Bitter Showdown in Motown

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."