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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. [Full Story]

Ann Arbor News publisher Laurel Champion, visibly emotional, told newspaper employees this morning that the paper would cease publication sometime in July, to be replaced by a different company and online publication.

The news shocked employees, who had anticipated cutbacks but not the decision to fold the company.

Champion told employees that the new entity – AnnArbor.com – will be separate from MLive.com, though details are still being worked out. According to an article about the changes posted on the Ann Arbor News section of MLive, the company will be led by Matt Kraner, former Cleveland Plain Dealer chief marketing officer. Champion will serve as executive vice president. Tony Dearing, who served as head of the News’ Ypsilanti bureau in the 1990s, will be “chief content leader” – the equivalent of the entity’s top editor. [Full Story]

Ed Pagani could have gotten an award for best prop, if such an award were given at Morning Edition. Pagani, a former Pfizer executive who’s now general manager of Lumigen Inc. and chair of the Ann Arbor Area Chamber of Commerce board, was one of five speakers at Wednesday’s breakfast meeting, which drew about 200 people. The Chronicle didn’t hear a single one of them make a “Glow Blue” joke – even though his elixir did evoke the University of Michigan’s decommissioned nuclear reactor. [Full Story]

According to Mo Frechette, they miss seeing customers out there in warehouse land. Toni Morell says they’re bored during off season. There’s also some inventory they’d like to move at discounted prices, Frechette says, so “why not do it as a hush-hush locals-only thing?”

The Chronicle suspects that Zingerman’s fans won’t really care why the managing partners of Zingerman’s Mail Order decided to open a super low-key discount retail store – they’ll just care about the when, where and what.

So here’s the deal: Every Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., starting last Friday and running for 21 weeks, the warehouse at 610 Phoenix Drive will be selling 21 types of items at deep discounts – including some things priced at $21 – to anyone who happens to stop by. The stock will be different each week, though there’ll likely be some overlap, too – you can sign up to get weekly emails alerting you to what’s on offer.

When we stopped by on March 13, the venture’s kickoff day, we watched a steady stream of people drop in – mostly from the surrounding industrial park, which includes the Borders Group headquarters and the Ann Arbor Learning Community, a charter school. Frechette said they’d told some of the surrounding businesses about it – plus there’s a sign at the entrance to their driveway – but otherwise, only some “leakage” about the store on Facebook and the blogosphere. Yet word is getting out. [Full Story]

Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners administrative briefing (March 11, 2009): During their informal administrative briefing, county commissioners engaged in a spirited debate on Wednesday about the value of joining a regional economic development effort focused on a corridor of airports. The item is on the agenda for the March 18 Ways & Means Committee, which consists of all commissioners and meets immediately prior to the regular board meeting.

The Aerotropolis Development Corp. is an economic development project targeting growth in the corridor between Willow Run Airport on the county’s east side and Detroit Metro Airport. In early November 2008, Wayne County executive Bob Ficano made a presentation at a board working session about the project, but the proposal never was brought up for a vote. At the time, several commissioners expressed concern at the cost of joining – a $150,000 annual fee.

Since then, the fee has been lowered to $50,000 for the county, and two local governments – Ypsilanti city council and the Ypsilanti Township board of trustees – have voted to join the project independently. The cost for those municipalities is $25,000 per year. [Full Story]

A couple of weeks ago, The Chronicle ran into Cheryl Clifton and Jim Musser walking along Liberty Street near Ashley. They work for Republic Parking as meter collectors – you’ve probably  seen them making the rounds as they transfer coins from the city’s 1,900 or so parking meters into portable metal collection bins.

What they also transfer, it turns out, are stickers. Namely, stickers that people affix to parking meters. Rather than throwing them away, Clifton and Musser (and others who’ve done this job previously) have slapped them onto the 21 collection bins. The day we chatted, the bin they were using had stencil-style stickers of a smiling Ronald Reagan. Apparently, it’s one of the tamer ones they’ve come across. [Full Story]

At Monday night’s city council work session councilmember Leigh Greden said that he wanted to see growth. Growth is what he could see (even if not the kind he was looking for) by turning his gaze to his immediate left at the council table to look at his colleague, Christopher Taylor’s upper lip, which is sprouting a mustache for charity. That kind of growth is no longer visible on city administrator Roger Fraser’s chin. Before the work session began, Fraser joked with the Ward 3 council contingent that he’d shorn his whiskers in order to appear as youthful as Greden.

