get full access to an e-edition that will have the look (but not the feel) of the newspaper. Others will get their hard copies delivered by U.S. Mail.

Michigan media companies are the petri dishes of several new models. The various Booth newspapers around the state will launch other experiments this summer.

Meanwhile, the technology is racing against the clock to beat the wholesale demise of newspapers in the U.S. New products that would deliver slender, lightweight devices that will get automatic digital delivery of news sites are on the cusp. The Detroit Media Partnership is committed to one, Plastic Logic, while magazines are putting their money on other products.

Good journalism, watchdog journalism, the kind that?s vital to the health of the nation (not Britney updates), will survive the turmoil. Ink, newsprint and delivery trucks maybe a thing of the past.

Here?s to journalism in the very best tradition, like the Free Press? series on former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff. M.L. Elrick (a J-School alum) and Jim Schaefer, and a host of editors and supporting staff, did a tremendous job in the highest tradition of journalism. Long may it last.

Elrick and Schaefer will be honored with the first ever 1st Amendment Watchdog Award given by the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame. Now more than ever it?s important to recognize and salute great journalism. The duo have captured every major journalistic award this past year. The big one is left?the Pulitzer. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, J-School faculty unanimously approved a new innovative curriculum?the first overhaul in years. Our students will graduate with the skills needed to be entrepreneurial reporters, flexible and adaptable to the ongoing changes in the industry. From here it goes to College and University committees. We hope for the official rool out at the School?s centennial celebration, April 15-17, 2010. Mark the calendar. This is going to be the event of the next century!

Despite the Mich newspapers shake-up, the end really isn't near!

Ann Arbor News closing with a successor news operation to reopen as a web only site. Flint Journal, Saginaw News, Bay City Times combining operations for a three day a week print product, the others days online. Jackson Citizen-Patriot, Muskegon Chronicle, Grand Rapids Press more budget cutting. On March 31, the last daily edition of the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News roll off the presses as those papers go to home delivery only on Sunday, Thursday and Friday (a pattern Flint, Saginaw and Bay City are adopting) with a streamlined edition in box sales or mailed to your home the rest of the week.

These are gutsy moves by frightened news executives frantically trying to weather the economic tsunami of the web’s impact on news delivery. Add to that the perfect storm of the economic depression (we here in Michigan know a depression when we see it), and you have the cumulative effect of the news of the past few month. The Rocky Mountain News gone. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer morphing to the web.

Is journalism dead? Should the J-School shut the doors or is this a paradigm shift? It’s a paradigm, baby, of colossal proportions. Think monks in monasteries and Gutenberg’s moveable type. Same impact. Different world—things happen much faster now.

News organizations should focus on their own news markets and cover the news that the web and major news sites cannot—the school board, the city council, the parks and rec folks, the cops and courts. These were always the heart and soul of the family-owned newspaper. As they disappeared, so did much of this kind of coverage. But it is coming back. The J-School is involved in a Tandem project in partnership with The Detroit’s News’ multiplatform editor Jonathan Morgan. The funding comes from a Knight Foundation Challenge grant and was the idea of a group of students.

The problem is the technology is a whisker behind the economic implosion and impact of the web. Products like a Kindle-like-iPhone or a Harry Potter on the train to Hogwarts with all those folks reading the constantly changing newspaper is just around the corner. Literally. Products like Plastic Logic are in the beta stages of thin, light products that are the ideal format for news delivery. Do you really think the cell phone screen is large enough? When the youngsters, turn 45 and presbyopia (that’s when the listings in the telephone book become unreadable and you now need glasses to read anything is called), cells phone screens are just too small. They can provide tweets and text alerts, but missing is a design that lets you know what information is the most important among the morass of info assaulting you at warp speed.

The times have changed. The news and information delivery models will be different. And news organizations like newspapers, TV and radio are scrambling to catch up (and frankly, somehow must have missed that press release when Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web, or Craigslist started running free classified and…the list goes on and on.

The J-School has aggressively repositioned itself with our proposed new curriculum that will include courses on entrepreneurship, more all round tech training to learn storytelling and interview methods not just for words but visually, and the virtual newsroom which will be launched in the Fall 2009 term.

