Owen Gleiberman, film critic for Entertainment Weekly, grew up in Ann Arbor. (Photo courtesy of Owen Gleiberman)

Today, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly enjoys a position as one of the country’s most influential movie critics, his opinions read and respected (and sometimes reviled) by millions. Forty years ago he was a precocious middle-schooler who carried a transcript of the Chicago Seven trial in his pocket as he roamed downtown Ann Arbor, exploring the head shops and hanging with the hippies.

Soon after enrolling at the University of Michigan in 1976, Gleiberman was bit by the movie bug and began reviewing films for the Michigan Daily. He struck up a long-distance friendship with Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who encouraged him in his writing and helped him to land his first job after graduation as a critic for the Boston Phoenix.

Though he now lives in Greenwich Village, Gleiberman makes regular return trips to Ann Arbor to visit family and friends. Over tea at Café Felix on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, he related what it was like to grow up in the countercultural milieu of Ann Arbor in the late ’60s and early ’70s, how that experience influenced his career as a film critic, and his thoughts and hopes on the future of journalism.

Were you born in Ann Arbor?

No, I wasn’t born in Ann Arbor, but I moved here when I was about five or six.

You were a young kid living here when Ann Arbor was at its radical peak. Were you aware of what was going on? Did the counterculture have an attraction for you, even as young as you were?

I was ten years old in 1969. I don’t know if I can speak for other kids, but growing up in Ann Arbor I very much felt the romance of the counterculture. I remember the first Earth Day in 1970, when I was 11. You felt all this energy burbling around.

Where it really kicked in for me was in seventh grade when I started to get a little older and was able to go downtown by myself. Then I got immersed in it. I still have these incredible memories of going to State Street and seeing underground newspapers, and going into the head shops like Middle Earth, which was then really a head shop. Seeing the black-light posters, seeing the underground comics, and even the beads that you would string. All of this was part of the same thing. It was part of this counterculture that was very, very real to me.

And I was into the politics then. I always say that I went through my radical Marxist-Leninist phase when I was 11, and then was smart enough to get out of it and become a centrist when I was twelve-and-a-half. But I really felt the romance of the counterculture. To me then as a kid it seemed like American culture was being changed in a good way by all of this hippie energy, which I think in a way that it was. It was very, very important to me. It really almost defined Ann Arbor for me, or defined what I loved most about Ann Arbor.

I used to have a transcript of the Chicago Seven trial that I would carry around with me and read all the time when I was in seventh grade. So I knew that by the time I was 12 years old that Ann Arbor was not just this kind of cool, fun, mellow place with a lot of candle shops, but that all of this stuff meant something, culturally – that Ann Arbor was at the forefront of things that were going on nationally. That was true, and I perceived it, and I thought it was really cool about Ann Arbor. It made me very proud of the kind of city it was. It just made me love the place.

My favorite thing to do was to go downtown. There was such a continuity among all these countercultural activities, that you felt like you were sort of participating in the counterculture just by going to play pinball.

Owen Gleiberman's graduation photo from Pioneer High School. (Courtesy of Susan Cybulski.)

When I was in junior high and high school, I really got into going to the city council meetings, after they’d elected the two members of the Human Rights Party. It was such a great weekly human drama in seeing these two Human Rights Party people, Nancy Wechsler and Jerry DeGrieck, be these kind of token hippies on this very straight city council. It was like the Chicago Seven trial every week, in miniature, in the way these people would clash with each other.

That’s as close as I ever got to being politically active. Because I am not an activist. As I grew older I started to develop a sort of disdain for protesters with signs, because I actually am a centrist at heart, and I think that protesters often call attention to nothing so much as themselves. I really am for political action getting done, and finding the middle way, and doing things. And yet, the protests did serve a function back then, and I really identified with it.

Also there was so much about the counterculture that wasn’t about politics. It was about music, it was about fashion, it was about drugs, it was about new ways of seeing. That’s the side of the counterculture that I really identified with.

There was a sense of optimism in those days, even though looking back it seems like it was a dark time for America.

Those were dark times for America. Yet all of that was giving such life to popular culture. That’s one of the reasons that the movies of the ’70s were so vital, and are now so mythologized. It was because popular culture was so vital back then. The incredible music, the incredible movies. How could you look at that stuff and not feel a certain optimism about America?

Yes, we had a corrupt government, we had a corrupt president. But the outrage at that was reflected in our popular culture, and we had a system that worked. We had a system that spat out the bad guys. And we had a press that sort of came to the rescue. So ultimately, although there was a lot of negativity, I don’t think the ’60s and ’70s were a negative time for America.

I think the beginning of the real negative time was the election of Ronald Reagan. I think that was the paradigm shift, because that’s when we went through the looking glass. That’s when we seemed to be moving into this greater optimism, but it was a phony optimism. I think that’s when we moved from the politics of reality to the politics of unreality. And I think that’s what led to where we are today.

Do you think that growing up in Ann Arbor had a significant effect on your later life?

I’ll tell you how I think that I’m totally a product of Ann Arbor. What I loved about the ’60s, and what I still do, is that there was something very hard-headed and no-bullshit about the Ann Arbor view. There’s always been a certain skepticism that the people in Ann Arbor have.

During the counterculture era they were skeptical of the lies being told by government. But I also grew up with a certain skepticism about the Left. I saw the kind of groupthink mentality that was there. It seemed to me that the Ann Arbor point of view that I learned was, don’t trust packaged truths, wherever they come from. Look for your own truth, and stick to that.

That, to me, was the real message of the counterculture. To be true to yourself, and to look at who you were as an individual, and express that. That’s what the ’60s meant to me. And that’s the side of Ann Arbor that I still try to carry into my work today.

Groupthink is what’s killing this country, in every form. There’s a lot of groupthink in my profession, film criticism. Even the mentality now that says you’re supposed to stand up for independent films, you’re supposed to stand up for small films.

Wait a minute – who said you’re supposed to stand up for any kind of film? You’re supposed to stand up for good movies. You’re supposed to stand up for your own individual, idiosyncratic judgments. That’s what I believe film criticism should be about.

Do you come back to Ann Arbor a lot? Is it a second home, or maybe a getaway of sorts?

In some ways I think of it like that. I love coming back here. There is a certain spirit of the place, that I think it still has, that I reconnect to. Everybody likes to reconnect with their roots, but in my case the roots are something I still believe in. They still nurture me.

I don’t know if I would be a film critic if I hadn’t grown up in a place like Ann Arbor. It always inspires me to come back here.

Tell me about your road to becoming a film critic. There was a thriving community of film buffs in town during the ’60s and ’70s. Were you a part of that?

Absolutely. The film culture in Ann Arbor is really what gave me my own start as a movie buff. I was nurtured in that environment. It’s what showed me what love of cinema was all about.

