Crain’s Detroit Business is celebrating its 30th
anniversary and the online story about the milestone features an electronic
version of the first edition from Feb. 4, 1985.
The flashback provides a few giggles along the way, plus
some interesting connections to today’s news.
Speaking of news, the Detroit newspaper wars (pre-JOA) was
the hot story on the front page of Crain’s that day. The Detroit Free Press had
just undergone a management shakeup and initiated the risky move of raising the
price of the paper from 50 cents to 75 cents. At the time, The Detroit News circulation numbers were 651,000 on weekdays; The Free Press lagged a bit at 632,000 daily. Sadly, those numbers now are less than 200,000 for the Freep and less than 100,000 for the News.
Here are some other highlights I picked up from Crain’s
edition No. 1:
·
A full-page General Motors ad explaining how
consumers could now lease a car, rather than buying.
·
A story about the completion of a $9 million
renovation of the Ambassador Bridge.
·
An article offering details on a new “high-tech”
concept brought to the Detroit area by a company called Guardian – burglar alarms
for the home.
·
A piece featuring a young economist, Patrick
Anderson from the old Manufacturers National Bank of Detroit, including a
headshot of Anderson, a veteran who still has an impact on public policy, in which
he looks like a freshman frat boy.
·
An ad for a sale on IBM PCs with a 350K drive
for just $1,295.
·
And a brief news item reporting that Perry drug
stores had reported record earnings for the prior year.
100,000 for the News? Wow. I remember when they used to print two editions a day; metro and out-state. They used to hand-deliver it to my driveway in West Branch. I don't know how that made any money.
ReplyDeleteWorked at National Bank of Detroit then, and was finishing up going to night school at Detroit College of Law. Both gone now, although they exist in later iterations.
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