Word: arbors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kestenbaum, clerk of Washtenaw County, Michigan, was in Lansing for a meeting recently, he saw something unfamiliar on the faces of the other clerks: pity. Colleagues from hard-pressed towns like Flint, Jackson and Kalamazoo were offering sympathy because, despite everything, they still had a local newspaper, while Ann Arbor, his county seat...
...first blush, Ann Arbor is an unlikely place to earn the dubious distinction of being the first good-size municipality in the U.S. to give up on its only daily newspaper. A2, as the town is known, is more or less the beauty queen of Michigan: pretty, confident and seemingly immune to the problems of her peers. It still has a downtown with sidewalk cafés and quirky local stores. Its biggest employers are two universities and two hospitals, and it has weathered the recession better than most of the rest of the state. Nearly half its residents have graduate...
...answer is that it didn't die. It was killed by its owners in a high-stakes gamble to try to create a new and more profitable enterprise. (In the past nine years, the paper lost more than half its classified-ad pages.) The Ann Arbor News ceased to exist on July 23. On July 24, AnnArbor.com was launched. The new website has a paper version - also called, oddly, AnnArbor.com - that comes out on Thursdays and Sundays. The News's owner, Advance Publications, is betting it can rebrand the 175-year-old News as a Web publication, turn a profit...
Instead of stanching the blood, the Newhouse family, which owns Advance - a group that includes more than 20 daily newspapers across the country - is using Ann Arbor as a lab subject to see if it might hurt less to tear the Band-Aid off quickly. Fixed costs such as paper, printing and delivery have been drastically reduced. From a staff of 316 at the News in May 2008, AnnArbor.com has a full-time staff of approximately 60, about 35 of them "content creators" (reporters) - plus some 80 from the "preferred blogging community," the majority unpaid - according to AnnArbor.com president...
...Arbor is an extremely Web-savvy market," says Kraner of why it was selected for this experiment, "probably the most Web-savvy Newhouse has. Secondly, with all the high-tech industries in this town, this market is very open to new ideas and new concepts. Third, we want to be the hub of connection. I don't know if you can find a market anywhere that has such passion for its community...