Screenshot of AnnArbor.com
Three things I’m hoping to find out about AnnArbor.com:
How will the older stories be treated in the print edition? If something happens at a city council meeting on Monday, will the print edition run a story on Thursday that assumes some readers still haven’t heard about it yet? (Because it’s entirely possible that some won’t have.) Will the print edition run an analysis piece on the issue at hand, with a “Here’s what happened this week” breakout? Will city council actions be presented in some kind of in-brief roundup format? Or will the print edition more or less ignore the nitty gritty, focusing on enterprise and features and leaving the breaking news for the Web?
Will AnnArbor.com maintain the volume and quality of local news that Ann Arbor News readers are accustomed to?
Will the Web version of AnnArbor.com be self-supporting, or will it end up being subsidized by the print product for a long time to come?
I wondered the same thing. The other thing I’m wondering about concerns who in Ann Arbor actually IS getting news strictly from the web or another source. Sure, the campus kids are surfing and getting news from all over the place, but what about older boomers and seniors? Many are on line, using email, etc., but how many are actually visiting newspaper sites and reading AnnArbor.com? How many are actually reading lenconnect.com? I still think the Ann Arbor market could support a daily; the newspaper companies need to change the business model and maybe they will need to suffer through less profits until they get it to work, like Ford, for example. Not great profits but changing its business model and responding to customers WITHOUT taking government bailout money. I think there still is a big demand for hard copy and I do not think a skeletal staff at the AAN is going to be able to keep up with all of the city business, local news, etc. that is out there. Many of the posts I read talked about the paper taking a liberal slant and cited that as a reason for reduced readership, but I think it’s much more than a perception of news being slanted left or right. I think it’s more about not responding to customer needs and demands. Maybe people in Ann Arbor would have liked to see more local coverage and it didn’t happen due to reductions in staffing that affects coverage. It is happening everywhere so perhaps there IS a lesson to be learned in making changes. Could the problem be businessmen running newspapers instead of journalists? I don’t know but I don’t think shuttering a 174-year-old business and going to the web is going to be a fix.
Well, I don’t know how many people are reading AnnArbor.com, but I know about how many individual people visit lenconnect.com every day. It’s a respectable number, but it’s definitely not as high as our print circulation.
Ann Arbor being a very wired area, I think this strategy has a better chance of working there than it would in many other areas. However, I think it’s telling that even in a very wired community, the company is not abandoning print. I suspect they knew that a Web-only operation would not be capable of sustaining the kind of journalism they wanted to be able to do.