This was an era in which being a movie buff was just part of the atmosphere of the time. There was a phrase around in the ’70s, called the film generation. It was the idea that people who came of age around that time were maybe the first generation that saw film as their literature. That they took film seriously, the way that an earlier generation had taken novels. A lot of people on campuses felt that way. I mean, students were just really into going to the movies, and taking them seriously.

The University of Michigan was a big enough place to support a lot of film societies. And on certain nights you would go and these screenings would be packed. Especially if it was a certain kind of movie. A Woody Allen double feature on Saturday night would have lines around the Modern Languages Building. Screwball comedies, Hitchcock films, they got that kind of response. Other movies were more obscure, but in general there were a lot of people who went to these movies.

It doesn’t seem that surprising for Woody Allen to draw a big crowd at the campus cinema. What does surprise me is that crowds would turn out for a Bogart picture, or even a silent comedy by Chaplin or Keaton.

I think this was the first era where going to see old movies had become kind of cool. I think part of that was that the ’60s were about overthrowing a lot of old stuff, and about only seeing new things as cool.

But by the time the ’70s really settled down, a lot of that was over, and for the first time I think a lot of students started to go back to those earlier models of movie stars, and of romantic comedies, things like that, and realized these were incredible movies, too. And there was something actually quite cool about them.

At some point you started writing about movies for the Michigan Daily, and even took a turn as Arts Editor.

I think one of the things that really got me involved in the Daily is that in my second semester, freshman year, I had really connected with a couple of Robert Altman films that I got very excited about. That semester a student group put together a whole Robert Altman festival, where they showed all his films, and they had all these people from his films come and give talks, like Elliot Gould, and Joan Tewkesbury, writer of “Nashville.”

I decided I wanted to be involved in that, and to cover it for the Daily. It was covering that event over my whole second semester that sort of fused being a movie buff and writing, for me.

The Daily was a first-class newspaper in the 1960s, competing with the professional papers in the area, and often having its stories picked up by the national news media. How was it in your day?

I think it was pretty good. One thing I know for sure is that the attitude we had at the Daily was that, in addition to just wanting to put out a good paper and serve that community, we felt that we were competing with the Ann Arbor News.

Now, the Ann Arbor News wasn’t necessarily the greatest paper, but they were a respectable paper, and they were a real paper, and they were professionally staffed. We just took it for granted that they were our competition, and I think that was a healthy attitude to have. How often did we scoop them, or do better coverage, I don’t know. But I think that was the right attitude to have.

What are your thoughts about the folding of the Ann Arbor News?

Well, from what I’ve read, they did it in part as an experiment. Ann Arbor was considered one of the most wired communities in the United States. So this was an experiment to see if a town that was sophisticated, that had a lot of people that used the Web, like Ann Arbor, could make the transition to getting their news online, as opposed to reading a newspaper. If in fact the experiment – a rather reckless experiment, I’d say – was successful, then it would sort of show how this could happen in other communities.

I believe what’s happened so far – and this is very anecdotal because I don’t live here, but I do know people in Ann Arbor so I try to keep up with this a little bit – my feeling is that if I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would say that the community of Ann Arbor misses the Ann Arbor News. That they still miss it, and it’s not just nostalgia.

What that paper provided, a sense of the information in one place, a sense that everybody would be reading that same information that you read – that gave you something. It gave you a certain feeling of unity about the information in the community, which is what a newspaper provides, and that that has not really been replaced.

If that’s true, then I would say the experiment was not really a success, and may actually aid the preservation of newspapers. Because yes, they’re up against it economically, yes, their business plan has been eroded, yes, it’s going to continue to happen. But if people genuinely like newspapers and continue to find a use for them, then that’s a reason to keep them around.

Would you say then that you’re cautiously optimistic about the future of journalism?

I think that moving into the digital era doesn’t need to affect writing that much. I mean, I’m not sure there needs to be a mystical difference between reading a piece through a digital medium or reading it on dead trees. I don’t know if the definition of a good piece of writing has really changed. I don’t know if people’s hunger for good writing has really gone away.

Now, of course, the big question in journalism is, people seem willing to pay for journalism and writing if it’s on dead trees, and they seem hostile to paying for it digitally. That’s the big question looming for journalists. Will we ever get to a point where people actually want to pay to read things digitally?

My feeling is, maybe yes. Certainly that’s what I think should be. But going forward that’s a great unknown.

About the writer: Alan Glenn is currently at work a documentary film about Ann Arbor in the ’60s. Visit the film’s website for more information.

Rough notes for the first rough draft of Ann Arbor history.

In this month’s milestone message, I’m going to explain what we do here at The Ann Arbor Chronicle. And I’m going to do it in a way that is intended to inspire additional voluntary subscriptions to our publication.

About 47 years ago, in a speech delivered in London to correspondents for Newsweek magazine, Washington Post publisher Philip Graham called journalism the “first rough draft of history.” The contention that journalists are writing history – even just a first rough draft – is pretty high-minded talk. Writing any draft of history certainly sounds sexier than the sheer drudgery of taking notes through a six-hour city council meeting seated on hard pew-like benches and condensing that material into a few thousand words for Ann Arbor Chronicle readers.

That’s an aspect of the job Graham meant in the first, less famous part of the “rough draft” quote [emphasis added]: “So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand …”

I think that digital technology allows journalists the possibility of providing a far better first draft of history than was previously possible. It’s better in the sense that it can be more comprehensive, and more detailed than the drafts that were constrained by printed newspaper column inches.

But seriously. Why does Ann Arbor need someone to write down its history? Do we here at The Chronicle really imagine that 100 years from now anyone will care that some new parking meters got installed in front of the Old Town Tavern? Nope. I don’t. Not really. Well, maybe. Okay, no. Not, really.

Sure, in an unguarded moment, I’ll indulge in the reverie that Ann Arbor’s 2110 version of Laura Bien will be mining The Chronicle archives and writing – for some next-century information distribution system – an article called “The Man Who Loved Parking Meters.”

More useful than 100-year-old history, however, is the history of five years ago, a year ago, or even a month ago. Because it’s the things that were said and done one month ago or one year ago that matter for elected officials making policy decisions, and for voters making choices at the polls.

So this month’s milestone provides a couple of examples demonstrating that The Chronicle is a pretty decent  source of recent local history – a better source than the recollections and conversations of our local political leaders.

Whereas: History is important

Legislative bodies, like the Ann Arbor city council, have an opportunity to record their own version of history when they write resolutions. Resolutions are divided into two blocks of statements, first the “whereas” clauses followed by the “resolved” clauses. It’s the “whereas” clauses that provide an opportunity for establishing a historical record of events that give background for the action that the body is taking. The action part of a resolution is expressed in the “resolved” clauses.

This ground was actually covered by Chronicle commenters back in March 2010 in a thread about a Chronicle city council meeting report. A question was posed by Rod Johnson [link]:

I’ve never understood the function of “whereas” and “resolved” clauses in resolutions. Do they actually have some specific force, or are they just part of the rhetoric of resolution-talk? Some sort of archaic survival from the 18th century?

