The New York Times of Canada is paying attention to the Free Press for its movement into two realms that are not an area of expertise for virtually any other North American newspaper in an era when papers are desperately searching for anything that works:
Detroit’s vast, abandoned Packard Automotive Plant has become symbolic of the city’s rise and fall, and the focus of a long-running drama about what can be done with the 16-hectare ruins. But a new documentary about the Packard also tells another story: about how a 183-year-old Detroit newspaper is morphing into a producer of full-length documentaries and an annual film festival.
Robert Everett-Green writes in the Toronto Globe and Mail:
Newspapers everywhere are trying to figure out how to stay alive in a digital world, and many have embraced streaming video clips as part of the answer. The Free Press, unusually, has decided to turn its video and storytelling expertise to long-form narrative as well.
The paper has won four Emmy awards, and like most other papers, the Free Press thought short was best for online, till it heard from readers about a nine-minute video it posted to mark the 50th anniversary of Aretha Franklin’s Respect hitting No. 1. They wanted more.
In 2011, "Living With Murder," about violence in Detroit, was posted on freep.com as a series of five chapters that you could choose to watch as a continuous 41-minute film. Many people did; the series won an Edward R. Murrow Award.
The way seemed open for more long-form documentaries, including a film about the infamous old auto plant, "Packard: The Last Shift," which was created by Free Press videographer Brian Kaufman.
“We thought it would be about 45 minutes, but the story kept evolving as we worked on it,” says Kathy Kieliszewski, the Free Press director of photo and video and festival artistic director whose grandfather worked at the Packard plant.
Even the six-minute trailer makes a strong statement, Everett-Green says,from the wrenching opening visualization of Detroit writer Philip Levine’s poem, "The Last Shift," to some equally powerful comment by the plant’s neighbours.
A reader whose screen name is "rad6016" left this comment after the article:
"Detroit seems more alive than some Canadian cities I could name."
