Before I headed to my first real - i.e., paying - newspaper job years ago, my parents bought me a used car. I can still remember getting behind the wheel, giddy and exhilarated to be on the road and starting the life I always envisioned for myself as a big-city reporter.
It was a Pontiac, and I was driving to Detroit.
I thought about that car this week for the first time in years, when the news came that the once-mighty and now-faltering General Motors was killing its Pontiac line, unloading it along with thousands of employees and hundreds of dealerships in a desperate attempt to stave off bankruptcy.
I don't have particularly sentimental feelings for that old Pontiac Grand Am - mainly what I remember about it was that it was turquoise and had an engine that a previous owner had painted the kind of orange-y red of bad lipstick. But it did its job, getting me to and then around the city for the reporting internship that I had the summer between my junior and senior years of college at the Detroit Free Press.
So maybe cars and newspapers will always be intertwined for me. Interns generally don't get the glory assignments, but one of the few front-page stories I had that summer was a feature about a fan club devoted to one of Detroit's biggest mistakes ever, the Edsel. Members came from all over, driving their restored Edsels around one of the Ford buildings, ghosts of the automotive past back to haunt the present.
Four cars and three newspapers later, that summer seems further away than ever. Back then, I never would have imagined that one day, some 30 years later, both industries would be suffering through an economic recession, scrambling to change their old ways of doing things to keep up with a changing marketplace.
While all newspapers are cutting back - we're going through a round of layoffs at The Baltimore Sun - Detroit has a drastically scaled-back news media picture. Last month, the Freep, as well as the rival Detroit News, with which it now shares business functions, discontinued home delivery of papers in the early part of the week, focusing instead on online editions and condensed paper versions for street sales.
I don't think I know anyone at the Freep anymore, but the newsroom I worked in seemed entirely of its two-fisted city. Like most newsrooms, much of the staff wasn't from the city originally, but they had come to know and love it, or at least love sticking their noses everywhere and writing all about it.
