Longtime Free Press reporter reflects on career in new memoir

As a young journalist, John Gallagher dreamed of reporting from Paris. Instead, he spent 32 years covering urban affairs for the Detroit Free Press in the “Paris of the Midwest,” a popular moniker for the city.

 “I had the catbird seat for the rise and the fall of a great American city,” he said.

Gallagher said his interest in covering urban cities stemmed from his time working at the City News Bureau of Chicago and a yearlong journalism fellowship at Columbia University in New York City.

“While in Chicago, I absorbed city life. Chicago is really into civic life,” he said. “My year in New York upped my game and broadened my horizons.”

It’s understandable that he calls Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” “a Bible for me.”

Gallagher’s new memoir, “Rust Belt Reporter,” follows his path from a young journalist at small dailies in Rochester and Syracuse, New York, to his long career at the Free Press.

Courtesy of Wayne State University Press When John Gallagher sat down at his computer during the pandemic and began writing memories, he had no …

Along the way, he details how the newspaper industry floundered as its economic model changed. With the advent of the internet, websites like Craigslist, which allowed people to post classifieds for free, stifled crucial newspaper ad sales. Instead of making changes, many newspapers were in denial, Gallagher observes.

 “Changes in technology upended the industry,” he said. He was in the catbird seat for that as well.

As he recounts in the book, the first time Gallagher walked into the newsroom of the Free Press was on a recruiting visit. Hanging from the ceiling was a rubber chicken, and the first voice he heard was of a woman shouting the F-word. While being shown the city in a company car, it ran out of gas.

He writes that he wasn’t turned off but was rather attracted to the casualness of Free Press: “I found it all cheerfully informal.”

While covering business for the Free Press, Gallagher was able to write not only about the city’s decline but also what he calls “Detroit’s resurrection.” He pointed to two in-depth stories, “How Detroit Went Broke” and “How Detroit Was Reborn,” as the most important pieces he wrote for the Free Press before he retired in 2019.

“There was no silver bullet but rather a mosaic of 100 different things going on, from urban farming, the development of an entrepreneurial ecosystem to investment from nonprofit groups and foundations like the Skillman, Kresge and Ford foundations,” he said.

He even points to the city’s bankruptcy as contributing to its resurgence, along with entrepreneurs like Dan Gilbert. Gilbert has transformed Midtown Detroit, beginning with relocating Quicken Loans’ headquarters to the city in 2010. Gallagher, who calls Gilbert “a major catalyst” in Detroit’s recovery, devotes most of a chapter to his work.

While at the Free Press, Gallagher became active in the Newspaper Guild of Detroit, the union for journalists and administrative staff. In July 1995, he joined around 2,500 newspaper workers who went on strike against the Free Press and the Detroit News. The strike lasted until February 1997, and it’s fair to say it decimated staffing. When all was said and done, he writes that only a few dozen journalists reclaimed their jobs.

Gallagher has authored several books on Detroit architecture, including “Great Architecture of Michigan”; “Yamasaki in Detroit: A Search for Serenity,” about the renowned Japanese American architect Minoru Yamasaki; and two books on urban redevelopment, “Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City” and “Revolution Detroit: Strategies for Urban Reinvention.” However, he said he had no intention of writing a memoir.

“When we went into lockdown, I went to the keyboard and just started writing memories,” he said. “Within two months, I had the bulk finished. I call it my pandemic book.”