And a response to Johnson’s question came from Vivienne Armentrout [link]:

… there is a very specific meaning to whereas and resolved clauses. Basically, the whereas statements are background to establish the thinking behind a legislative motion. They are also used as political puffery. [...]

But the “resolved” is actually the law being made. [...] It’s the resolved clauses that you have to watch.

Just as an aside, that’s a pattern of interaction for comments on this website – question followed by answer – that’s worth highlighting. It’s the sort of commenting that I think adds value to The Chronicle.

Whereas: Implied history is also important

While Armentrout is right that it’s the “resolved” clauses that have a material impact on the world, I think it’s worth watching the “whereas” clauses as well – not just what gets written into them, but what gets redacted from them. Tracking the versions of different “whereas” clauses can reveal that councilmembers care deeply not just about the history that’s explicated in “whereas” clauses, but about history that might be implied by the language of “whereas” clauses.

Consider, for example, a resolution approved at the city council’s most recent meeting on May 17, 2010 concerning the city’s future discussions with the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority. Those discussions will address a revision to the contract under which the DDA manages the city’s parking system. It’s a topic The Chronicle has covered in detail starting in January 2009.

Considered by the council on May 17 was a resolution that for the second time created a city council committee to meet with a corresponding committee of DDA board members to negotiate a revision to the parking contract.

Among the “whereas” clauses was this:

Whereas, It is in the public interest that these negotiations are conducted transparently;

As The Chronicle reported out of that meeting, Stephen Rapundalo (Ward 2) wanted that clause stricken. Why? Is Rapundalo against transparency? No. Rapundalo was working from the premise that the city council’s work is always conducted transparently and that the city council in general values transparency. To include such a “whereas” clause would be redundant. So by including the clause, Rapundalo felt it somehow implied, through redundancy, that to date there had been less-than-transparent behavior.

The fact is, there had been less-than-transparent behavior. This is not something open to dispute or interpretation. Specifically, a working group of city councilmembers and DDA board members had met for the first four months of 2010 out of public view, and outside of the committee structure that the two bodies had established to undertake the work that the working group actually did.

But the “whereas” clause was stricken – with dissent from three other councilmembers, who are apparently better students of recent city council history than Rapundalo. At the council table, he subsequently revealed that he was not in command of some basic facts crucial to his contention that there’d been no less-than-transparent conduct.

Whereas: The Ann Arbor Chronicle writes a historical record

Rapundalo contended that he’d done “due diligence” in reviewing city council minutes and that he’d found no action by the city council since January 2009 on the issue of the DDA parking agreement. He thus questioned whether the council had ever appointed a committee for the purpose of renegotiating the parking contract with the DDA. At the council table Sandi Smith (Ward 1), supported by the city clerk, corrected Rapundalo’s gap in knowledge of recent history.

The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s coverage of the issue has featured prominently the fact that the city council did create and appoint a committee – but only reluctantly, because city councilmembers did not like the composition of the DDA’s committee. On multiple occasions, The Chronicle has published timelines featuring the city council’s creation and appointment of its own committee.

Chronicle coverage confirms what Rapundalo could have confirmed for himself – even if he’s not a Chronicle reader – using the city’s publicly accessible online Legistar system that manages the legislative history of all the city’s public bodies. Legistar turns up the council appointment of its committee on a simple search.

Whereas: Talking about parking in parks is upsetting

The city council meeting that featured Rapundalo’s worries about the implications of including transparency language in a “whereas” clause was the same meeting when the council approved its FY 2011 budget.

In the city administrator’s proposed budget there’d been a very modest amount of revenue factored in for introducing a program to allow parking in two city parks – Allmendinger and Frisinger – only on University of Michigan football Saturdays. The council amended out the parking-in-the-parks proposal.

Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3) expressed some irritation that the proposal had even been part of the proposed budget. He wanted to include a “resolved” clause in the city budget amendment that would direct the city administrator to refrain from proposing it in the future. It was the city administrator’s budget to propose, so the direction to the city administrator, Roger Fraser, seems on target.

But where did that idea of Saturday football parking in the parks come from? If you were forming an opinion based only on the conversation at the council table that night and at the council’s previous meeting, you might reasonably assign the “blame” for the idea to the city’s park advisory commission (PAC). Mayor John Hieftje said that PAC had recommended the idea. Christopher Taylor (Ward 3) went on at some length praising PAC for leaving the proposal in their recommendations, saying that PAC had less latitude to look elsewhere to address budget challenges than the city council did.

Not included in the remarks by Hieftje and Taylor was the salient point that PAC did not conceive of the parking-in-the-parks idea. PAC was reacting to a proposed budget from city staff, who ultimately report to the city administrator. So it wasn’t PAC’s idea. Maybe it was Fraser’s.

That’s a convenient historical narrative and one consistent with Hieftje’s comments the night the budget was approved. Hieftje moved the conversation past Kunselman’s suggestion to give the city administrator explicit direction on parking in the parks, by assuring Kunselman that Fraser had “gotten the message.”

But I don’t think it’s just Fraser who needed to hear the message. It was also Kunselman’s fellow councilmembers. For FY 2011, the idea for parking in the parks could reasonably be analyzed as sprouting back in October 2009 – in the form of a resolution placed on the agenda by four councilmembers, but which was then subsequently deleted from the agenda. From The Chronicle’s reporting in October, which we cited as a part of the budget meeting report:

Placed on the agenda on Oct. 2, with sponsorship from Sandi Smith (Ward 1), Sabra Briere (Ward 1), Carsten Hohnke (Ward 5), and Mike Anglin (Ward 5), was a resolution that would have allowed the city to generate revenue from parking cars in Frisinger Park on home football Saturdays. Frisinger Park is just south of East Stadium Boulevard between Woodbury and Iroquois. It was pulled off the agenda on Oct. 5.

Here’s how the resolution read:

Whereas, Frisinger Park is well situated to provide special event parking, in particular for University of Michigan home football games; and

Whereas, The City is providing home football game parking at other City-owned facilities, including its facility on S. Industrial and these parking revenues are a new source of funds for the City which is striving to maintain high quality level of service for its citizens;

Resolved, That the City Administrator establish a parking program for University of Michigan home football days at Frisinger Park, including the option for pre-game/post-game tailgating.

Sure, it’s Fraser’s budget to propose and he need not have included parking in the parks as part of it. But in answering the question of why it was in the budget at all, it’s appropriate to say out loud that six months earlier there was at least some support on the city council for the concept.

Whereas: History is sexier than bridges

The city council got an update at one of its recent meetings on the planned reconstruction of the Stadium bridges over South State Street and the railroad tracks. At one point during the meeting, there was frustration expressed by some councilmembers that the University of Michigan was not shouldering a share of the cost for the project.

