Biz columnist receives hundreds of responses to request

Tom Walsh, the business columnist at the Detroit Free Press, writes that he received hundreds of responses from his request for ideas last week about how to remake his column.

Walsh writes, “The latest response, arriving as I wrote this Friday afternoon, came from Beverly Worman of Washington Township, who said: ‘Please write deeply about topics. I can get all the ‘fluff’ I can stomach via radio sound bites and Internet headlines … Please continue to provide us with meat, potatoes, vegetables, and an occasional cookie.’

“Thanks, Beverly. I’ve never had my work described as meat, potatoes, veggies and a cookie before, but I’ll take it.

“Sam Ewalt of Marysville was a bit more disturbing.

“‘It seems to me,’ he wrote, ‘that the effort to make newspapers more user-friendly results in less and less emphasis on news and information, and more and more reliance on gossip and scandal-driven entertainment. I understand why you are desperate. I still think there is room for in-depth reporting, but how are you going to connect with readers when nobody is turning the pages?'”

Read more here.