Depressing Daily Press

Sick as a dog today (thanks, N1H1). But found a couple interesting posts to share:

--Old pal Rodney Curtis has a great blog/site about his adventures in unemployment and at the Detroit Daily Press, which shut down last week for retooling.
--Also, Crain's Detroit had an interesting article about the Detroit Daily Press and more information its decision to reorganize. I'll put out some highlights:

The co-owner of the mothballed Detroit Daily Press said today the newspaper will re-launch in January only if circulation problems can be solved.

“If I can't get the circulation together and know that it can be run properly, I'm not going to do it,” said Mark Stern, who with his brother Gary published the inaugural issue on Nov. 23 only to suspend operations Friday afternoon because of retail delivery and productions problems, and a lack of advertising.

Stern said the circulation department is going to be completely revamped, and he would decide today if circulation director Jim Lingemann will be retained. He was meeting with the circulation staff this morning.

The Royal Oak-based Press was on pace to lose more than $1 million in less than two months if things continued at the current pace, Stern said. He said he was prepared to float losses for some time, but not at that rate.

“We decided at this point to stop the bleeding,” he said.

The Press -- aimed at Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties -- also should have waited at least a couple more weeks before launching, Stern said, to ensure circulation, advertising and marketing plans were fully in place. He admits they were not, and thought things could be solved as they published.

Home delivery was to begin today, but the myriad problems printing and delivery the newspaper made that impossible, Mark Stern said.

The Sterns had said they needed to eventually reach 150,000 subscribers to make the paper work — which is about 17,000 fewer subscribers than The News has right now.