The people who run Gannett and Knight-Ridder might like me to say it is good that Detroit has "diversity of editorial voices." [But] I don't believe the JOA -- or the newspaper industry in general, for that matter -- is terribly concerned with the preservation of editorial diversity. Even if it were, I'm not sure the News and the Free Press are all that different from each other anymore. They are adequate, not dissimilar papers going about essentially the same difficult, perhaps impossible, task of trying to be everything to nearly everybody. Both aggressively seek the same affluent segments of the Detroit market; neither can afford to be too different from the other without risking alienation of those crucial audiences. In other words, surviving means working against diversity, not for it ...

My hometown is a deeply troubled city that cries out for one excellent, financially strong newspaper instead of the two adequate, financially weak papers it has today. Had there been no prospect of JOA, maybe by now Detroit would have that one excellent paper.

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