An Early Chronicle Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is still a few weeks away, but on the occasion of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s two-month anniversary, I’d like to go ahead and say thanks. Thanks first to everyone for reading. That’s the number one thing anyone can do to help this publication along.

Thanks also to those who’ve helped us give Chronicle readers something interesting to read – by writing columns or by filing Stopped. Watched. items.

Also, thanks to everyone who’s added to the quality of The Chronicle by leaving a comment on an article that complements, clarifies, or corrects information in that piece. Thanks also to everyone who’s sent along proofing corrections by email or phone. We do care about executing with precision on the difference between “complement” and “compliment.”

Thanks also to everyone who’s sent along suggestions for stories to cover. Getting a press release is one thing – receiving an email from a reader saying, “I hope you go to the tour of the Labadie Collection exhibit,” is quite another.

Thanks as well to everyone who’s sent along suggestions of a more general nature. We’d ask that you believe us when we say that we’ve listened hard, even if an instant change did not appear in The Chronicle. One example is the creation of The Tip Jar. More on that in a bit.

First, here’s a couple of other changes that were driven by reader feedback and our recognition that readers were right. At the outset, we imagined that it would be a rare Chronicle article that would have an open comment thread. It was an approach to which we had given a lot of thought – a lot of thought that I will spare readers, who are now just glad that most articles now have open comment threads. Most articles, that is, on which we did the original reporting. There’s whole categories of items for which we still systematically keep comments closed – New/Old Media Watch items. Generally, if there’s an original source other than The Chronicle, then we think it’s more appropriate that readers contribute their comments directly to that source.

A related issue is the reliability of those sources. Some readers would prefer that The Chronicle not link to sources in New/Old Media Watch items unless we’ve actually vetted the information. From our point of view, Media Watch items are offered as something of possible interest to Chronicle readers, not as a particular endorsement of the information or opinions presented by the source. We think of these items as an entirely different category from the stories we write and report on ourselves.

But we’ve relied somewhat heavily on the website layout to enforce a relegation of those items to their appropriate status – they appear in the left sidebar, not in the main column, which is reserved primarily for those articles on which The Chronicle has a claim to originality. But for readers who use a feedreader, all these items have the same status. (For readers who don’t know or care what a feed reader is, what follows isn’t important and can be safely ignored.) The RSS feed just loads them one after the other as the same kind of object.

As a partial response to this issue, here’s a way for readers to cook up their own RSS feeds to exclude and include exactly the Chronicle categories they want to read. Each category (section) has a number. [Key: 3=Business, 4=Education, 5=Entertainment, 6=Environment, 7=Government, 8=Missed Ticks, 9=Neighborhoods, 10=New Media Watch, 11=Old Media Watch, 12=Police, 24=Stopped. Watched.] The syntax for creating a custom feed, where x, y, z, w, correspond to category numbers, is this:

http://annarborchronicle.com/feed/?cat=x,y,z,w

For example, readers who want everything except for New Media Watch and Old Media Watch could use this feed: http://annarborchronicle.com/feed/?cat=3,4,5,6,7,8,9,12,24

Readers who just want to know when we blow it could use this Missed Ticks feed: http://annarborchronicle.com/feed/?cat=8 Mmm, that feed full of mistakes tastes good, huh?

Here’s a request, though, for readers who read Chronicle content with a feed reader: every once in a while, change up your diet and visit the actual website. Why? Because Laura Fisher did an incredible enough job on the configuration and design that the number one comment I’ve heard back from readers is: “It looks amazing!” Number two is: “How did you get WordPress to do that?” She’s not hard to find online and can be told directly how amazing her work is.

Finally, we’ve heard from any number of people who have nothing to advertise (which is the revenue model The Chronicle uses), but who would nevertheless like to support The Chronicle financially. Otherwise put, they’d like to feed us, and we’d like to accept their generosity. Here’s a way for people to do that: The Tip Jar. As noted on that page, there are some conditions on donations to The Chronicle – which we’d like to stress are not tax deductible. We’re placing a limit of $500 per calendar year per person on donations. Further, any donation should made with the understanding that the donor’s name plus the month and year of the donation will be published here at The Chronicle as a part of a list. We want our financial interests to be as transparent as possible so that readers can judge for themselves whether our published material meets their standards for objectivity and the separation of content and financial support. Advertisements are already transparent in this way.

By dating the contributions, we’re recognizing that some donors might at sometime in the future – even the near future – come to regret their association with our publication. We’d hope this would never be the case, but we don’t take for granted that we’ll continue to enjoy everyone’s continued support no matter what we do. A long-ago contribution, we think, would be assessed in a more accurate light by readers, than an undated amalgam of everyone who has ever contributed anything.

Thanks in advance for tips, both financial and news-wise. Thanks in advance for continued commenting and correcting. And finally, thanks in advance for reading.