I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
If you’re not a regular subscriber to your favorite print newspaper and thought you’d pick up a copy Wednesday morning for the “Obama” headline, odds are you were probably out of luck.
I know my local gas station didn’t have a single paper when I stopped by Wednesday, but at the time, I simply thought the trucks were running late with delivery.
After hearing that papers were selling out, I stopped again in the evening, and the racks were still empty. Chris, the attendant at my local BP station in Temperance, Mich., said every paper his place carries was “gone within a couple hours early in the morning,” and some people were buying multiple copies.
Ron at Barnes and Noble in Battle Creek told me that the only paper the store had left was Sports Weekly after everything else sold out within hours of opening Wednesday.
And while you’re trying to figure out where to put your newspaper souvenir of Election 2008 and perhaps wondering if you’re being a bit silly to want to hang onto it, think about Thomas Baldwin of Bellingham, Wash.
From the Bellingham Herald:
Thomas Baldwin thinks there might be money to be made now that Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is President-elect Obama.
And he’s got 10,000 reasons to be hopeful.
On Wednesday, Nov. 5, Baldwin purchased 10,000 copies of The Bellingham Herald’s election wrap-up edition that has Obama smiling and waving on the front with “Obama wins” in bold letters across the top.
Baldwin figures the historic election could some day net him a profit.
So far, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News have stepped up and run more copies of the historic Obama headline editions and were to have them available at all their retail outlets Thursday, two days after the historic night.
The Detroit Free Press:
Vendors across Michigan sold out of the Free Press within hours — sometimes less — as people rushed in the morning after election day to get a copy of the historic edition, prompting the newspaper to immediately print 9,000 extra copies and order another 55,000 to be sold Thursday at all retail outlets in Metro Detroit — about 3,300 of them — that sell the Free Press.
The Free Press will also publish a special section on Obama’s road to the White House with the Thursday newspaper.
Sellouts were reported across the state and the country.
“This paper is significant. It is a footprint, that I was here at this time,” said Charlene Bradford, 50, of Detroit, who waited in line for 2½ hours outside of the downtown Free Press building this afternoon.
She waited longer to get her 18 copies of the newspaper, she said, than she did to vote Tuesday.
Andre Moore of Detroit said, “I knew this was going to happen because everyone wants this paper. It’s a collector’s item.”
The Detroit News:
Historic edition is being reprinted
Our first run sold out and we are currently printing more copies of Wednesday’s newspaper. They will be available at our downtown office, 615 W. Lafayette Blvd. in Detroit, and will be sold Thursday at all of our retail outlets in Metro Detroit and at select locations in outstate Michigan.
Fast Company notes that the spike in demand for print papers during the election is just a temporary respite for print newspapers today:
Unfortunately, this is just a temporary reprieve from a bigger downward spiral [for newspapers]. The Times itself published a pretty glum story last week about the young campaign embeds from the papers and the news networks, who will find few job opportunities in journalism after the election. Can it really be true that the career-making job immortalized by The Boys on the Bus in the ’70s is now more like a dead end?
Of course, not all the news about the news is bad. Media winners from this election include the sparkling — and liberal — Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, along with Web sites The Huffington Post, Politico, and the geek-heaven stats site FiveThirtyEight.com.The worry on the minds of those of us in the media biz is not a lack of outlets. It’s that as ad dollars shift online — a process sure to be accelerated by the coming downturn — the rates and revenues just won’t rise fast enough to support good reporting in any medium.
If you weren’t able to get a day-after-Election-Day copy of your favorite paper, let me know in the comments here along with the name of the paper, and the city. I’ll try to find out for you if more copies will be made available.
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