Press: Bitter Showdown in Motown

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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¢ on weekdays, vs. 20¢ 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 exposé 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."