I just want to thank you for the monthly updates. It gives the paper a very personal feel to hear from you, the people who run the thing, about how things are going and what you’re doing to respond to reader comments. It makes me feel like you really are a part of my community (which you are). I hope they’ll continue in some form even after you’re counting these things in years.

Thanks for the readership figures.

Roughly how much revenue in ads would the Chronicle like to take in during the coming year?

Somewhat ironic that with all this focus on “watches” and a clock as a logo, we don’t timestamp those, huh.

There’s downsides to expanding the article’s system time/date stamp to display clocktime as well (e.g., for items where we’re unsure about exact time, the fact that it’d be displayed with “exactness” creates the erroneous impression that it happened exactly then; editing the system time is tedious) but we’ll add definitive clock times to the body of the items for those where we have a definitive time.

We’ve begun adding times in this way as of earlier today. Assuming this works out okay in the coming few weeks, we’ll try to get all correspondents on board with this systematically — if an exact time is available. We probably don’t want to require it. One idea for Twitterers to save some precious characters might be to add “TT” for TrueTime to the end of a tweet, which would mean: “Timestamp this with the time on the tweet.” If there were no time stamp on the Stopped.Watched. item, it would mean we don’t have anything more definitive than the day.

The sort-of-off-track discussion of economic recovery signs might not be so off-track after all. It might be nice to see some coverage of what positive economic news there is — reporting on the robins instead of just the mud. How about a section similar to “Stopped. Watched.”, or maybe integrating “economic robin” sightings into S.W.?

Emotion and perception seem to play a big part in our economy these days, so why not try to generate a little “positive vibe”?

Thanks for all you’re doing! And I hope you’ll also continue to write about your decisions based on journalistic ethics, values, and considerations. That is also very valuable reading.

In my humble opinion, the start of the recovery will be very subtle and uneven across different aspects of the economy. Oddly enough, and assuming that banks start to lend again, I believe that auto sales may be among the first things to pick up in the latter half of 2009 reflecting deferred purchases over the past twelve to twenty four months. I certainly do not mean to imply that happy days will be here again by the end of 2009 for the autos, just that the relentless slide in auto sales may stabilize and then slowly reverse. All bets are off if either GM or Chrysler have to go through a disorganized (vs. pre packaged) bankruptcy.

Other aspects of the economy such as local housing, will take much much longer to show signs of improvement. Housing in this area, for example, suffers from a severe imbalance between supply and demand due to overbuilding, a lack of new job creation and the resulting household formation. None of these factors are likely to be corrected locally in less than three to five years.

To your point about AA government planning, I fear that since it is so dependent on property taxes which are going to be depressed for many years to come, and since the full truth about public employee unfunded pension liabilities are not yet well understood, the “recovery” as far as the Ann Arbor City government is concerned is way way off. The City of AA, and all other municipal entities for that matter, are going to have to learn to live with a lot less for many years to come. The new City Hall and Skyline High School are examples of very bad decisions given the current state of affairs. Unfortunately, each project was started when things were supposedly good and each took on momentum that in the case of Skyline proved impossible to stop. I am still hopeful that the City Hall project can be sidelined until the City’s economic future is more stable.

We sure got off the track of the original article. But I am glad that we have the forum provided by the AA Chronicle to air these thoughts.

Bob

I didn’t say there are absolutely no indications of a recovery — I just said *I’m* not seeing any, and of course I have only a very limited perspective of a tiny slice of the world.

the reason I keep harping on this issue here and at AU is that our estimate of when the recovery will begin (has begun?) has major implications for the city’s strategy on a whole variety of issues, snow removal and the income tax being just a couple of them.

I’d be delighted to be proven overly pessimistic, I just want to be sure that people are thinking through the contingency plans if things keep getting worse.

Fred