No kidding. Here are the opening paragraphs:
The Ann Arbor News will close in July after publishing as the city’s daily newspaper since 1835, publisher Laurel Champion announced today.
Heavy losses in revenue drove the decision. Champion said the current “business model is not sustainable.”
“This isn’t about abandoning local journalism, it’s about serving it up in a very different way,” Champion told employees.
A new Web-based media company called AnnArbor.com LLC will be launched later this year. In addition to publishing continuously online, AnnArbor.com will publish a print edition twice a week.
Champion, who will be executive vice president of AnnArbor.com, told News employees they can apply for positions with the new company, although job losses are inevitable.
It’s weird to hear about this for me for two reasons. First, this past weekend, a kid came to my door asking me if I was interested in subscribing to the Ann Arbor News. Since I already subscribed, I declined. Second, in a more academic turn of events I was going to post about eventually, U of Michigan press also has decided to go digital. It would seem the combination of a bad economy and new technologies are making for some rapid changes.
Needless to say, I’m sad for all the various people who are going to be losing their jobs, including some people who I know directly and indirectly. But I’m also interested in seeing where this next experiment in online publishing takes things. Eighteen years ago, Jay David Bolter told us in the first edition of his book Writing Space (this link is to the 2001 second edition, by the way) that “Today we are living in the late age of print.” It took a while, but it is beginning to look like “today” is arriving locally in full force.
Slight update 1: See this post on Michiganliberal.com.
Slight update 2: MLive.com has various self-reflective pieces on the end of the AANews. For example, there’s “AnnArbor.com will offer more than local news to an Internet savvy community,” which suggests where this brave new world might be going:
AnnArbor.com will likely be a free, advertisement-supported news and local content aggregator published online. It will also publish a print publication two times a week, Thursday and Sunday, which will likely include more news analysis and information about what could be found online, Chief Content Leader Tony Dearing, a former Ann Arbor News managing editor and a former editor of the Flint Journal said.
“This is a completely new model that we are building; something from the ground up that has not been done before,” Dearing said.
AnnArbor.com’s coverage area will primarily focus on Ann Arbor, but will also offer information more broadly about the county in the future, he said.
The Web site will aggregate both content produced by trained journalists employed by the company and content created by local residents, such as bloggers. It would also include information and statistics compiled about the community.
For example, if someone is looking for information on child care in Ann Arbor, they might find stories produced by the company with links to local blogs and information on which local child care companies are licensed, Dearing said.
Cooking, eating, dining and wine are all examples of examples of particular interest for some people in the Ann Arbor area, Dearing said.
What I think is potentially interesting about this model is it is more or less acknowledging that the amateur blogosphere of community journalists– kinda like EMUTalk.org, for example– is the future, which is both promising and scary.
Not surprised in the least. I couldn’t stand the Ann Arbor Newspaper and especially the Ann Arbor Newspaper’s hiring practices where they sit you down for a POLITICS QUIZ SHOW on local city issues. I guess if you answer the questions for a conservative perspective you don’t get hired. That’s at least the gist I got from my meetings with the Ypsilanti Republicans back in the day (2003).
Not too long ago EMU students were asked if they wanted to receive the paper by absolute FORCE against their will and at the same time have their tuition hiked.
What a novel idea to rescue a paper…Force people to read it. Luckilly that proposal was shot down.
I couldn’t care less about any newspaper company as even the right leaning ones have disappointed me greatly in their support for Carl Levin (Detroit News) and other lefty leanings.
There’s a correlation here. Conservatism gets banned from print media… Print media goes bust.
But Jeff, even the conservative print media is going bust. It’s just the sunset for print media in general, now that most (but not all, mind you) people have some access to digital news (internet, tv, etc).
As much as I feel bad for the people who will be losing their jobs and an avenue to share their passion for current events and writing, there will be a little less daily Ypsilanti and EMU hate out there now.
I am very sad that I will no longer be able to read my Sunday paper every Sunday morning. I ‘ve been doing it for so long that I am not sure how I am going to handle it:-)
It will be very different not to have the local coverage in print. I feel so sorry about all the good folks working there, it won’t be easy to find other jobs in this economy.
But it is definitely not surprising. It is still hard to believe that a city and a whole area that is so vibrant can not maintain a local paper. But the A2 News management sure has a big hand in its demise….These are the folks who spent so much money buying and building that new building and were so late in dealing with the virtual realities…I mean, even now, their website totally sucks! Shifting to focusing on local coverage came way too late. They just never “got it” and were too slow to do anything about it. If they had concentrated their energy on implementing some changes instead of trying to dig up more dirt on EMU maybe they will still be here.
As sitedad has says, the future is kind of scary….Relying on part time bloggers and sometimes crazy blog commenters is just not NEWS…
Oh well, I wonder how many Journalism majors are still left at EMU
Interestingly enough, we still have a large journalism program at EMU, I think in large part because students coming into this program nowadays realize that journalism is a much bigger category of things than working for daily newspapers. And also because a lot of the curriculum is reflecting the new media, and talking about things like the implications of the web, publishing online, multimedia online, etc.
