The Detroit News
major newspaper of the Detroit, Michigan area
The Detroit News is one of the two major daily newspapers in Detroit, Michigan, United States. It is owned by USA Today Co., which also owns the main historical rival the Detroit Free Press. Both newspapers operated under a joint operating agreement from 1989 until 2025.
The paper began in 1873, when it rented space in the rival Detroit Free Press's building. The News absorbed the Detroit Tribune on February 1, 1919, the Detroit Journal on July 21, 1922, and on November 7, 1960, it bought and closed the faltering Detroit Times. However, it retained the Times building, which it used as a printing plant until 1975, when a new facility opened in Sterling Heights. The Times building was demolished in 1978. The street in downtown Detroit where the Times building once stood is still called "Times Square." The Evening News Association, owner of The News, merged with Gannett in 1985.
At the time of its acquisition of The News, Gannett also had other Detroit interests. These included its outdoor advertising company, who operated many billboards across Detroit and the surrounding area, including advertising displays on Detroit Department of Transportation and Southeastern Michigan Transportation Authority buses, with its only competitor, primarily along Metro Detroit's freeway network, being 3M National Advertising (now Lamar Advertising).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Detroit News” is major newspaper of the Detroit, Michigan area. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Detroit, News and major, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2703792. 7 of 7 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989, 2025, 1873 and 1919.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Detroit News” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.