The key is still and will always be the journalism.

The only thing to fear is if the journalism disappears because of it.

Will that happen? Absolutely not. All those news aggregator sites like Google, Yahoo, AOL and Drudge gather their news content from some of the same news media outlets that are in peril. They also need to recognize this problem and start hiring the hundreds of journalists to keep their coverage alive and vibrant.

This is shake up, break up and then we will make it up. The founding fathers didn’t protect a free press in the 1st Amendment to be nice guys. They did it because they got it that someone had to watchdog government and the press was the one entity to do that—fearlessly. Ask the former mayor of Detroit about that. Without the aggressive, persistence intrepid work of Free Press reporters M.L. Elrick (one of our alums) and Jim Schaefer (an Ohio State guy who does darn good work, too!), that story would never have been told. The abuse of powers and misconduct that cost Detroit taxpayers more than $9M never revealed and likely ongoing.

So hang on. This makes the worst roller coaster in the world look like a kiddie ride. This is scary, challenging, thrilling, fun and most of us will live through it and even benefit.

Faculty like break, too!

Faculty just want to have fun (and work, too!) on spring break!! We promise to avoid the beaches students like to hang-out!

Driving my mother to her place in Ft. Myers (after coordinating judging for the annual MIPA conference on Saturday)...Cheryl Pell

WORKING!! yea... we have a bunch of shows to put out for the Big Ten Network!...Troy Hale


I'm going to Florida to visit my sister. I'll only be gone four days, and two of those are traveling, so, I do not think I'll be spending too much time on the beach!...Darcy Greene

Headed down to New Orleans for a few days for my first visit since before Katrina to one of my favorite cities in the world. Looking forward to warm weather, good food and drink, and a firsthand at what a "heck of a job" really looks like...Michael Stamm

I will be having a BLAST! Will give three little talks and the keynote at the Southern Interscholastic Press Association conference in South Carolina. Will then head over to Depauw University in Indiana to spend the week under the Kilgore Program for visiting professionals...Joe Grimm

I am taking four students to the Michigan Association of Broadcasters conference next Wednesday to receive their honorable mention award for best newscast...Bob Gould

I'm working on completing requirements for my Master Hand Knitting Certificate. People don't realize how cut-throat and competitive things get in the world of advanced needlework. "Devise a way to block stockinette swatches so that the edges don't curl using only water and heat. You may not use another stitch as a selvedge edge." That's a feat that pretty much defies the laws of physics. Also have three novels by relatively new Indian/Sri Lankan authors to read and submit for review to "Rain Taxi," a lit mag out of Minneapolis...Jean Raber

My plans are to catch up on a backlog of papers that need to be graded and attend the Health Care for Journalists conference in Washington D.C. mid-week...Dave Poulson

I'm hanging around town and working. Pretty exciting?Huh!...Howard Bossen

I'm going to be a judge here:
http://www.ifra.com/website/website.nsf/html/CONT_COMP_ASIA?OpenDocument&AMA...Karl Gude

I'll be delivering a keynote address at the annual conference of the Association of Socio-Economic Researchers of Agriculture in Mexico The title of my presentation is "The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America and the Agricultural Relationship between the United States and Mexico." The conference is from March 12-14 in Sinaloa, on the Mexico's Pacific coast, well known for its resorts in Mazatlan and its large agricultural sector...Manuel Chavez

I'm heading to Lakeland to spend time with my kids and the guy who is the incredibly talented voice of the Detroit Tigers and likely fielding hundreds of emails from students...L. A. Dickerson

I hope to get back into the studio and finish recording my (second) CD; its working title is "The Hat Album." There shouldn't be much rewriting to do on the story I just finished for "American Theatre" but I've left some time open, just in case, and it will set a good example for my students...Marty Kohn

Heading to a barrier island in Georgia to join my husband, our two dogs and one cat (who thinks he's a dog), and to eat lots of Georgia shrimp...Jane Briggs-Bunting

Safe travels all. See you back in a week.