Ann Arbor News to Close in July
http://freep.com/article/20090323/BUSINESS06/90323020/Ann+Arbor+News+to…
I don't understand how a county of over 300,000 people can't support a newspaper. This seems really bad in a lot of ways.
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:02 AM ^
that about 250,000 of them don't want to wait until tomorrow to read yesterday's news.
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:20 AM ^
Bummer man. I like the Ann Arbor news. They had a cool sports section and there wasn't much cooler than being mentioned in the Prep Report. I am going to be one who will truly miss them.
Now the question becomes what will happen with that building downtown? Maybe more room for google?
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:23 AM ^
The real question is what do all of the people employed by the Ann Arbor news do? How do local athletes get any media attention now? Where can townies go to get their news? This is terrible, I cannot believe such a great paper is closing down...
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:28 AM ^
I know Jim Carty went to law school in the fall, he must have seen the writing on the wall.
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:33 AM ^
Are you kidding me. I have lived in Ann Arbor my whole life, and it is the worst newspaper ever! It doesn't reflect the values of the city. I, for one, won't miss it one bit.
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:50 AM ^
It's ironic you didn't provide an MLive link.
:)
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:35 AM ^
The ND football columnist at the South Bend Tribune, who was very critical of Weis, also left there to go to law school...at Michigan.
It's not surprising to see the AAN stop publishing. Many people in AA get news from the Freep/Detroit News/NYT anyway...at least in paper form. Plus, there's a free online news service called the Ann Arbor Chronicle that's been gaining steam the past year or so.
I venture that the new Ann Arbor News online and the Chronicle will be local rivals for news coverage of the area and it's much cheaper to provide online content than to print papers every day.
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:43 AM ^
They really bit the hand that fed them with that "investigation" of the athletic department. That turned so many people off, especially when the shady methods they used to get of their information started to become common knowledge. Most people only read that paper for the sports section anyway, and nobody wants to read hatchet jobs against their heroes.
I agree though, losing the coverage of high school sports is a real bummer.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:09 PM ^
I really, really concur -- nobody provides coverage of area high school sports like the Ann Arbor News. The small local papers all cover their own towns, but the AAN has done a good job of putting together good broad coverage of the whole area (and besides, the small local papers are weeklies). In the fall, I've always picked up a Saturday AAN to read their high school football coverage.
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:50 AM ^
There were a lot of good UM articles on the mlive website. I hope they can keep the quality level high. Most of all, though, this could mean that mlive will soon start chagring money to view their site.
Besides downloading a lot of live music, reading newspapers is my main internet activity. If the Ann Arbor News charges money and is successful, the days of reading newspapers free on the internet will soon be over.
Actually, though, I am surprised that it has taken this long. I have often wondered what is "in it" for papers who put their material on the internet every day for free. It's not like they can make enough money on pay per click ads, and I don't see nearly as much traditional advertising on the websites as I do in the papers.
Looks like a laptop will soon replace newspapers as reading material in breakfast restaurants.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:11 PM ^
i didn't particularly like Carty but growing up in a2 and constantly reading the preps section (as mentioned above) or the michigan team previews always made for a good read. this is depressing on a number of levels. you can say how you hated the a2 news but as a (former) life resident of a2 (and hopefully soon-to-be again resident) this sucks. This was our own paper. I liked how most a2 residents didn't read the free press or the other shitty detroit paper cause we had our own. It was just another thing that made a2 its own entity.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:13 PM ^
Steven Berlin Johnson set up a site called http://outside.in , which tries to aggregate news and stories based on geography. It's still sorta beta IMO (you'll notice that right now the site relies heavily on MLive and the AAN), but there's definitely some potential there. Wherever you find yourself, you can help contribute as well. You can register your blog/site to outside.in, and they'll do a pretty good job of autotagging it (at least if you include the full name of the location in the post).
I don't think it will replace older-styled media like the AAN, the Seattle P-I, or the Rocky Mountain News, but in this chaotic transition time, I think Outside.in, as well as the Ann Arbor Chronicle, are very promising possibilities.
Guys like Clay Shirky and Dave Winer have been harping on this stuff for years: rather than trying to preserve the format and style of the newspaper (a ultimately losing proposition anyway), this period calls for extreme levels of experimentation and innovation. We can't possibly guess what the future will look like, but the best we can do is try any and everything and something will arise.
It doesn't make the job-loss any easier for those involved, though. That just sucks.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:41 PM ^
One of the interesting things here is that Ann Arbor has been drifting closer and closer to being a suburb of Detroit for 40 years... this is helping to hasten the process.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:44 PM ^
Outside of the Sports section, did anyone care about the newspaper? The answer, most likely, is no.
I worked at The News in the late 90s/early 2000s in the circulation department. When I left the circulation for the daily paper was maybe 80,000? I don't remember. All I know is that that number has dropped significantly over the past five years. Why pay $40 every three months to read local Sports and a bunch of AP articles that are a day old? IMO, if local papers want to survive, they need to cut out a lot of the national AP stuff and really focus on being LOCAL news.
But then when The A2 News decided the best way to focus on local issues was to go to war with the University of Michigan athletic department the other year. That was like shooting themselves in the foot.
Some comments on the MLive article talk about older folks having a hard time reading online, but the older folks are slowly, well, dying, and the trend these days is everything is going internet based. Why pay $40 for three months when I can read it all online for free almost instantly when news happens? It makes no sense. A lot of newspapers just haven't been able to figure out how to counter the internet, yet they themselves put their news stories online for free, so it's a bit of a head scratcher. The internet really killed off the business because on top of being able to read it all for free, there's a lot of citizen journalism/blogs out there, too, and alternative news sources.
This move is something I have seen coming for the past few years. Sad to see from one perspective, not surprising to see from the other.