Sandi Smith (Ward 1) raised the issue with respect to the bridge reconstruction itself. Margie Teall (Ward 4) raised the issue of UM helping to pay for street reconstruction due to road surface damage that the football stadium reconstruction project had caused in the same corridor.

City administrator Roger Fraser, and city project manager Homayoon Pirooz, were essentially diplomatic in their responses to councilmembers. They both reported that the university had not indicated it would be shouldering costs for either of those two issues.

It would not have been out of place, however, for the pair to have mentioned that the council had three months earlier heard from Fraser, during a council meeting, that the university would be footing the bill for $450,000 worth of street and utilities work that the city itself would ordinarily fund. The work will be done in connection with the transit station on North University Avenue – improvements to the corridor are taking place this summer. The Chronicle included the $450,000 as part of a February city council meeting report.

City councilmembers equipped with The Chronicle’s reports fresh in mind on that occasion might have mentioned the $450,000. That could have led to a conversation framed by the question: What’s the balance of payments like between the city and the university? It’s a conversation that I think would be really useful for the city council to conduct in a comprehensive way, instead of the piecemeal way that the council currently thinks of city-university relations.

That conversation is unlikely to happen, I think, if on obvious occasions no one points out relevant recent history – like the university’s willingness to pay for $450,000 worth of work the city would normally fund. I think city councilmembers and Ann Arbor citizens who have the city’s recent history in mind, as recorded in detail by The Chronicle, are more likely to point out the facts that will start good conversations.

But recent history is in many ways like the Stadium bridges as described to me recently by Eli Cooper, the city’s transportation program manager. We were out on a field trip to the bridge on the occasion of a visit from the U.S. assistant secretary of transportation.

Said Cooper: “It’s a bridge. It’s not sexy.”

History is not all that sexy, either. But with all due respect to the engineers in The Chronicle’s readership, history is sexier than bridges.

Resolved: Readers will subscribe to a valuable historical record

The Chronicle’s business model is based partly on voluntary subscriptions. What voluntary subscribers are helping to buy for themselves and the city is a decent historical record of much of the city’s civic life.

And that’s valuable not just for the 100-year archives, but for the community’s shorter-term collective memory. I think The Chronicle provides what President Obama, in his UM commencement address, suggested was necessary for useful dialogue: “a certain set of facts to debate from.”

And that set of facts is something I think is worth paying journalists to write.  Many of you readers have shown you think so, too, by subscribing voluntarily to The Chronicle. And for that, I thank you.

About the writer: Dave Askins is editor and co-founder of The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Even though Mary Morgan and I usually alternate writing The Chronicle’s Monthly Milestone column, April marks the third month in a row that I’m providing the update. I’d like to say right up front there’s no scandal in this. It does not reflect an internal struggle for power here at The Chronicle. Although if it did, it’s worth noting that my three-month streak would mean that I am winning. And I’d also like to say right up front: If there were to be an internal struggle for power here at The Chronicle, I would totally win. [No, there will not be a poll at the conclusion of this column, asking readers to weigh in on that.]

More seriously, the alternating authorship of the Monthly Milestone column reflects The Chronicle’s commitment to shared work – internal to our organization. But externally, our strategy for providing coverage of the Ann Arbor community is also partly rooted in sharing the work load.

So this month, I’d like to take a look at how that plays out on The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s website – in the form of reader comments – as well as among The Chronicle and other local media.

Shared Work: Reader Comments

Last month’s Monthly Milestone included the bullet point that “We [The Chronicle] don’t care much (only some) about comments.” To be clear, we do take seriously the “some” part of that point. In fact, one of the functions of my Monthly Milestones is sometimes to highlight particularly noteworthy comments written by readers.

Some of the most useful comments are those that ask simple factual questions. And sometimes it’s a question that someone at The Chronicle can answer immediately – or respond to by tracking down the requested information. Here’s an example of that ["County EDC: Money to Loan but No Deals"]:

By Karen Sidney
March 17, 2010 at 12:04 pm

Would these bonds be backed by county or city tax revenues or is the only entity on the hook the private or non-profit entities who use the bond proceeds?

The followup comment to Sidney’s question was made possible by the fact that she asked a simple factual question in a timely way:

By Dave Askins
March 17, 2010 at 3:26 pm

“Would these bonds be backed by county or city tax revenues or is the only entity on the hook the private or non-profit entities who use the bond proceeds?”

At a committee meeting today, I asked Washtenaw County corporation counsel Curtis Hedger this question. He clarified that it was not the full faith and credit of the county that backs these bonds — the party on the hook is the private entity.

Fortunately, readers don’t just ask good questions. They also know things. And sometimes they’re in a unique position to know things, and they share the knowledge that answers a question ["AAPS Weighs Schools of Choice Program"]:

By Chuck Warpehoski
March 24, 2010 at 10:46 am

When evaluating the cost of the outsources vs insourced food service, did Rolland Zullo include the cost of payments to the state pension fund in the cost of in-sourced food service?

That question was answered by Zullo himself:

By Roland Zullo
March 24, 2010 at 1:57 pm

Hi Chuck,
The short answer to your question is yes, I included all costs, including pensions.

The analysis is a bit more involved, because costs and revenues change over time, and both affect the total budget.

The study is available at: [link] If you have questions, please feel free to contact me.

Roland

When a reader can provide the answer to a factual question posed by another reader, that’s a perfect sharing of work. It means that here at The Chronicle, we don’t have to do everything ourselves.

Shared Work: Other Media and The Chronicle

The idea of not trying to do everything ourselves is something that extends to our choices about what aspects of the community to cover in The Chronicle. A certain amount of that material is set by our commitment to trying to cover the work – in a fair amount of detail and context – of the public bodies who are responsible for spending public dollars.

But there’s some discretionary coverage we provide that falls outside of public meetings. For example, I recently wrote a piece about a University of Michigan group who knit scarves for homeless people. Why would The Chronicle invest time and resources writing about some student knitters, but take a pass on sending someone to the Google Fiber rally on the UM Diag? After all, isn’t fiber optic cable more or less like very high-tech thread? If we care about wool, why don’t we care about fiber optic yarn?

In favor of knitting, part of the story’s appeal was an opportunity to connect the knitters’ venue – Couzens Hall – to some of our UM regents meeting coverage. The regents authorized a major capital investment in refurbishing that dormitory over the next year, which will be closed during the renovation. Also, The Chronicle already has a certain history of giving knitting its due, when we stumble across it in other contexts.

So why not a rally for Google Fiber? First, we’d already included the general subject of the city’s response to Google’s request for information (RFI) in our city council meeting coverage – which included a public hearing on a council resolution of support. Christopher Taylor (Ward 3) was point man on the council for promoting the city’s response to the RFI and inviting public participation. He spoke to that issue at meetings prior to the public hearing – remarks we included in our reports of those meetings.

