Posted on 06/23/2009 6:05:03 AM PDT by abb
I have been wondering for a year now which American city will be first to lose its only daily newspaper. The results are in, and the dubious distinction goes to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the Newhouse family's Advance will shutter The Ann Arbor News in late July.
Ann Arbor? Home to the huge University of Michigan, birthplace and headquarters of the Borders book chain and a pocket of relative prosperity with only light collateral damage from the auto industry, a literate place, population around 100,000, one might expect to be appreciative of what print newspapers offer.
But some of those apparent strengths seem instead to have proven drawbacks -- a curious state of affairs that may provide an unexpected window into what kinds of newspapers are most vulnerable in the brutal business climate of 2009.
At a glance, Ann Arbor's transition to a Web-first publication model with a print product on Thursdays and Sundays sounds similar to the experiment under way in nearby Detroit. There, home delivery of both the News and Free Press has been cut to three times a week, readers are being encouraged to go online or buy an electronic replica edition and a compact print version is being offered on off days to print loyalists who go out and buy it.
In several ways, though, the Ann Arbor plan goes further than Detroit or similar cutbacks at the East Valley Tribune in the Phoenix suburbs and hybrid formats at other papers:
* The Ann Arbor News, after 174 years, will close as a business. * Its successor, AnnArbor.com, will be a new Web site, built from the ground up (and therefore supplanting MLive, the current site which serves several Michigan cities with locally tailored editions). * The News's distinctive headquarters, designed by prolific Detroit-area architect Albert Kahn, will be sold. AnnArbor.com has already taken the ground and top floors in a downtown office building, annoying some by supplanting a popular coffee store. * All the staff is being dismissed. Reporters and editors, whose salaries averaged around $50,000 according to one discussion post, can reapply for the many fewer jobs in the new venture, but the pay scale is being dropped to the mid-$30,000 range for reporters. * The new publication is being called a "print product" not a newspaper. Hints are that the Thursday edition may be light, targeted to weekend planning, Sunday including longer news takeouts.
Laurel Champion, publisher of the News and Executive Vice President of the new venture, declined to be interviewed for this piece, saying in an e-mail that much remains to be determined over the next month.
In announcing in late March that the News would close, she said that the paper lost money in 2008, was losing markedly more in 2009 and gave no evidence of being "sustainable" under a traditional business model. (Steve Newhouse, who runs Advance's digital businesses, said essentially the same in a brief interview with Crain's Detroit Business).
A tip of the hat to my friendly competitors Fitz and Jen at Editor and Publisher, who suggested just after the announcement that some characteristics of Ann Arbor -- especially a young, wired-up populace -- work against business success for a newspaper.
Tony Dearing, who is joining AnnArbor.com as content director, expanded on the point in an interview with blogger Jim Carty: "What people don't understand is that, yes, Ann Arbor is a dynamic, vital market... But there are a lot of things about Ann Arbor that make it harder to succeed as a print daily paper. Print papers do a little better with an older audience, and Ann Arbor is a little younger. We do better where there is a high level of home ownership, and there's a lower level of home ownership. We do a little better where there is a higher level of longtime residents. Ann Arbor is much more transitory."
Carty asks Dearing how smaller properties in Advance's Michigan Booth group (still operating under the name of previous owners), some facing down-and-out economic stress, can maintain seven-day-a-week publication schedules. His reply: "A daily newspaper is a very traditional product that does best in very traditional communities. Jackson, Saginaw, Flint and Bay Cities are VERY traditional communities. Ann Arbor is a very untraditional community, and it's just way harder to succeed with a print product here."
I don't think it is a stretch to extrapolate the Ann Arbor problem to metro markets in the worst trouble -- San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Jose. Youngish, upscale, hip, high-tech , a big artistic community -- those may all be economic engines for the city but a business negative for the one-size-fits-all traditional newspaper.
Conversely, rankings of newspaper household penetration are always led by such relatively traditional and stable cities as Rochester, Richmond and Milwaukee.
Absent more insight from management, I can think of one more competitive negative and a few things Advance may have done to compound its Ann Arbor troubles.
I don't know the campus paper, The Michigan Daily, well, but I have observed in other university towns-- Austin, Texas and Athens, Ga. -- that a strong paper at a big school is formidable and often quite profitable. It provides enough news to satisfy most of the student population, just passing through for a few years. Plus it sucks up restaurant and nightlife advertising and may be the first ad buy for youth-oriented shops.
