By Gunnar Heinrich

Bloggers give props to the Detroit News' Auto Insider all the time. After all, it's where so many of us online publishing gear heads - from Jalopnik's jackals to Autoblog's bloggers - get the deep dish on what's happening in Motown.

Ours is a parasitic relationship...



Like mother birds with their chicks, us bloggers chew up the content that the Auto Insider serves and then regurgitate it into easily consumed mush for our own impatient readers. We then link the Auto Insider to let a small percentage of our own traffic track back to the DN's original QT.

It's mostly a one sided deal done on the backs of their reporters' hard labor.

The Detroit News people know this. So, when the Freep recently updated their website with a new with-it "Scanning Blogs" section, which Internet platforms in the new media might you think they would have their readers look to?

Jalopnik? Nope.

Cars!Cars!Cars!? Huh?Huh?Huh?

LeftlaneNews? Left lane wha?

No sir, the blogs that the folks in Detroit are linking to are the blogs of either established Internet companies (AOL's AutoBlog), tried-'n-true print media (New York Times' Wheels Blog) or better yet - blogs published by the Freep's own advertisers (Cars.com).

Now those are some props.

[Sources: Detroit News, Cars.com, Edmunds]

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