But seriously, why not just head over to the Diag already and document the Google rally? Did we not know about the rally? Did we not even think about the rally?

Yes, I thought about the rally. I thought about it in some detail. Here’s how detailed my thinking was. In announcing the public hearing on the council’s Google Fiber resolution, Taylor had expressed his hope that the public hearing in council chambers would include, perhaps, a song – he noted that there was some precedent for songs sung in the council chambers. He was surely alluding to Libby Hunter – who generally renders her public comment to the council in the form of a song. But Hunter did not oblige at the public hearing, and neither did anyone else.

So, to me, the burning open question about the rally was this: Would Taylor’s wish for a song be realized?

To get the answer to that question, I could have attended the rally, or I could have done what I did, which was stay home and read about it on Twitter, Facebook, or myriad other online sources. We didn’t “get the story” for The Chronicle.

When we don’t get a story like that, it does not bother us. When there’s an event like that, which every other media outlet will predictably cover, The Chronicle is mostly relieved that we don’t have to cover it. We’re focused on being there on those occasions when most other media outlets are not going to be there – or when most other media outlets are not going to report out the comprehensive detail that we’re committed to providing. We don’t try to do everything ourselves.

Coda: What About the Song?

As it turns out, there was a group sing at the Google Fiber rally on the UM Diag. An Associated Press article reported that it wasn’t merely a song – it was an anthem. Question answered.

I was not able to obtain the complete text to the Google Fiber Anthem, but it seems to have included the line “Ann Arbor Google Fiber, ain’t nothing any finer.” So it’s probably a good thing that I elected not to attend the rally, because I would have felt compelled to bellow forth the competing song below. I undertook to compose it in an effort to render a more accurate translation of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” If you’re keeping score, an ode trumps an anthem.

NODE TO JOY

Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium
Fiber surely, Google’s funky, download now made easier

Wir betreten feuertrunken himmlische dein Heiligtum
We’ll be trading urban [trans. note: possibly 'drunken'] fairies, in for holy optic towers

Deine Zauber binden wieder, was die Mode streng geteilt
You’re the Fiber binding, winding, what the modems strongly tore

Alle Menschen werden Brüder, wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.
All the mentions will be broader, when you search on Google’s World

Seid umschlungen, Millionen! Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!
Sung it song-like, millions sing now, this will kiss the world wide web.

Brüder, überm Sternenzelt muß ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Broadly, sternly, ever mustard, is a lovely Fiber well.

Singing that would clearly not have served anyone’s best interest. Fierce debate would have erupted over the accuracy of the translation, and that would have distracted from the point of the rally. [I would accept the criticism that the translation is somewhat casual in places, but to its credit, its meter scans the same as the original – so it's eminently singable.]

So readers who voluntarily subscribe to The Chronicle are supporting, in part, the extraordinary discretion I displayed in choosing not to attend the Google Fiber rally.

Dave Askins is editor of The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Mary Morgan, Ann Arbor Chronicle publisher

It’s Monday afternoon and I’m sitting in a terminal at Detroit Metro airport, waiting for a flight to Texas to be with my father and sister.

News of my mother’s death and the planned closing of The Ann Arbor News came inside a 12-hour span. The two events are orders of magnitude apart in their emotional impact on me, but in an odd way I find myself processing both and finding a metaphor for one in the other.

My mother was ill for a long time. Once a woman who loved to sing, she became unable to articulate the simplest concept. She grew to be fearful of even the shortest trips outside her home, though once she’d been eager to travel – so much so that all our family vacations when I was young were camping trips, far before it was popular. Piling us into a station wagon hauling a pop-up camper was the only way my parents could afford to see the country.

By the time she died, my mom was a shadow of her former self. And for the people who knew her only in the final months of her life, I’m sure it’s hard for them to imagine the woman I knew, and loved.

All of this was on my mind when word came about the decision to close The Ann Arbor News. And what I’ve heard from people in the aftermath of that decision looks very much like grief.

For the people who work at The News, or those who work at any of the hundreds of other struggling newspapers nationwide, it’s a grief linked to the uncertainty of their livelihood, for sure. But for the many journalists who are deeply committed to the idealistic goals of their profession – that the very foundation of a democracy relies on an informed public, which a free press serves – the closing of a newspaper is a frightening symbol. For them, it’s not a business. It’s a calling – even when it sometimes fell short of that idealistic goal.

But what about the rest of us, those who are no longer linked to traditional media, or never were? What are we grieving? It’s the loss of something that’s been part of our lives as long as we can remember. Of something that’s been entwined in our daily routines, often thoughtlessly. Of opportunities missed, of potential unrealized. Of witnessing a long, sad, sometimes maddening decline – and feeling powerless to do anything about it.

Of course not everyone is sentimental about the closing of The Ann Arbor News – one blog headlined its post with “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead.” I believe this animosity stems at least in part from an us-versus-them mentality. Over the years the News had grown inarticulate about its vision, and fearful as well. I’ve heard people at the News described as arrogant, and no doubt there was some truth to that, for some. But more recently, whatever arrogance newsroom leaders had was replaced by fear and a kind of desperation – not an eagerness for what the future was bringing as it barreled toward them, but a resentful apprehension. They felt embattled and under-appreciated, too – and all of this contributed to a destructive bunker-mentality that only exacerbated their alienation from the community.

These were the death throes. Yes, the economy is brutal and advertising revenue has been leeching away. Despite the economy, I believe the newspaper could have survived if its leaders had better engaged and embraced this community – not as sycophants or vacuous boosters, but as people with a vested interest in the lifeblood of Ann Arbor, its politics and government, arts & culture, schools, businesses, nonprofits – and in the people who live and work here every day, who, like us, call this patch of Michigan home.

Maybe their new venture, backed by the resources of the Newhouse corporation, will do this. Based on the community meetings they’re holding to help shape what the new online publication will be like, it sounds like they’re going to give it a shot.

I also wonder what this means for The Ann Arbor Chronicle – all day long people have been asking us that question. We have a clear vision for what The Chronicle does well – eyewitness, first-hand accounts, whether it’s a public meeting or a fun community event. And we’re committed to covering the community where we live in a way that reflects what it is, quirks, warts, and all. With the news yesterday, expectations from some readers of what The Chronicle could be and should be have risen dramatically. And so have our own.

But just for a little while, I’ll pause to indulge in unabashed nostalgia. Because when The News ceases to publish in July, I will miss it. Whatever takes its place – the new business promises to publish a print version on Thursdays and Sundays – it will almost certainly not look or feel like a daily newspaper. That model has been broken, at least in the minds of the number crunchers, and perhaps they’re right.

Almost everyone I talk with has stories of their own about visceral ties to their local newspaper. For me, I’ll miss the tactile, physicality of newsprint: its grime, its tempting outdoor smell that teases our cats to pounce, its transience. I’ll miss its clutter – how, spread across the floor, the newspaper evokes the messiness of the lives its reporters cover. I’ll miss the thunk it makes when our carrier pitches it onto our porch steps.

