Word: arbors
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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...
Besides, if there's anything Ann Arbor won't lack for, it's news. There's already at least one profitable local-news site in town. Mary Morgan, 48, a former News staffer, and her husband Dave Askins, 44, started the Ann Arbor Chronicle last September. It specializes in long-form accounts of local council, school-board and other civic-association meetings. "I hand-tooled most of the HTML myself," says Askins. (He learned on his other site, Teeter Talk - word-for-word transcriptions of interviews with local figures on the couple's teeter-totter.) The Chronicle, says Morgan...
Some locals are seeing the loss as an opportunity. The folks behind the Ann Arbor Observer, a 33-year-old free monthly, hope to pick up some of the News's journalists and advertisers. Then there's the Ann Arbor Journal, a free weekly paper/website that started circulating to 20,000 homes three weeks before the News closed. Plus, the university has the Michigan Daily, which doesn't cover the town but keeps an eye on its biggest employer. All in all, there may eventually be more reporters covering Ann Arbor than before the newspaper was killed...
...fragmented media universe where the battle will be fought for every eyeball, dedicated readers like the Morays are treasures. But their loyalty is hard-won. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the Ann Arbor community-content experiment, it's already proved one thing: the content part is easy; the community part...