First impressions of AnnArbor.com, Part 2 (Web edition)
Two key ways AnnArbor.com differs from most newspaper Web sites:
1. Presentation of news. While most news sites to some extent copy the basic concept of the front page of a newspaper — the editors choose the most important or interesting stories to showcase and put them front and center — AnnArbor.com more closely resembles a blog, with news presented as more of a reverse-chronological stream.
As Ben Cohen at the Nieman Lab notes, “[t]he main limitation of such a format are obvious: namely, that a big story can be washed away by a torrent of small ones.” But Cohen also reports that chief content officer Tony Dearing says a solution is in the works — down the road, it’ll be possible to treat a given story differently if it deserves extra attention.
2. Advertising format. Instead of a more conventional banner approach, ads appear alongside editorial content, and they behave like blog entries — you see a headline, and you can click on it to go to a new page with more details. The ads are separated from independent editorial content by being given a different background color and a little red flag off to the right that says “Deal.”
One thing I’m curious about: Is the “Deal” branding going to appeal to every advertiser, or will it eventually turn out there’s a demand for a different way of labeling things? I can picture a high-end luxury retailer saying “You know, this ‘deal’ thing doesn’t really make sense for my marketing plan … my stuff is expensive and there’s a reason for it, and that’s what I want people to think of when they see my name.” Of course, that’s probably not a big problem to change if the need arises.
Three things I especially like about the site:
1. It’s easy to crunch the news however you like it. The first couple of times I scrolled through the main page, I thought “You know, there’s not a whole lot on this page that I want to read.” Then I clicked on the “news” tab, and suddenly there were a whole lot of stories I wanted to read. (It’s not just the standard news/sports/entertainment divisions … see next sentence.) If you experiment for a couple of days — “What does it look like if I click on News / Featured Posts? How about News / Most Popular? News / Everything?” — you’re likely to find the mode of presentation that most often gives you things you’re interested in. You can also view by neighborhood (although I’m not in a good position to test that feature in any meaningful way, living 45 minutes away from Ann Arbor and not being too familiar with the neighborhoods).
2. Commenting feels like an organic part of the site, not an afterthought. On the individual story page, there’s a large “Your Voice” header at the bottom of the copy with comments below. On the index page, each story lists the number of comments currently posted on it. A “Your Voice” section is featured prominently on the main page with an excerpt. One additional thing I’d like to see is a “Recent Comments” block in a sidebar — on other sites, I find that a list of recent comments is a good tool for discovering stories I otherwise would have missed, or stories that I read a few days ago and didn’t realize had sparked an interesting discussion.
3. They’re not reluctant to link out. For example, this link to a CBS News report on a camp at U-M for kids with disabilities.
First impressions of AnnArbor.com, Part 1 (print edition)
Now that AnnArbor.com has been up and running for a few days and the company has put out its first print newspaper, here are a few first impressions. (I was going to talk about the print and online editions together, but this ended up getting pretty long, and it’s late.)
The first Sunday print edition of AnnArbor.com is more intensely local than the old Sunday Ann Arbor News. It has four main editorial sections — an all-local front section, nation and world, sports, and entertainment — plus classifieds and a four-page section on bright stock that includes Milestones and Faces in the Crowd, both carried over from the News.
The biggest contrast with the old Sunday paper comes in the front section. The past few Sunday papers came with only five or six local news stories; the new version has more than a dozen local stories and columns, plus a handful of police briefs. The first few pages include some well-packaged standing features, such as a “Week Ahead” roundup selecting one interesting event for each day of the coming week, a “Get Involved” feature listing three upcoming community service opportunities, and a “News Quiz” that, while interesting, would benefit from some way to refer readers to the news stories from which the questions originated. (Then again, that might be easier for them to do after AnnArbor.com has published a few weeks’ worth of stories to refer to.)
One item that seems a little odd is the lottery listing on page A2. That seems like one of those features that makes a lot more sense for a daily than for a semiweekly — do you run Thursday, Friday and Saturday numbers in your Sunday edition, even though people who bought tickets on Thursday have probably found other ways to find out if they won? Or do you take a piecemeal approach, running lottery numbers from Wednesday and Saturday, but no other days? (And in that case, since regular lottery players will wind up finding other ways to get numbers for the other days of the week, why expect that they’ll be turning to you for those two?)
