The Press: City Room Green Stamps

Journalism has long demanded a wide array of skills: interviewing, spelling, bluffing, sleuthing, reading documents upside down on someone else's desk. The Detroit News has added something new to the list: selling papers. For every 13-week subscription a staffer can peddle, the News announced last week, he or she will earn two points toward a catalogue full of gifts, from a Rubbermaid bird feeder (six points) to a digital watch (100 points).

That huckstering innovation is part of a drive by the evening News to halt its steady loss of readers to the morning Free Press (daily circulation up 22% in ten years to 622,339, only 5,122 behind the News). Last month the News roused its reporters' wrath with an internal memo announcing that the "product" would henceforth stress stories about "Detroit and its horrors that are discussed at suburban cocktail parties." The subscription drive has met with similar hostility. Complained a Newspaper Guild officer: "That's just not our role. The obvious answer to the circulation problem is to put out a better newspaper and cut out the garbage like that memo." Countered Managing Editor Burdett Stoddard: "My daughters thought it was a good idea. They're trying to get something for their room."