And perhaps above all, I will marvel at how I’ve become like my mother, whose stories about growing up with an outhouse and no running water seemed apocryphal to me, as newspapers will be to kids born today.

We can’t help but grieve. Yet it’s exhausting, and can’t be sustained at its most heightened level. I take comfort in that. So today I’m grieving, but tomorrow or the day after I’ll feel more hopeful. I will still miss what’s gone, but will remember why I loved it, and I’ll hold that part with me.

They’re boarding my plane. As I get ready to pack up my laptop and go, I feel as though I’m leaving something precious behind, and moving toward a future in which the landscape of my life has unalterably shifted. I don’t know what the future will be in this new place. But I don’t feel I’m alone.

Mary Morgan, publisher of The Ann Arbor Chronicle, was a 12-year veteran of The Ann Arbor News. Most recently she served as opinion editor there, and before that was editor of the News’ business section. She and Dave Askins, Chronicle editor, launched this online local news publication in September 2008.

At last, I thought, Ed has finally written a column about what’s happening at The News. That’s great! So I clicked on the link, and pulled up … a blank page on MLive.

I groaned – the mess that is MLive strikes again! – and I put my head in my hands: This technical glitch reflects so much of what’s wrong with the News’ business model, and shows how far they have to go in addressing this and all the other challenges they face. Maybe, I thought, Ed’s column will confront some of these realities. I’d just have to wait for the newsprint version on Sunday morning to read it.

What’s happening

The timing of Ed’s column was interesting. It came about a month after The News had reported another round of buyouts, part of a statewide restructuring of publications owned by Advance Publications, a privately held Newhouse family company. The use of the word “reported” could be somewhat misleading – locally, the paper ran a 5-sentence news brief in the local section. I wrote about it here, as did former News sports columnist Jim Carty, writing on his blog, Paper Tiger No More. The news was picked up by various other sites that keep tabs on what’s happening in the industry nationwide, like Jim Romenesko’s column on the Poynter Institute website, and blogs like Newspaper Death Watch.

The situation has roiled the local newsroom, where every full-time employee with five years or more of tenure has been offered a buyout. And because there have been very few new hires over the past five years, the offer affects most of the newsroom staff. They have until the end of this month – just a few more days – to make their decisions.

The buyout is complicated by the fact that staff aren’t assured they’ll keep the job they have if they don’t take the offer. Advance Publications is consolidating the production staff of all eight of its Michigan papers at the Grand Rapids Press. But they’ll have far fewer production jobs in Grand Rapids than exist at the individual papers now. So page designers, copy editors, graphic artists and others who are involved in production will have to apply for those Grand Rapids jobs – assuming, of course, that they’re willing to move their families to that community.

The same goes for virtually every other person who stays – it’s a crapshoot. The company has a no-layoff policy – rare in this or any industry. But now that might mean the job they give you is in Bay City selling ads, even if you’ve never done that before. If you don’t take the buyout and don’t like the job you’re offered within the company, you can quit – which means no unemployment benefits.

Communication with the staff about these changes and the future direction of the paper has been poor – and that’s a generous description. Communication with the community has been even worse. People ask me why The News is closing. Answer: It’s not. Or they wonder how the paper can call itself The Ann Arbor News when all the workers will be in Grand Rapids. Answer: The newsroom, advertising and circulation staff are remaining in Ann Arbor – the consolidation hasn’t gone quite that far. But the fact that so many people are confused speaks volumes about how ineffectively The News has communicated its plans to its readers.

Of course the staff size will be reduced after the buyouts, even if only a small percentage of people end up taking them. Due to attrition and a previous round of buyouts, the newsroom already has far fewer people than it had just five years ago. The departure dates for those taking the current buyout will likely be staggered over several months, so the full impact might not be felt until mid- to late-2009.

It’s happening everywhere

All of these local changes are taking place in the national context of a transformation in the field of journalism, driven by the overall economic downturn, lower advertising revenues, rising newsprint and personnel costs, competition from online news sources and a shift in readership away from traditional print to online.

The decision this fall by the Christian Science Monitor to become a primarily online publication was a dramatic indication of these changes, and the recent announcement that the Detroit papers are canceling home delivery on all but three days, revamping their newsstand editions and pinning their future to their online product is just the latest in a string of decisions that seem either boldly visionary or baldly desperate, depending on your perspective. (One blogger sweetly called the moves in Detroit a “crap sandwich.”)

The publisher of the Detroit News, Jonathan Wolman, was in town in early December as part of a panel discussion titled “The First Amendment, Freedom of the Press and the Future of Journalism,” held at the Ford Library. As partners in The Ann Arbor Chronicle, my husband and I have a deeply vested interest in exploring this topic – it’s our future, too.

Based on what the panelists had to say, that future involves a tumult of technology – news delivered via Twitter, video, podcasts, blogs, live-blogging, social networks like Facebook and others methods yet to be invented. These different forms require attention – someone has to file a Tweet, shoot and edit video, record the podcast, get these things into some kind of presentable form and post them on whatever platform they’re using. Often, that someone has evolved to be the reporter. That doesn’t include time spent doing what the job originally entailed: Preparing, researching, reporting, writing, editing, rewriting and, god forbid, just working the beat.

With fewer people employed at news organizations, each person is asked to do more of these things. At some point, something’s got to give. Vincent Duffy, news director at Michigan Radio, said at the Ford Library forum that typically what gets shorter shrift is attention to the story itself.

Technology is also behind the news in other ways. All of the panelists said they factored in website traffic – specifically, what stories online drew the most readers – when deciding what to cover next. They all looked at that data as part of their daily news meetings, when editors discuss how to allocate their staff resources, what kind of “play” a story will get or whether it’s worth covering at all.

I guess this could be seen as the democratization of media – readers are essentially voting on what they’re most interested in, be it Britney or bailouts. But it also seems like an abdication of responsibility, when newsroom leaders throw up their hands and say, “Hey – we wanted to cover the war in Iraq, but our readers were clamoring for cute puppy stories.” It’s happening at a time when newsrooms need more leadership and vision, not less.

The spin

Back to Ed’s column. I was glad to see he at least acknowledged the buyouts and talked about some of the challenges the paper is facing. I was glad that it ran on the front page of the Sunday newsprint edition. Finding it online was more of a challenge – it was placed in the “Real-Time News Coverage” feed, but as far as I could tell there was no direct link from MLive’s home page (an example of the weird disconnect between the online and print versions).

So what did he have to say? The piece began with this curious statement: “In the coming weeks, your News will begin to focus more on local people, local issues and local events.”

