“In the media” without the AANews: a year (or so) later

I was browsing through the Internets this morning a bit and I came across this rather self-congratulatory piece in AnnArbor.com, “AnnArbor.com marks first anniversary, reflects on year of rapid evolution and encouraging results.” All this reminded me that we used to have a daily newspaper in this area that actually was printed on paper and delivered to people’s houses and everything.  The passing of AANews and the birth of AnnArbor.com was also a topic of discussion here a year ago, as it was at many others in the local blogosphere.

A year later, and I have to say I still don’t miss the AANews, at least not much, and AnnArbor.com is not much of a substitution for me for the AANews.  I mean, I don’t think it’s bad really, though given that the print newspaper it was replacing had been sliding downhill for a number of years (pretty much like every newspaper in the U.S.), the bar for “success” of AnnArbor.com has been set pretty low.  I read it via my Google Reader feed once in a while, mostly looking at headlines and that’s about it.  We were subscribing to the paper version around my house for a while, but after about a month’s worth went completely unread, we canceled it.  Our lives have gone on.

I said last year that I predict AnnArbor.com will fail, and I think that this is still likely, at least eventually.  In today’s “letter to readers,” there’s this paragraph:

We are often asked how our business model is performing. As a privately held company, we do not disclose our financial results, but we can say that our advertising revenue – particularly online revenue – has been growing at a healthy pace and that we’re encouraged by the progress we’re making on that front.

I think this translates as “we’re not making money yet.”  They say they’re growing and are now getting an average of 209,000 unique visits a month.  That’s a lot, of course, but I really doubt it’s enough to generate the kind of ad revenue it takes to support the people who work there.

What has also been interesting about the local media scene to me has been The Ann Arbor Chronicle (which still appears to be going strong) and The Ypsilanti Citizen (which is no longer) and emYOU (are they still in business?).  I think all are/were very small operations– I mean like one or two people– and it would appear that so far, only the Ann Arbor Chronicle has been able to make a real go of it.  Perhaps there’s just not enough interest/advertising money out there.

We’ll see what the next year brings.  There’s already the next efforts of the Ypsi Citizen people, the less newsy iSPY.  One idea that I’ve had that I want to kick around with my journalism colleagues in the fall is trying to start a “citizen journalism” sort of site that could also be a student project of sorts too.  Maybe…