The only syndicated content in the front section comes on the opinion page in the form of columns by David Brooks, George Will and Maureen Dowd. I wonder if these will be regular features or if they’ll gradually be replaced by local voices.
Integration of the Web and print products goes beyond the usual “go to our Web site to see videos for this story” refers. For instance, readers’ online votes will determine which advertisers will be included in a “Top 4 Deals” ad every Sunday, and the “Top 4 Deals” will appear in a prime spot in the print edition.
The second section (actually, it’s labeled A11 through A16, but is packaged separately from the front section) is devoted to national and world news. Much of this section focuses on more featurey and analytical pieces — an AP analysis of the Henry Gates case; a Washington Post story about health care policy; a Los Angeles Times story about cloning. That’s what I’d expect for a nation/world section in a semiweekly paper. There are also a few breaking-type stories, including an AP bulletin about a Taliban attack in Afghanistan on Saturday. This raises the same question as the lottery numbers: Will AP stories about events overseas be rewritten to give an overview of everything that’s happened since the last edition was published, or will events that don’t happen on a Wednesday or Saturday simply go unpublished?
It would be interesting to see AnnArbor.com try to produce an all-local nation/world section. As paradoxical as that sounds, it might make a lot of sense: Scrap the straight-news reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and focus entirely on Ann Arbor and Michigan perspectives on national and world events. In a town like Ann Arbor, there must be plenty of people with interesting things to say about race relations, health care policy or medical ethics. On one hand, it would involve more personnel costs; on the other hand, wire-service subscriptions aren’t exactly cheap, either. (And presumably, Booth’s other Michigan papers could get some mileage out of the stories, too.)
The sports section is a dramatic improvement, at least compared to Sunday Ann Arbor News editions from July. Where the two issues I flipped through at the library for comparison purposes had only one local sports story each, the Sunday AnnArbor.com sports section has seven, plus a photo package on the Ann Arbor City Tennis Tournament. At a time when there aren’t any prep or college games to cover, the staff does a good job mining the community for interesting features — a story about a new eight-man football program at a local charter school, an analysis of the University of Michigan’s athletic budget, a nice feature about the Washtenaw Interclub Swim Championship.
The AP stories in the sports section focus mainly on Saturday games, which, again, raises the same question as the international news coverage. Personally, I’d rather see an in-brief treatment of the last three days’ worth of action than coverage that bumps back and forth between extremes (a story if it happens on Wednesday or Saturday, nothing at all if it happens on other days). Something more like a newsmagazine than a daily newspaper. Of course, it’s really impossible to make any conclusions based on only one edition.
The entertainment section is strongly local too, with only a few pages’ worth of wire copy. In addition to lots of stories about local events, venues and artists, the paper has lined up a former bookstore owner as a columnist — a good case of tapping into local talent, whether the subjects written about end up being local or not. The travel section, which used to be a standalone, has been folded into this section — probably a good move, since the travel section never seemed to garner much advertising and was almost exclusively wire copy before. On the advice page, since I can imagine some “Dear Abby” fans being unhappy about seeing her cut down to two columns per week, it might be useful to include refers pointing out that advice columns are available every day on the Web site.
From a visual standpoint, the paper’s design is clean and attractive. (One minor quibble: In some cases, the column mug boxes are so severely horizontal that it’s kind of jarring.) Refers are plentiful, both to the Web site and to other places in the print edition (even a story on A1 about a Scio Township startup that plans to make electric scooters is accompanied by a one-line refer to a story on A14 about electric scooters in China. Branding with the AnnArbor.com logo is plentiful throughout the paper (in a few cases, it’s so small that registration problems and dot gain cause the small, lightfaced “.com” to almost completely disappear, but the logo is still recognizable). The paper is generally friendly and easy to navigate.
(Disclaimer: I work for a paper that could be considered a competitor to AnnArbor.com, because we’re sold in some of the same places and have a few of the same advertisers — although our coverage areas don’t really overlap at all.)
Questions about the new AnnArbor.com
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?
Final edition
The final issue of the Ann Arbor News.
The final issue of the Ann Arbor News was printed on Thursday. The first issue of the print edition of the same company’s new AnnArbor.com will be printed Sunday.
It’ll be an interesting experiment to watch.