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Like a restless, hungry explorer whose grazing area keeps getting bigger, Charlie LeDuff introduces himself to a new audience Tuesday.
In addition to reporting for Fox 2 News locally and occasionally for other Fox affiliates since early last year, the author and former Detroit News reporter will write regularly for Vice News, a magazine-style national site.
"The way he connects with people is just magic ," says the editor-in-chief at Vice News.
His debut piece about the James Robertson saga is headlined "Detroit's 'Walking Man' Walks On."
LeDuff talks revisits a two-week-old tale that Bill Laitner of the Free Press broke on the first day of this month. Vice's new correspondent talks with Robertson and dusts the narrative with point of view, such as: "The buses only go as far as the [Troy] mall, because they don't really want [Robertson's] type of guy walking around in the suburbs."
The Detroit journalist's new part-time outlet bills itself as presenting "news, analysis and opinion on the absurdity of the modern condition." Perfect fit for Charlie, right?
Need another sign it's LeDuff's kind of platform? The New Yorker says Vice Media, the parent firm, is "the bad-boy brand."
“There is nobody out there who is doing better reporting on life in America than Charlie,” Jason Mojica, the top editor at Vice News, tells Benjamin Mullin of The Poynter Institute, a journalism training center with an industry news blog. “The way he connects with people is just magic and his is some of the most human reporting being done today.”
Among comments under his Vice News debut, Bill Shea of Crain's Detroit Business pokes back at a reader who calls the piece "racist, vitriolic garbage." The fellow Detroit journalist says:
"If you don't understand the history of both overt institutional and latent racism, in both the public and private sectors in Detroit and its suburbs over the past 200 years, you have no business publicly typing something so thoughtless. And you clearly don't get it. . . .
Being black very much matters in this narrative. . . . I live here every day. It matters. Also, LeDuff knows his shit."
LeDuff, 48, came to WJBK (the Fox affiliate here) in 2010 after two years at The News. From 1995-2007, he was a New York Times reporter.
He's the author of a 2013 best-seller, "Detroit: An American Autopsy." Last January, he added occasional non-Detroit reporting projects -- "The Americans with Charlie LeDuff" -- to his Fox role.
The writer-broadcaster grew up in Westland, went to Livonia's Churchill High and the University of Michigan, and lives in Pleasant Ridge.
Vice Media, which calls itself "the Time Warner of the streets," has other websites, a global magazine, a HBO show and an ad agency. It's based in Williamsburg, Brookjlyn, and is described in Gawker last spring as "the counterculture empire that even Rupert Murdoch could love." (That's not a compliment. The headline is "Working at Vice Media Is Not as Cool as it Seems.")