Oh, and the annarbor.com people will have two “papers” a week, one of them on Sunday. My guess is that it will be sort of like a local magazine-type thing, maybe with comics. So you might still get to keep your Sunday mornings, EagleG.
I have two predictions/wild-assed guesses as to what might happen in the not too distant future:
* If daily print media really does collapse/go away at an alarming rate all over the country, then advertisers (who have been reluctant to spend too much money on advertising in web-based versions of the paper or other resources) might actually be willing to buy ad space in the new annarbor.com.
Further, we might actually be entering a time where a new space is created for many “locals” delivered via the web. Already we’ve got the Ann Arbor Chronicle, the Ypsilanti Citizen, a host of local blogs that act like news outlets, etc. If there is no “traditional dead tree” media, perhaps we are returning to an earlier journalistic era of many voices in a community the size of Ypsi-Arbor instead of the one.
* If the problem has been the corporate and other managers who have been running the AANews and there is still a demand for a traditional dead tree newspaper, then I predict that some enterprise will fill it. Now, I am more confident in my earlier prediction, but a new newspaper rising from the ashes is not impossible, especially if there is a noticeable void in the market.
Time will tell, I guess.
This is sad news indeed. The newspaper business is obviously in deep crisis, far worse than the auto industry. The AA NEWS has been a fine local paper – not perfect, but serious and well written. The investigative work its reporters did on the two hor-rid EMU scandals of the last decade — which are the two largest scandals in the history of public higher education in Michigan — were outstanding. I will always remember those newsbreaking pieces. And the paper’s recent coverage of the UofM sports scandals – the near giving away of academic credits to jocks — is also notable and important.
Good luck and godspeed to all members of the AA NEWS staff — editorial, production, distribution, everyone.
Just a half century ago, American newspapers were at the peak of their power and influence, and I think on balance their power was titled toward justice. Things have changed, and not for the better in many respects.
(here I have shamelessly copied my comment from MarkMayard.com, for EMUTALK.)
And I will add this: The AA NEWS has been a fair paper toward EMU over the last decade. Previously, it ignored Eastern, but it’s followed EMU stories, good and bad, with admirable persistence for many years now. Janet Miller and Geoff Larcom each did very good reporting on EMU. That EMU officials disliked that paper is a credit to the paper, given how deep the mismangement of EMU was. Without that local paper, it would have been much, much harder to bring an end to the worst abuses at EMU. How many EMUTalk readers remember when the news of the overspending on THe House was whispered about around campus and the fear of job loss for Speaking up against President Sam and His Queen, Pam, prevailed? Only a free press, interested in important local matters, would have allowed those facts to become known. Many friends of mine think the AA NEWS was biased against EMU, but they are mistaken. The paper followed good stories and wrote them up. Some stories that we critics of the status quo on campus thought were important were not followed up on, but reporters and editors have to use their own judgment, not just reflect the views of their sources. The AA NEWS was no echo chamber of the EMU public relations office, where the disregard for verifiable facts was and is so legendary that few of its suggestions to reporters have been taken seriously for years.
Sitedad, don’t forget YpsiNews.com, the grandfather of on-line news reporting in the area.
We were the only news outlet to post video and report live from yesterday’s Washtenaw Community College meeting discussing the purchase of the Country Club. Show us some love.
We were first to break the story about the employee in the eye of the snow shovel storm at City Hall quitting.
We were the only news company to cover live and broadcast the complete EMU Regents meetings during the murder blow-up and firing of the president.
I am just saying. [grin]
Cheers!
– Steve
True enough, Steve. Add YpsiNews.com to that list too!
All this makes me remember again that I need to update some links around here….
“The News has 44,833 daily subscribers and 55,374 subscribers on Sundays, as of Sept. 30, company figures show”
And that’s not enough of a base to be sustainable? Jeeze.
The subscriber base barely cuts into the fixed costs. It all has to do with ad dollars. The combination of the economy downturn and continued resurgence of the online ads and Craigslist pretty much nailed the coffin for the A2 News. Just check to see how many ads are in the papers lately, I think the only ones left are the car dealers and real estate ads…
Again, it is a sad world that we are going to rely on local coverage by part time non trained journalist bloggers. No offense to sitedad at all, I think sites like emutalk.org is part of the solution but I only see it as a small complimentary piece of the big puzzle.
Good to hear that journalist majors at EMU are doing well…I am surprised. I just hope my son does not tell me “Dad, I am going to study journalism in college” one day:-)
I think these are very interesting times, as the curse goes.
As EagleG points out, it isn’t news being online that has caused the demise of print newspapers, and it isn’t even the drop in “big advertisers.” The thing that has really crushed newspapers like the AANews are classifieds. I never paid much attention to the classifieds, but that was where the real money was in terms of ads, and that is all pretty much gone. Anyone younger than 50 knows that the first place to look for a used car or something is craigslist, and the first place to look for a job is something like monster.com. In that sense, newspapers were brought down by a better mousetrap.
I think the real unknown is when the AANews finally stops showing up, what will readers do, and what will advertisers do? I mean, if there is no print resource for local advertising, will they final spend money on online pubs like the new annarbor.com? I think that’s the hope.