[COMMENTARY] News late last month that the Detroit Free Press will print its last editions of the Community Free Press on Aug. 1 stunned the reporters, editors, photographers and myriad freelancers who’ve diligently worked to make those mini-papers popular with readers.

In Detroit and 10 suburban areas where they circulate, the CFPs have managed to give the Free Press a local persona sorely lacking in the Big Paper. Kwamegate will get you through half a cup of coffee, but most readers don’t live in Detroit. They want to read about their communities. Soon that identification with local needs will be gone, and the people who work to make the CFPs high-quality sections are wondering why theirs are being put to death.

Not enough advertising revenue is coming from CFPs, says management.

Continued – The real reason, I think, is that the CFPs were envisioned several years ago when then-Free Press owner Knight-Ridder was looking for ways to compete with the suburban Observer & Eccentric newspapers. But in 2005, Knight-Ridder sold the Free Press — which it had owned since 1940 — to Gannett. Then Knight-Ridder itself was sold, broken up and no longer exists. The sale of the Free Press to Gannett made that chain — biggest in the country — owner of both Detroit dailies.

(Media News runs the Detroit News for Gannett and receives a small management fee, which should trouble anybody committed to having separately owned newspapers in the area. It should also concern lawyers at the U.S. Justice Department presumably dedicated to making sure antitrust laws are not violated.)

But Gannett also owns the Observer & Eccentric papers. That means the CFPs are competing head to head with another Gannett property.

I heard another reason, from a Freepster, why Gannett is shutting down the CFPs. Supposedly, Gannett managers got wind that The Newspaper Guild was going to file a grievance claiming the Free Press has been overusing freelancers on the CFPs. Not wanting to face yet another defeat in an arbitration case, managers decided to pull the CFP plug.

I don’t buy that, though. Now, it’s true that the Free Press never had enough full-time writers to fill the CFPs. Freelancers have written many of the CFP stories, and a case could be made that one or two of them are working full-time without benefit of the Guild contract. Ditto freelance photographers. The union has grieved that kind of situation before, and has won in arbitration.

But that’s not why Gannett is dumping the suburban papers.

First, even if it’s true that the Guild is planning to file a grievance, how would Free Press bigwigs get wind of it? It’s not like the Guild’s one full-time employee, President and Administrative Officer Lou Mleczko, is having lunch with Free Press Executive Editor Caesar Andrews or Editor Paul Anger.

(I understand the air gets pretty chilly around managers when Mleczko shows his face. The union has won two major arbitrations recently, and that has embarrassed managers.)

Besides, why would shutting the CFPs stop the Guild from filing a grievance?

Here’s what I think happened:

Last January, Gannett was poised to kill the CFPs in a couple weeks. I learned that managers had announced this, so I posted the news in my blog, joelontheroad.com. You can read about it in my Jan. 29 blog post. Within days, I learned that managers had reversed their decision and had promised to save the CFPs. Big relief among staffers. What heroes those bosses are!

My guess is that the chiefs didn’t like being outed, so they announced they were saving the CFPs, all the while intending to kill them off a few months down the road. That way, they could make my blog appear goofy in predicting the demise of a popular publication which didn’t die, despite my prediction. Then they could come around in the summer six months later and, assuming memories are short, kill the CFPs off without anyone suspecting that was their plan, slightly delayed, all along.

Nice try, guys!

The CFPs are history after all, and you read about it first in joelontheroad.com.

Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com