Newhouse/Advance gained a good reputation through the 1990s and early 2000s for investments in news quality, strong editors and notable editorial improvement at such papers as The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, The (Portland) Oregonian and The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. But the chain was also known for an informal business culture that worked in good times but seemed to catch the company recognizing late the life-and-death financial crises at The Star-Ledger of Newark and The Jersey Journal.
The News is covering its own demise thoroughly, allowing some lacerating criticism into lengthy discussion threads. But those forums -- and similar ones in other Ann Arbor publications -- frequently fault Laurel Champion's predecessors for being remote and arrogant, losing touch with the community and publishing an often-flat product.
Advance is also notorious for weak Web sites, editorially aimless and locked into a rigid and barely navigable design mandated by headquarters. (A ranking of newspaper Web sites last week placed The Star-Ledger's dead last among 23 rated).
Add it all up, and there are good reasons to start over with AnnArbor.com. I'll explore in a later piece how the site is taking shape and the cluster of Web and print competitors it will face in America's first city to lose its daily newspaper.
ping
Given that it’s Ann Arbor...locals will only be missing the most politically correct news they’re allowed to publish anyway.
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/06/23/globe_guild_call_talks_productive/
Globe, Guild call talks productive
http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/
A Crossed-Up Acrostic Fan
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/four-crowdsourcing-lessons-from-the-guardians-spectacular-expenses-scandal-experiment/
Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment
I just wish I could get the local paper, Galveston News, to stop throwing it’s plastic wrapped trash in my driveway. It goes straight into the garbage can and then the dump I guess.
It really doesn’t surprise me that the The University of Michigan paper out produces the local daily. Afterall, since the taxpayers pick up the tab for the student paper, It doesn’t have to worry about making a profit.
The Indiana Daily Student is much bigger than the Bloomington Herald-Tribune, as well. With the exception of the Northwestern paper which competes against the Chicago Tribune, all student papers at Big Ten schools benefit from taxpayer support, no need to turn a profit, and better access to those individuals on the campus that the media may want to interview.
I am 61 years old and have not read a "print" newspaper in 10 years. And feel I am better informed now than before. It is not about media, but content.
AP will be the death knell of newspapers.
AP = Always Propaganda
Call the police and have them cited for littering.
There was a Boston Globe in a pile on the ground at the end of the driveway the other day, and I would have picked it up. Honest! But at the time, I did not have with me any pooper-scooper bag with which to pick it up.
I think the newspaper folded ‘cause their football team sucks.
.....the pay scale is being dropped to the mid-$30,000 range for reporters. .....
A truly dedicated reporter, that is one who really wants to make a difference, would write for free. There would be no salary or any of the disagreeable encumbrances. Livelihood would would be derived from the numerous public assistance programs available in the great Michigan cities.
The support for the assistance programs would come from the profits of the no longer advertisers who can be taxed more. Once relieved of the cost of advertising, the profits rise and are there for the plucking by the looters.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06232009/business/globe_turns_again_175644.htm
GLOBE TURNS AGAIN
LABOR TALKS CIRCLE BACK TO 1ST PROPOSAL
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/23/mps-expenses-daily-telegraph
MPs’ expenses supplement boosts Telegraph sales by up to 150,000 copies
I agree with you. I live in Madison, a college town and our local paper panders(ed) to the university and government bureaucracy ideals. The advertisers and subscribers were not those people. When the newspaper demonizes the business community and lauds the unconventional, they commit economic suicide. A lot of papers were owned by people who had agendas they wanted to promote more than reflect the community as a whole. In Madison, there is an alternative newspaper, The Isthmus, that is free and is the only paper that many of the alternative life stylists read. The irony is that once in a while the Isthmus is more fair and balanced than the paper of record, The Wisconsin State Journal.
Is that the one with the red stars at the top of the front page?
I have the same problem here in Michigan...When you get lots of snow in the winter, spring comes snow melts and I have a front yard littered with blue plastic bags with County Press in them...Of course they are in varying degrees of disintegration after 5 months under the snow..
And the only person to read their own blog will be themselves (and maybe Mommy and Daddy-who have been footing the bills for these twerps!
http://voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/06/22/this_just_in/111propertysale061909.txt
New U-T Owners Unloading Property
When I lived in Madison in the 70s, the WSJ was the Republican paper and the Cap Times was the (ultra liberal) Democrat paper. On campus there was the approved student paper (leftist of course), and the unapproved Badger Herald (conservative).
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