Another Positive For Detroit: The Mayor's Office Response to Dateline.

MSNBC
This e-mail was sent to the Dateline NBC producer of "America Now: City of Heartbreak and Hope," which aired on April 19, 2010.

After allowing time for the dust and tempers to settle, I want to express my disappointment with the Dateline piece on Detroit. The story told was one-sided, and failed to accurately reflect the other side of the story--and Detroit. For so many who look to outlets such as yours for information, they will yet again walk away with a misperception about the city and its people.

For the access and assistance given to your organization and staff to research this story, the outcome was disappointingly shallow. Media outlets come to the city and tell and then re-tell the same things--Auto epicenter, riots, white flight, desolation. Same story, different byline.

While we acknowledge our challenges, which mirror or even pale to those in other urban cities, we also recognize our potential and accomplishments. Nowhere did the story include those who are buying into and supporting the city's rebirth. No energy or excitement surrounding the Riverfront, Eastern Market, Tech Town, Avalon Bakery, Indian Village, the DIA, Campus Martius, and the list goes on and on.

We are not perfect, nor do we desire to be portrayed as such. But, we also find no value in being incorrectly painted as a city whose residents must resort to hunting racoons for food. It is this image that contributes to fueling decisions to not return, invest or remain in our city.

In all fairness, it would be great for Chris [Hansen] to return and tell the rest of the story--where people are not struggling on $200 every two weeks to feed their families, shooting racoons to eat, contributing to government corruption, or attending a struggling school system. This may be the reality for some of Detroit, but it is not the reality for all of Detroit.

Rounding out the story would prove that NBC's interests and efforts were not to simply gain ratings at the expense of the city, its residents and supporters. You showed the heartbreak...we'd like to see the hope.

Thank you.

Karen Dumas
Group Executive/Communications

Office of Mayor Dave Bing
City of Detroit

Noah Stephens's 'People of Detroit' Portraits Show City's Humanity

Huffington Post

"Because not everyone in Detroit is an abandoned building" -- that's the tongue-in-cheek but sharp-edged tagline to Noah Stephens's "People of Detroit" portrait series.

Stephens, who grew up in Highland Park, says he started his photography project in response to negative and over-generalizing media portrayals of the city. The one that sparked the idea for "People of Detroit" was a 2010 "Dateline" special about a Detroiter who hunts raccoons and sells their meat, which received criticism for its misrepresentation of the city.

"When 'Dateline' implied that circumstances in Detroit were so dire that people had been forced to consume wild 'coon meat as some kinda of post-apocalyptic staple food, I had finally had enough of misery-obsessed, sensationalized portrayals of the city," Stephens wrote in an email to HuffPost. "I started 'The People of Detroit' to call attention to a side of life in the city rarely examined in national or global media."

Stephens posts his widely varying portraits to his blog. Most are of strangers he meets around the city, and each portrait is paired with a short essay about the subject.

"I try to get a sense of what it is that drives them; occupation, hobbies, what are they passionate about," Stephens said. "I also like to find out as much as I can about the relationship the person has with the city."

What began as a response project quickly took on a life of its own. Recently, when Stephens started thinking about bringing his photography to an offline audience, he came up with the idea to show his photographs at the Renaissance Center during the 2012 North American International Auto Show. The big car event will be held at Cobo Center, but the nearby Ren Cen is General Motors' headquarters.

Stephens made a fascinating case for why his work should be shown to coincide with the Auto Show.

Click HERE to read the rest of this article!

CNN: Creative Detroiters Quietly Rebuild, Challenge City's Bad Rap

Thalia Mavros, Director & Producer, VBS.TV
CNN

Editor's note: The staff at CNN.com has recently been intrigued by the journalism of VICE, an independent media company and website based in Brooklyn, New York. VBS.TV  is Vice's broadband television network. The reports, which are produced solely by VICE, reflect a transparent approach to journalism, where viewers are taken along on every step of the reporting process. We believe this unique reporting approach is worthy of sharing with our CNN.com readers.

In August 2009, Vice published a story called "Something, something, something, Detroit: Lazy journalists love pictures of abandoned stuff," about the roving gangs of photojournalists prowling the empty city and feasting on its highly photogenic carcass. Since then, some of the worst offenders have abashedly changed their approach to covering Michigan's largest city. But most outlets are still fixated on the all-you-can-click pageview buffet that is "misery porn" of the decaying Motor City.

Last month, we traveled to Detroit with co-creator and star of the "Jackass" empire Johnny Knoxville to explore what lies gasping beneath the rubble of over-indulged industry, frighteningly embarrassing municipal mismanagement, and decades' worth of social and economic imbalance. What we found is a burgeoning class of creative young folk intent on rebuilding their communities and the city, despite being faced with a world that has already phoned in their city's obituary.

Of course, not so much has changed on Detroit's surface: empty seven-lane streets, lots of abandoned stuff, fortified mansions beside charred remnants of neighborhoods, grasslands reclaiming entire city blocks, gaudy casinos in the deep ghettos. You've heard this all before. Even the BBC has filmed its requiem for the city, and NBC's "Dateline" has infuriated Detroiters with accounts of impoverished residents barely subsisting on freshly hunted raccoon meat. It amounts to a nihilistic sensationalism tinged with brittle, gauzy vestiges of hope and breathtaking visuals.

The fact of the matter is that the situation in Detroit is daunting. The city that so successfully realized the 1950s American dream is now a visual testament to its grandiose demise. But is that really news?

We like to think that the story is better told by identifying those who remain in Detroit and those who are moving back precisely because it is challenging. We set out to give the people of Detroit a platform to tell their story. The city has become a place where enterprising classes can find the space and time to do whatever they want, cheaply and hassle-free. It's a raw space where they can create community and start rebuilding their city from the inside out.

The people we talked to were all eager to discuss the reasons they love Detroit and, just as important, their vision for it. Everyone is doing something: buying and developing land, building businesses, making music, and laying the foundation for a new Detroit with a creative scene that reminded us of East Berlin after the Wall came down.

What we found there is a DIY paradise where people hustle to survive and use an anarchic sense of creativity to make things happen. It's a city primed for innovative solutions: How does a 20th-century city transition into the 21st, divesting itself of its outmoded industrial and economic models?

It's an exciting challenge that goes hand in hand with redefining the new American dream.

Click HERE to see more of the film.