Imported From Detroit ... Really?

— Photo by TJ Sullivan —

That commercial about the Big D. The one hawking a sweet ride. That stylistic pitch that plants the words "Imported from Detroit" in the brains of loyal American-car buyers nationwide. The TV ad that first aired at a two-minute length with a 313 rapper at the wheel ... all stereotypically super-serious ... leering at the camera ... saying ... declaring ... contradicting the stereotypical portrayals of Motown as a source of decay ...

"This is the Motor City, and this is what we do ..."

I liked it.

A lot of current and former Detroiters liked it too.

It imbued us with a rare strain of pride. Not the pride that accompanies the grand achievements of athletes who play in suburban arenas, or of local boys and girls who make good and forget where they're from. Pride that comes from what the city once was, as well as from what it is. Pride that runs as deep as the pigments in Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry murals. Pride as enduring as the Spirit of Detroit statue, or that 24-foot, fist-and-forearm monument to Joe Louis. Pride that, despite deep wounds and unprecedented losses, our hometown remains tough, rough, resolute and straight-up raw.

The message was made in Detroit, but to my ears, and I expect to the ears of a few others, the pronouncement was more majestically profane. Something like: Made in #$@&-ing Detroit!

Then a couple weeks went by.

A couple weeks of reading news.

A couple of weeks of pondering whether a TV ad could do a whole town proud.

I decided otherwise.

I changed my mind because, as the commercial suggests, Detroit defies the canards. It's been there, way down there, in a place no other city has been, or wants to go. It hasn't just been down those roads, it built those roads. In some parts of the city, those roads are all that's left.

The idea of a car being "imported from Detroit" is so retro it's cool. It'd be even cooler if the car was actually built in the actual City of Detroit. But, as the car maker's Web site explains, this sedan is assembled in Sterling Heights.

No games. No lies. Sterling Heights is part of the Detroit Metropolitan Area, as entitled as any neighboring municipality to warm itself beneath the blanket brand name of "Detroit." And, as any Detroiter knows, the auto industry once put plants all over the metro area. But, to be clear, as most any real-estate agent in the region can attest, in 2006, Sterling Heights ranked as one of the top-10 safest cities in the US among cities with populations between 100,000 and 500,000, which is to say, the suburb of Sterling Heights is no City of Detroit.

When homeowners in Sterling Heights put their houses on the market, they surely emphasize the suburban identity, the safety, the schools ...

When Homeowners in the City of Detroit put their houses on the market, they don't often boast about the schools, especially now that state officials in Michigan have ordered Detroit Public Schools to begin implementing a plan to close half the city's schools.

Close.

Half.

The.

Schools.

Nothing new to Detroiters. A long time coming. Old story. Dire straits. A distraction from good news, like the recent boost in graduation rates to a four-year high. Some say such closures will never happen. But, there it is. A plan. An alternative to bankruptcy. An order. Close 'em. Close half the schools.

Half.

The Detroit News broke down the potential in terms of classroom sizes:

"Grades K-3 from 17-25 students to 29 in 2012-13 and 31 in 2013-14."

"Grades 4-5 from 30 students to 37 in 2012-13 and 39 in 2013-14."

"Grades 6-8 from 35 students to 45 in 2012-13 and 47 in 2013-14."

"Grades 9-12 from 35 students to 60 in 2012-13 and 62 in 2013-14."

Which reminds me ... "Say nice things about Detroit!"

When I was a kid, growing up in the City of Detroit, back in the '70s, a booster began a campaign to improve the city's image. "Say nice things ..." The message appeared on billboards, stickers, buttons ... They figured it'd help if Detroiters thought of their city as a "nice" place. A city has to want to change. So, say "nice things" for a change.

I recall snickering.

Nice? What was nice?

My whole kid world was consumed by caution. Lock the doors ... Close the windows ... Stay away from there ... Don't go looking for trouble ...

Every Oct. 30th, an annual doomsday dubbed "Devil's Night," we stood sentry behind the bushes out front to ward off vandals as hundreds of buildings citywide were set ablaze.

