Two Newspapers and a Player to be Named Later

The Detroit connection originally caught my eye, but this Reuters article on the ownership swap of the Detroit News and Free Press is hilarious -- albeit entirely unintentionally, and in a way that's a little sad.

What it boils down to is that Gannett, Knight Ridder, and Media News are trading newspapers and cash back and forth to each other like baseball teams before the deadline, and the Reuters article covers it exactly like that. They're shuffling publishers like starting infielders against a left-handed pitcher.

Growing up, I never thought it was strange that Detroit had two newspapers. We had three car companies, three TV stations, two sides of town, and two brands of cola (not counting Faygo, Royal Crown, and Towne Club). My family bought both. I liked the Free Press, because the script "D" in its title looked like the D on the Tigers' hats and uniforms. Plus it carried "Peanuts," "Calvin and Hobbes," and all the other best cartoons. It's strange to think that most cities have only one newspaper, or that a handful of corporations could own all of them, making deals amongst themselves to decide which papers to float and which to sink. But a lot of things seem stranger to me now than they did twenty years ago, when I was just a little boy who loved the Tigers and experienced everything, good and bad, about his hometown as though it had always been and would always be, everywhere and forever.