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Key links:
Primary website:
freep.com
Primary Twitter:
@FREEP

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News are Michigan’s largest newspapers.

Under a 1987 joint operating agreement, the Detroit Media Partnership publishes, distributes, and sells advertising for both papers. The papers are owned separately and employ independent news staffs and websites. The two papers were not making money as of late 2009, though executives were optimistic about their profitability by the end of 2010.

The Free Press is owned by Gannett, who bought the paper from Knight Ridder in 2005 in the same deal in which it sold the News to the MediaNews Group. The Free Press, often known as the Freep, is the older and larger of Detroit’s daily newspapers, having launched in 1831.

The Daily News is owned by MediaNews, which bought the paper from Gannett in 2005. It was founded in 1873.

In 2009, the Free Press and News became two of the first papers to cut back from daily delivery in order to save money and emphasize the web, delivering the Free Press to homes three days a week and the News twice a week. The papers remain available at newsstands each day. The papers also introduced an e-edition of their non-print editions as part of the transition. The Detroit Free Press’ e-edition had about 100,000 readers as of 2010, giving it the second-highest  e-circulation that year, behind only the Wall Street Journal. That number had been surpassed by several other papers by 2012.

In May 2010, the papers announced they would restart daily home delivery in some areas through independent carriers.

The Free Press has won four Emmy awards for its video work, which it started in 2005. The Free Press produces a television news segment on a local station with stories written and produced by Free Press journalists.

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“But it’s…cartoons?”: Comics and cartoons are coming to life well beyond the printed page — When Kevin Necessary read a story from WCPO — a Scripps-owned television station in Cincinnati with a robust website — that shared intimate details about undocumented immigrant families living in the greater Cincinna...
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All the news that’s fit to podcast: Newspapers try out audio — The podcasting fervor of 2015 has continued into 2016 and shows no signs of diminishing. Gimlet, the podcast startup cofounded by Alex Blumberg of Planet Money and public radio fame, is a household name in the digital au...
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The coming death of seven-day publication — "Ultimately, consolidation is just a mop-up strategy — one that simply squeezes out the final remaining profits before the lights are turned out."...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: May 24, 2012.
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The Orange County Register is a daily newspaper based in Orange County, Calif. It is the second-largest newspaper in California and 14th largest newspaper in the U.S., with a combined 356,165 print and digital subscribers as of March 2013. The paper originated as the Santa Ana Daily Register in 1905, changing names twice more before…

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