When I was in the sixth grade (at a Catholic school, by the way), my class was told that a classmate's father, a public-school teacher, was in the hospital recovering from stab wounds he received when one of his students attacked him.

We were programed to flee. Getting good grades was important, we were told, not just to get better jobs, or to live better lives, but to get out. To get to the suburbs. To get to another state. Wherever. Just get someplace nice. But, oh yeah, "say nice things about Detroit."

By the time the rest of the nation began to freak out over kids taking guns to school, the metal detectors in some Detroit public schools had rust on them.

Nice things existed. Nice things remain. New money in the form of movie and TV production has transformed Detroit's bombed-out neighborhoods into post-apocalyptic backlots, though, local talk of turning the Motor City into Hollywood East seems about as likely as a return to hatchbacks and T-tops. The impressive, on-location, TV cop drama "Detroit 187" gets better every episode, and even manages to posit the possibility that Detroit is on the verge of a renaissance. But inexplicably bad ratings could send cast and crew packing come spring.

Regardless, it's all nice for now. The commercial. The movies. The TV show. But, just as I found it hard to notice nice things when I was a kid in Detroit Catholic schools, it's even harder to imagine kids in Detroit public schools noticing what's on the blackboard, let alone anything nice, when they're packed 60 to a classroom.

Sixty students ... Sixty cell phones ... Sixty iPods ... One teacher.

Detroit means a lot of things. Tough ... Rough ... Dangerous ... Music ... Motors ... Business ... The Detroit Hotel of this suburb ... The Detroit Association of that suburban group.

Being an adjective is nice, same as being Imported from near Detroit is preferable to being Imported from China.

But being Imported from the City of Detroit ... That'd be really #$@&-ing nice.


(Twitter Me)

Cross-posted at LAObserved.com.

— TJ Sullivan

Thank You, 'Editor and Publisher'

Editor & Publisher is closing.

I know this because it was reported by The New York Times.

So far, The New York Times is still in business. But Editor & Publisher isn't going to be for much longer, and, ridiculous and sappy as it seems to get emotional about a trade publication, well ... I am.

Like a lot of journalists, I wouldn't be where I am without Editor & Publisher. I'd still be a journalist, of course, but I definitely wouldn't have followed the same path, which means many of the important stories I fought to report might never have been reported. I might not have met the same friends. I might not have even met my wife.

No joke.

I'm in Los Angeles today because E&P sent me to Idaho ... and then New Mexico ... and then ...

I'll explain.

As I approached graduation in the late 80s, the classified section of E&P Magazine was the most valuable item in the newsroom. It was to me, and every other journalism grad hoping to land a job at a newspaper, the only link to our future, the only publication that listed what few jobs the industry had to offer.

Unlike most of my friends, I applied to all of them. Regardless of whether I met the qualifications, I wrote each and every newspaper that placed an ad.

In addition, I tapped the E&P Yearbook for the addresses of newspapers that didn't have jobs posted, but which were publications that I respected, and hoped to someday join.

I must have typed more than 60 letters on my Remington portable typewriter that spring, and maxed out my credit card on photo-copied clip sets, 9x10 envelopes, and first-class postage.

Thanks to E&P, I received five jobs offers, including one on the British Virgin Island of Tortola. The editor of that one apologized for not being able to pay my moving expenses, but, by way of consolation, she assured me that both rent and rum were very cheap. Needless to say, I didn't take that particular job.

But, the job I did take also resulted from an E&P classified. It was in Ketchum, Idaho, a weekly with an editor who let me crash in a spare room at his house for a few days until I found a place of my own.

Less than a year after that, still in Ketchum, I received a phone call at work from an editor in Santa Fe. He said he'd kept my letter of application for a job they'd advertised in E&P long before I took the job in Idaho. He'd tracked down my whereabouts by calling the references I'd listed. He said they'd already filled the investigative reporter slot, a post for which I clearly wasn't qualified, but they had an opening in sports and wanted me to fill it.

Sports? The closest I'd ever come to sports reporting was to take agate while working the late-night shift on the sports desk at the Lexington Herald-Leader. I wasn't a sports writer. I was an investigative reporter, or, well, I was going to be.

The editor didn't care about that. "You don't belong in Idaho," he said. "You belong here."

