Press: Bitter Showdown in Motown

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Despite their windfalls, many reporters fear a day of reckoning. Says Free Press Columnist Judy Diebolt: "I worry a lot that one paper may not survive, and that it may be mine." Indeed, in Lawrence's office is a display of delivery boxes of the defunct Washington Star and the Philadelphia Bulletin, with the inscription LEST WE FORGET. There is space for a third mailbox, notes Free Press Executive Shine. "And it is not for the Cleveland Press."

—By William A. Henry III.

Reported by Paul A. Witteman/Detroit