It’s hard to argue against more local coverage. Yet it prompts the question: does this just mean more local relative to non-local content, or does it mean more local coverage in absolute terms? The staff of the newsroom, during my 12 years there, at least, has been focused exclusively on covering local people, issues, and events. The state, national and international news was picked up through wires services that The News subscribes to. If we see a reduction in wire-service content – not an unreasonable move given that these are costly services – then of course we’ll get “more” local content, relative to everything else. But providing “more” local content in absolute terms requires the folks who’ve always worked exclusively to provide local coverage to provide even more of it.

The brute reality is that there will be fewer people in the newsroom after the buyouts. So how can there be more local news in the paper if there are fewer people to do the reporting? Ed doesn’t address this, so we’re left guessing. The staff who remain will in some cases be doing different jobs. Editors might be asked to do reporting – for mid-level editors, that’s already happening. Everyone will likely be expected to produce more, and in different forms – video, podcasts, online (see above “Future of Journalism”). Maybe they’ll use more freelancers. Likely they’ll recruit people from the community to write columns – not a bad thing.

In his column, Petykiewicz also says that readership has never been higher than when print and online are combined – no doubt that’s true. (Strip away University of Michigan sports coverage, though, and online numbers would likely plummet.) But the challenge he doesn’t discuss is the digital elephant in the room that is MLive: It’s an ill-conceived, poorly executed, untenable partnership.

Michigan Live is a separate “sister” company to The News. It operates the websites for all eight daily newspapers in Michigan as well as the Business Review publications. Many decisions related to the site have been made at the corporate level in New Jersey – and it shows. The operation runs to a great extent on automated feeds that rely on hand-coding, which if not done accurately by News staff results in all manner of glitches. Headlines can be loaded without the accompanying story, for example.

Since it launched in the mid-1990s, the site has been roundly ridiculed by readers for its confusing, hard-to-navigate design. (It’s not loved by Ann Arbor News staffers, either.) I think it’s improved incrementally over the years, but its generic look, the lack of a decent archiving system, the difficulty in finding content (even when you know it’s there, somewhere) are crippling.

The revenue model is even worse. Newspapers – especially those like The Ann Arbor News, which haven’t faced competition from other traditional media in the form of a comparably-sized newspaper or TV station – have been cash cows for their owners. They’ve delivered double-digit profit margins with the knowledge that advertisers really had no choice but to pay their rates. There was no other game in town.

Now readers and advertisers are migrating online, but without the commensurate revenue. Readers don’t pay subscription fees. Online ads don’t command as high a rate as print ads, and the online revenue is parceled out between MLive and The Ann Arbor News and MLive’s other print partners. For the News, just like any newspaper, that means there’s a smaller advertising pie. But with MLive as part of the picture, it means that more people are eating that smaller pie.

So what’s next?

No amount of spin will change the realities confronting The News, but there is hope. A smaller newsroom could produce a smaller newspaper that’s a must-read, tightly focused on local news and events. But to do that, the paper’s leadership needs to overhaul its own approach to doing business. Here are a few places to start:

• Don’t treat readers like idiots. Don’t tell people they’re getting more when they’re clearly not. They might not like the changes you’re making, but what they’ll really hate is an attempt to mask those changes by saying it’s an improvement. You’re in a fight for survival. You need readers on your side – employees too, for that matter. People will be advocates, even evangelists, for the the local paper, but not if they think you’re trying to swindle them with a product that costs more, delivers less and is being promoted as an upgrade. Everyone these days is dealing with the crappy economy – they understand you’ll have to make hard decisions. Don’t pretend it’s not happening.

• Don’t try to be everything to everyone. For several years after I joined The News in the mid-1990s, “zoning” was the big thing. The paper put out several different editions, swapping out the lead stories in each one so that it related to the edition for a particular community – Ypsilanti, Livingston County, Ann Arbor. The newsroom twisted itself in knots to make this happen, resulting mostly (as far as I could tell) in confusion. Readers in Ypsilanti felt they weren’t getting the “real” newspaper. People who worked in Ann Arbor and lived in Livingston would see two different versions and wonder, “What the…??” The effort was eventually dropped, but the paper still tries to cover a little of everything, both topically and geographically. With fewer resources, you need to hone your focus. And when you do, make sure your readers understand your goals.

• Communicate, communicate, communicate. If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. Vickie Elmer has been interviewing people for an article about changes at The News that’s scheduled to run in the January edition of The Ann Arbor Observer – it’s probably already being delivered to local households. If The News itself had been frank about what’s happening there, she wouldn’t have much of a story to tell. And I would be writing a much different column than the one you’re reading today.

• Get out of the office. Like anything else, loyalty is built through relationships. If people don’t know the decision-makers at The News, they’ll view the institution as just that – an institution, making it a far easier target to lampoon. Speak to community groups, reach out to people you don’t already know, make sure all the senior managers are involved in as many different community efforts as possible. It’s easy to develop a defensive bunker mentality when you don’t leave the building and when most of your conversations are held with others in the newsroom. Relationships shape reality, and when you don’t have deep connections to the community you cover, you can’t really understand what’s important to your readers.

The Ann Arbor News can emerge from its restructuring as a stronger, more relevant publication. But that won’t happen unless its leadership makes some fundamental changes in the way they operate. It’s not clear they’re willing to do that – even when it appears they have no other choice.

Dick Ryan recalls President Ford's response to a proposed bailout of New York city.

“I’ve never seen reporters so excited as when they’re talking about their Twitters,” remarked Gil Klein, moderator of a panel discussion Wednesday night at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor. The discussion was part of a nationwide tour of similar events hosted by the National Press Club as a part of the organization’s 100th anniversary. Klein, director of the National Press Club’s Centennial Forums, mentioned the micro-blogging platform Twitter in the current context of the tremendous period of innovation in the field of journalism.

But the consensus among panelists was that the raft of new technologies and platforms had actually become somewhat of an additional burden on reporters, which ultimately was not yet offering a return on the bottom line that would keep newsrooms fully staffed. Panelist Vincent Duffy, who has been the news director at Michigan Radio since May 2007, characterized the response from managers to innovative technology this way: “That’s great! Do that, too.”

As a result, said Duffy, what suffers is the reporting of news. From the perspective of a news director for a radio operation, Duffy said that for a particular segment that’s aired, (i) there’s a radio version, (ii) a web version, (iii) a printed version for the web, which has to be cleaned up to bring the spoken version to a written standard, and (iv) a web promo for the piece. And then, continued Duffy, radio news directors find themselves asking (v) do we have pictures? (vi) do we have enough pictures for a slideshow? (vii) do we have video? (viii) do we have a Twitter? (ix) do we have a blog post? What is sacrificed in this flurry of media, said Duffy, is what historically would have been attention by news directors and editors to the story itself: requests for additional background information, an additional source, an update.