Two weeks later, I was again packing everything into my little, gray Chevette and driving hundreds of miles to live in a place I'd never been, all because of a job I'd found through E&P.

Like many of my colleagues, I continued to refer to E&P's classified section many times in those pre-Internet years, usually in response to some newsroom nonsense that had pissed me off. At one newspaper the editor eventually took to hiding the company copy of E&P, an apparent response to the many pay raises he was forced to offer to keep his best staffers on staff.

But E&P has always been far more than a collection of classified ads. As my experience in this industry increased, so did my appreciation for E&P's reporting, and its role as a watchdog of the industry. E&P has been the first place many journalists turn to report unethical behavior in their own newsrooms, situations that would probably never get dealt with were it not for the watchful eye of E&P.

Times change. Life goes on. There are now and will continue to be watchdogs to keep the journalism industry honest. But we owe a lot to E&P.

I don't know where I'd be without it.

-- TJ Sullivan is the author of the novel Boon.

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Cross posted at LA Observed

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Trackbacks:
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Los Angeles Times

A SLAPP In The Face Of Journalism

A hearty congratulations and considerable sympathy is due freelance writer Susan Paterno, whose American Journalism Review article "Santa Barbara Smackdown" so upset the owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press that the journalist ended up in court for two years before having the case dismissed this month.

That's two years of courtroom conflict that should light a fire under every American journalist, and not just the freelance writers who aren't reading their contracts before they sign them.

Two years.

As Howard Kurtz reported a year ago, the publisher of Paterno's story, American Journalism Review, "was not originally named as a defendant but agreed to pay Paterno's legal bills and indemnify her against any judgment."

And what did AJR get for doing the right thing? Kurtz had that answer too: "management was stunned to discover that its libel insurance did not cover freelance writers."

Like AJR, a lot of mainstream newspapers are contracting out more and more of their content, which in many cases exposes their freelancers to the same sort of experience Paterno suffered.

Every journalist ought to consider the chilling effect this is bound to have on freelance journalists covering business and government at every level. Will injustices go unreported for fear of retaliation? I don't know. Is two years in hell too long?

The rundown of Paterno's case is at LA Observed.

Cross-posted at LA Observed

Hat tip to Romenesko at Poynter.org for the related-comment link.

Click to e-mail TJ Sullivan in LA

Like Giving Another Man's Wife A Foot Massage

Another new post at Native Intelligence:

Director Quentin Tarantino could have used a few partners in 213 to help produce the collector's edition DVD of his most-celebrated film, "Pulp Fiction."

The DVD's trivia track says Echo Park (see inset) is "a suburb of Los Angeles," something any self-respecting, Los Angeles film buff ought to know is about as wrong as giving another man's wife a foot massage.

Read the entire post at Native Intelligence.

— TJ Sullivan in LA

Prisoners Of Our Own Device

Check out my new post in the Native Intelligence section of LA Observed.

Here's a snippet:

“Auld Lang Syne” is a song made up of words in the Scots language, which means many of us understand only that it's about old friends and days gone by...

I mumbled through it myself Sunday night in downtown Los Angeles as Lyle Lovett and His Large Band led a chorus...

Most of Lovett’s audience stood and sang in happy voices...

(Then) I spied three women in about the 25th row raising their Blackberry (Crackberry?) devices aloft...

Flipping their phones as an alternative to flicking their Bics...

Read the entire post at Native Intelligence.

— TJ Sullivan in LA

Material Matters More Than Material Things

My wife and I are hosting the family at our home on Christmas Day. It will be the first year we’ve done this. And, as you might expect, the stress level increases as the time draws near, and not just because it’s sure to be remembered as the Christmas we spent on the floor.

The adventure began Thanksgiving Day, when we decided that playing host meant it was time to spruce up our home. That led to the conclusion that we had to part with the couches each of us had brought to the marriage. Although I had resisted this final step into adulthood, I went willingly to our Westside Macy’s furniture store and stepped into the red-tag obstacle course. A sale was on, and it promised free delivery before Christmas...

Read the rest of this post at Native Intelligence.

— TJ Sullivan in LA