I used this canvas bag to deliver the morning paper in Columbus, Indiana, from 1974 to 1980. The circulation area for the Louisville Courier-Journal extended only as far north as Columbus. More people in Columbus subscribed to the Indianapolis Star, or else the local afternoon paper, The Republic. But some people subscribed to all three.

It’s my turn to write the monthly milestone – an update about The Chronicle. Here’s a nuts-and-bolts outline, with a longer version after the break.

• Events: List them yourself on The Chronicle by registering for an account on Upcoming and creating the event listings there. Let us know when you’ve done that, and we’ll add them to our “watch list,” which will make them appear on The Chronicle’s event listing. It’s free.
• Emailed updates: Shoot us an email saying you’d like to receive weekly story summaries, and we’ll send them to you – with links to the complete story.
• Advertising crew: As part of our ongoing effort to increase revenues to support expanded coverage in The Chronicle, there’ll be some folks out there in the community earning commissions by convincing advertisers to place ads in The Chronicle. If you think you’ve got what it takes to sell ads into The Chronicle, let us know.
• Print and thoughts on newspapers: Printing off a page from The Chronicle should look a bit better than it used to. Regarding the contrast between news on-screen versus printed on paper, Del Dunbar’s column that we ran back in September 2008, our first month of publication, is a better read than ever. [Link to Del Dunbar's column.]

Events

Here’s how to set up your own event listings on The Chronicle.

1. Register for an account on Upcoming (http://upcoming.yahoo.com). Some readers might already have an account with Yahoo!
2. Create the event using +Add An Event on Upcoming. It’s a form-filling exercise that asks for what you’d expect: Title, venue, time, date, description, cost (if any). Many if not most of the venues in Ann Arbor are already in the Upcoming system – start typing and the auto-fill will take over. If you wind up needing to add a venue, once you type in the address, a link to a map of that location gets automatically created.
3. Let us know you’ve created the event. Email us the link. Or just tell us the title. We’ll find it. Then we’ll add it to our “watch list” and it will show up on The Chronicle’s event listing. Plus, your event will potentially show up in other places that use Upcoming. ArborUpdate‘s right sidebar is one example.

To  people with events to promote, the advantages of this approach include: total control over accuracy, tone and language of description; total control of any needed revisions (what if the time, date or venue changes due to circumstances beyond your control?); potentially wider distribution across the web.

For us, one advantage is that it saves work – one click adds an event to our “watch list.” Another is that we retain editorial control over which events appear on our website. A final advantage is that Upcoming uses the nomenclature “watch list.” We’re all about watches and clocks here at The Chronicle, for heaven’s sake.

Why events? Our approach to chronicling the community is to show up somewhere and give a first-hand eyewitness account.  That approach doesn’t necessarily serve the promotional interests of people who are holding events. It also doesn’t necessarily directly serve the public interest in knowing when important events are going to take place: “Thanks, Ann Arbor Chronicle, for telling me what happened, but how about telling me next time that it’s going to happen so I can go myself if I want.” A mostly reader-driven event listing allows us to focus resources on reporting and writing, while serving readers’ interest in knowing what’s coming up.

For readers who are familiar with microformats, our event listing has them.

Emailed Updates

We’ve heard from several readers that their preferred way to read The Chronicle is to receive a warm, friendly electronic nuzzle – an email message – with links to stories. So we’ve begun sending out weekly updates (Saturday or Sunday) with short synopses of the main stories from the past week, including links to the whole story. It’s just text, no pretty pictures. We also include in the weekly update a link to our list of advertisers.

If you’d like to be added to the list, shoot us an email at dave.askins@annarborchronicle.com. If you decide, after receiving some of these updates, that this is not what you wanted after all, just send us an email and we’ll take you off the list.

Advertising

It’s always been our intention to expand coverage of The Chronicle as revenues allow. With the recent developments in the local media landscape – most notably, The Ann Arbor News is ceasing publication this summer – expectations from our readers have risen. We’ve heard from several of you that you’d like us to step up and expand the breadth of our coverage. We don’t intend to disappoint.

