It's Detroit's time.

Scandal-plagued ex-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has hip-hopped to Texas.

His replacement, successful businessman and former pro basketball star Dave Bing, is taking the tough, unpopular, but long-overdue steps of restoring fiscal and moral integrity to city government.

Robert Bobb, the steely Detroit Public Schools emergency financial manager, has stunned folks here with his take-no-prisoners approach to rooting out corruption and setting the stage for actual learning in Michigan's largest school district.

Even the much-ridiculed Detroit City Council is showing signs of competence.

And Time Inc., part of Time Warner, one of the most powerful media companies on the planet, will chronicle the city's story over the next year from a home it purchased in the city's eclectic West Village near downtown.

Why does any of this matter?

Oh, I know. Many of us have written off this city as a cesspool of hopeless crime, illiteracy and sleaze.

Elected officials in Lansing have treated Detroit mostly with indifference.

Detroit Renaissance, a powerful group of business leaders, has shifted its revitalization efforts away from the city and is pushing for state government reforms.

But Detroit is still by far the largest city in the state. And it's the center of a metropolitan area that is home to nearly half of Michigan's residents.

The growth and energy of the city in the first half of the 20th century drove much of the state's economy.

Its decline since then is a major reason why Michigan has fallen from being one of the wealthiest states in the country to one that could become among the poorest unless trends are reversed.

Time Inc., which publishes Time, Fortune, Money, Sports Illustrated and other magazines, sees Detroit in an even broader, more critical context.

"From urban planning to the crisis of manufacturing, from the lingering role of race and class in our society to the struggle for better health care and education, it's all happening at its most extreme in the Motor City," Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief John Huey wrote in the Oct. 5 issue.

Time Inc.'s year-long "Assignment Detroit" also is drawing lots of attention to the city from other national media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and National Public Radio.

Much of the coverage so far plows familiar ground to those of us who live in the region.

But Time Inc. has given Detroit and Michigan a rare opportunity to change the conversation about a city and state that others view as way past their prime.

City officials, state policymakers and business leaders have the power to demonstrate over the next year that Detroit can rise again and that Michigan has the will to reinvent itself after the auto industry debacle.

Time Inc. is here to tell the world those stories--for free. Wasting that opportunity would be a tragedy.

E-mail Rick Haglund: rhaglund@boothmichigan.com