Further, said Duffy, the vast mix of digital options meant that is was not obvious what the “media of record” was. This role has historically been played by newspapers. With the number of newspapers dwindling, Duffy said it wasn’t clear who might have the resources to cover important events like the Detroit city council meeting, the Ann Arbor city council meeting, and the Fowlerville library board.

Left to right: Marla Drutz, Vincent Duffy, Omari Gardner, Jonathan Wolman

In response to an audience question, Duffy said that in public radio, they were aware that there are plenty of people who don’t have access to computers or else simply prefer not to get their news from a computer screen. However, Duffy pointed out that people under 30 basically do not listen to public radio – median age for public radio listenership is 45. So for public radio, the web is a key to gaining new audience. The idea is to introduce the next generation to public radio via computers.

How to monetize the new audience that comes via the web is something the panelists agreed was a challenge that had not been met. Panelist Jonathan Wolman, who is editor and publisher of The Detroit News as well as publisher of its website, detnews.com, characterized it as a situation where the growth in revenues from web advertising was encouraging, but had not reached anywhere near the levels it would take to replace lost revenue from the print side of the equation. Comparing web to print, the ratio Wolman offered was 1:8. The advertisers, said Wolman, are as confused as anyone else.

But for her part, panelist Marla Drutz, vice president and general manager of WDIV-TV Detroit, seemed to suggest that if there’s a burden of technology that’s not accruing to the bottom line, then it’s self-imposed. The role of managers, she said, is to allocate resources to those activities that make bottom-line sense. She said that one of the main attractions for a television operation was weather information – even though the total amount of time devoted to weather in the course of a day might be a half hour’s worth of programming. This allowed the investment in extremely sophisticated and expensive equipment and could justify the hiring of a meteorologist. If no one is reading the blog, or following the Twitters, or watching the video, then don’t do it, she said. The metrics, she pointed out, are easily accessible.

In fact, the panelists all spoke of the standard place in their morning meetings of the metrics for analysis of web traffic on the various stories from the previous day. Panelist Omari Gardner, news editor for digital media at the Detroit Free Press, described “tailoring the product” based on the web traffic analysis.

Gardner also talked about the impact of buyout strategies in order to keep newspapers solvent. He said that it was typically the most experienced reporters (and most highly compensated) who were being ushered out with buyout offers, and that had the effect of removing an important piece of the system of mentorship. Older, more experienced members of the newsroom could no longer show the new folks the ropes.

The amount of time the panelists spent talking about financial viability and the measurement of success by audience prompted an audience member to wonder if they were more interested in protecting a free press or rather creating a sale-able product. The audience question alluded to the title of the panel discussion, which was “Protecting a Free Press while Journalism Is in Turmoil.” To that, Duffy said that historically the press had always been a business proposition and that the nature of that proposition hadn’t changed.

To be fair to the panelists’ focus on sale-ability of product and reporting the news with fewer resources, it was driven somewhat by the moderator’s questions. In fact, the first question at the beginning of the night concerned whether the panelists felt they had adequate resources to cover the story currently unfolding on the automobile industry. The panelists said they were ready and able to cover that story. But towards the end of the evening, a voice from the audience familiar to Chronicle readers questioned whether the press had been doing an adequate job covering the auto industry in the period leading up to the current crisis. Tom Partridge expressed his disappointment in the Michigan media for not providing more information about the Big Three’s business plans, pointing out that except for Chrysler, these are public companies.

In response to Partridge, Gardner said that reporters did the best they could, but that the auto companies were quite insular and that they had set up barriers and boundaries that made it difficult.

Tom Partridge asked if panelists think Obama will be open to the press.

Partridge also asked the panelists to speculate on whether the election of Barack Obama would herald a new era of openness and freedom of the press. Duffy was skeptical. “They didn’t call him No-drama Obama for nothing,” he said.

The presidential allusion looped nicely back to the beginning of the evening, when Richard Ryan, retired chief Washington correspondent for The Detroit News, talked about his experience covering Gerald Ford. When Ford was announced as the pick for vice-president to replace Agnew, Ryan drove out to Ford’s house that night on the off chance that he might be able to talk to him. Ryan wound up talking to Ford sitting in a blue leather chair, with Susan sitting on the couch, Betty in the next room chatting with friends, and a dog and cat skittering around the house. Ford told him that on Tuesday, he was going back to Grand Rapids … for Red Flannel Day. And that, said Ryan, reflected that Ford was still the congressional representative from Michigan, not yet the vice president.

Klein, the moderator, had been keeping an eye on the time on account of the weather forecast for rain to start around 9 p.m. – perhaps he had visited Drutz’s website before the discussion started. And it did wrap up shortly after 9 p.m.

Ann Arbor News columnist Geoff Larcom, center, talks with Julia Eisendrath and Jonathan Martin during Tuesday evening's reception for Knight-Wallace Fellows.

Journalists from across the globe gathered Tuesday evening in the terraced backyard of the Wallace House, mingling with guests from UM and the community to kick off this year’s Knight-Wallace Fellows program.

Each year, about 20 mid-career journalists are picked for the eight-month program, coming to Ann Arbor to live and study a topic of their choice. They take a leave of absence from their jobs, receive a stipend and get access to UM resources.

Last year, Ann Arbor News reporter Tracy Davis was selected for the program, studying globalization and world ecology. This year, columnist Geoff Larcom will research the psychology of leadership.

Charles Eisendrath, director of the Knight-Wallace Fellows program, talks with a guest at this year's welcoming reception. He's wearing his trademark bow tie and hat.

On Tuesday, two university administrators, David Lampe and John King (both K-W board members), were on hand to officially welcome the fellows and their guests. Lampe is UM’s vice president of communications and a former journalist; King is UM’s vice provost for academic information.

Lampe urged the fellows to take advantage of the university’s vast resources: “We know who knows what about what.” King called UM “a terrific sandbox.” (As an aside, he also noted UM’s large number of student organizations – over 1,000, including The Squirrel Club, which sells its T-shirts for $12.)

The keynote speaker – Andrew Whitehead, head of core news for BBC World Service Radio – was a K-W fellow in 2004, and researched the origins of the India/Pakistan conflict over Kashmir. The work resulted in his book, “Mission in Kashmir,” published last year.

Championed by veteran journalist Mike Wallace, the Knight-Wallace Fellows is fairly low-key in the Ann Arbor community, but boasts powerful connections in the profession: Board members include Wallace, ABC News anchor Charles Gibson, and Jill Abramson, managing editor of The New York Times. High-profile visitors – including, in the past, Bill Cosby, Michael Moore and George Soros – are also known to drop by Wallace House during the year.

Features of the K-W program also worth mentioning: the twice-weekly sherry hours and trips to Istanbul and Buenos Aires. For journalists who’ve earned entree to this rarefied community, it’s a special eight months indeed.

Former U.S. Congressman Joe Schwarz was among those attending Tuesday's reception at the Wallace House on Oxford. He's teaching a course this semester at UM's Ford School of Public Policy.