For a few months now, our efforts to grow revenues have included some other folks who’ve been working with us to increase the number of advertisers in The Chronicle. Readers might have noticed the effect of those efforts. In addition to thanking our long-time advertisers, we’d like to welcome the following advertisers who’ve joined us since our last monthly milestone (and see the full list of all our advertisers here):

• Courtyard Shops
• Downtown Home & Garden
• Emergent Arts
• FestiFools
• Fourth Avenue Birkenstock
• getDowntown
• Legacy Land Conservancy
• Potters Guild
• Real Seafood Co.
• Washington Street Gallery

We’re also ready to add some additional advertising representatives. If you want to take a shot selling ads into The Chronicle on a straight commission basis, send Mary Morgan an email at mary.morgan@annarborchronicle.com.

Additional revenues will support additional reporting and writing. I think there’ll be a variety of local enterprises over the next few months that launch because people see an opportunity to fill a void. I think that The Chronicle and annarbor.com will likely be just two of a host of media alternatives – from other purely online ventures with rolling publication times, to printed weekly publications, to other combined print-web initiatives. It could be that several survive longer term.

Whether one of those is a daily printed publication is possible, I’d say yes, but doubtful. Still, The Republic, which is the local paper in my hometown of Columbus, Indiana (pop. 35,000), seems to be printing a paper every day.

Newspapers and Print

Related to printing is one recent success here at The Chronicle: When you print off a story from The Chronicle, the result now looks pretty close to the way the screen looks. One exception is that the advertisements are lined up along the bottom. So if you know someone who’s just never ever ever going to go online to read local news, and there’s  some Chronicle content you think they’d enjoy, we’d encourage you to print off a page and hand it along to them. Or just post it somewhere prominent.

We know that a sheaf of 8.5 x 11 sheets isn’t going to replace the feel of a newspaper. But it’s better than nothing – which to paraphrase Del Dunbar in the column he wrote for The Chronicle back in September, is exactly what you paid to read this.

In the wake of last  week’s news I found myself re-reading that column. I’d like to invite you to do the same: “I miss my daily newspaper as I remember it.”

After reading Del’s piece, Twitter it, Facebook it, MySpace it, email it.  Or … print it out and staple it to a telephone pole.

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.

T. Casey thinks it’s a big deal to be mentioned in a book. And I think he’s right. If not a big deal, then at least a medium deal. There’s something still magical about a book as opposed to anything that might be viewed on a screen. If there weren’t something special about it, the University of Michigan would not have installed a book printing machine in its undergraduate library. It prints out copies of books in its digital collection while patrons wait.

The question of which book that machine prints out – a scanned version, and if so, which edition, or if not scanned (OCR-ed instead), does that really count as printing “the book” – those are issues I’ll leave to others. For my purposes, whatever book comes out of that machine, it’s some book. And if you’re mentioned in it, it ought to count as being mentioned in a book. Whatever that’s worth. Probably not much. And maybe it shouldn’t be much, if Bill Tozier is right about the place our current understanding of print has taken us:

I want our understanding of print to die. Our mythology. The authority of texts and citations, the abusive misapprehension of what constitutes scholarship and knowledge in our global culture. The notion of fact, of “it’s true because it’s in a book” and “I don’t have to talk to you and explain what I mean because I cited the paper in my bibliography.” Lazy people talk about books they’ve never read, cite articles in journals they’ve never heard of, as signals of their status and erudition.

Yes, T. Casey will be able to trade on the laziness of folks who say, “T. Casey really could’ve shot J.F.K, and I know that, because it’s in Bugliosi’s book.” But even if we strip away the mythology, and the misappropriated authority afforded to printed texts, there’s something left still, I think, for the simple thrill someone might feel for being mentioned in a book. So I think T. Casey should at least be be appropriately thrilled for his mention in Bugliosi’s book.

Because … quite frankly, I feel thrilled to have been mentioned in a recently published book about human power. This past Saturday, I pedaled over to the Remodel Green Expo at Eastern Michigan University where the author of The Human-Powered Home, Tamara Dean, was selling and signing copies of her book. It can be purchased online as well. She had come to the event all the way from Viroqua, Wisconsin, where she lives a human-powered lifestyle in a rammed earth home. There’s a picture and description of my laundry spinner on page 201. And the only thing I had to shoot to get in there was a photograph.

Tamara Dean signs her book for me: "Dave, Thanks for your contribution and for coming to the presentation. May your muscles never fail you! — Tamara"