This is such a curious story that I want to preserve bits of it as they appeared, to help better make sense of it.
The back story is that some veterans of the "strike newspaper" industry decided they could make a go of doing a new daily Detroit paper, with delivery.
They launched to the point of being able to print a week's worth of paper, then abruptly shut down.
Bill Shea from Crain's had a hard time finding a copy on Monday when it got started:"Due to circumstances beyond our control, lack of advertising, lateness of our press runs and lack of distribution and sales, we find it necessary to temporarily suspend publication of the Detroit Daily Press until after the (first) of the year," the statement read. "Once we can fix these things, we plan to be back stronger and more organized when we return. This is just a bump in the road and not the end of the Detroit Daily Press."
While 3,500 sounds like a lot, I’d hazard that one could easily find 100,000 retail spots, or more, pretty easily in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, so the paper might be harder to find that some might expect. I looked at a few downtown Detroit places at lunchtime with no luck. I’ll check again later and pop up to Royal Oak so I can get a copy to dissect for you on here. Stay tuned.TIME's Detroit bureau weighs in:
Surprising -- yet not surprising -- news out of the new Detroit Daily Press. The city's new paper says it needs to regroup. Editors and writers now have a five-week vacation to see what happens. Many friends were working there, and they were the ones who took the buyouts or were laid off from The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. I'm sad to see an enterprise that could have been an exciting addition to the community fall so quickly.
Media critic Jay Rosen had only this cryptic comment on the situation:
Not a single thing do I get about this story. Either the reporter is incompetent or the actors are crazy.
And I suspect it will take a while to figure out what really happened.