Illustration of the concept of a … [Full Story]

In the midst of all the sturm und drang surrounding the future of Shaman Drum Bookshop, I went to Nicaragua.

Dianne, my wife, had been teaching for the last month in Catarina, a town in the mountains south of Managua. She volunteered under the auspices of the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, a small congregation in Ann Arbor of which we are both members. ECI is collaborating with the Iglesia Bautista Remanente, a Baptist church in Catarina, on projects that “will bridge the divide between wealth and impoverished countries by providing capital, employment and opportunities for cultural exchange.”

Joe Summers, our minister, is an old friend of mine – we worked together in the bookshop years ago – and ECI is an openhearted, diverse community that is serious about creating a better world. Although I’ve been mostly engaged with Buddhism in my adult life, I was attracted to this church because of the willingness of Joe and the congregation to struggle together around difficult issues. And I still enjoy a good sermon.

I hadn’t had much of a chance to talk with Dianne about the state of the bookshop given that our telephone and internet connections were short and infrequent. The experience teaching in Catarina was transformative and very positive for her, but living conditions were difficult. She asked me to come. I traded my frequent flyer miles for a ticket to Nicaragua. [Full Story]

Every year, the staff at the Dairy Queen on West Stadium Boulevard looks forward to seeing their regulars: Medium Twist Man, Moolatte Lady (a postal worker who stops buy every weekday and buys the same frozen coffee drink each time), Hot Dad (who makes the college-age staff swoon) and the Cocoa Fudge Family.

On a bitter cold Tuesday afternoon – opening day of the season – the regulars hadn’t shown up yet, but about 30 other customers had. Owner Diane Kerr wasn’t surprised by the turnout, despite temps in the 20s. “It doesn’t matter what the temperature is,” she says, “as long as the sun is shining.”

Clearly, there’s anticipation: The Chronicle was alerted by two Stopped.Watched items about the opening of this West Stadium store, as well as the DQ on Packard. As one Stopped.Watcher said: “Spring is coming!” [Full Story]

I generally brace myself when February rolls around – it doesn’t have a great track record of bringing the best of times, in my experience.

This year was different.

February treated The Chronicle okay. In spite of continued grim economic news, we’ve signed on new advertisers. In spite of the media’s general belief  that readers have super-short attention spans, we’ve gained new readers – and you might have noticed that we don’t always write short.

Yeah, this sounds pretty self-congratulatory. I can’t help it. Each business, nonprofit or professional who spends their advertising dollars with us or contributes via our Tip Jar, each person who spends some of their time reading The Chronicle – when they have a hundred other things calling out for their attention – is a precious thing to us, and we celebrate that unabashedly.

A lot happened in February, including several things we’re doing aimed at spreading the word about our publication. For our sixth monthly milestone message, here’s an update on what we’ve been up to. [Full Story]

Ann Arbor Gold, a program of the Ann Arbor Area Chamber of Commerce used to encourage shopping at local merchants, has shut down. The company that administers the program, CertifiChecks, is filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in Dayton, Ohio, according to an announcement on the firm’s website. Lindsay McCarthy, the chamber’s director of marketing & programs, sent an email message to members late Friday afternoon with the news. According to the chamber’s website, more than $2 million worth of Ann Arbor Gold certificates have been sold since the program started in 1994, with more than 140 businesses participating. [Source]

When Rob Cleveland of ICON Technologies sent us a press release about his firm’s purchase of the Ann Arbor Art Center’s Felch Street property, we took the opportunity to get an update on the center’s plans for its main Liberty Street site.

We reported last year that the art center, like virtually all nonprofits, was struggling financially and faced a budget shortfall. Last August, with two weeks left in their fiscal year, they’d launched a “Close the Books in the Black Campaign” to raise $20,000. So how was the center faring financially now? [Full Story]

On Wednesday morning, the Downtown Development Authority board operations committee got an update on the new parking payment kiosks which will soon begin replacing downtown Ann Arbor parking meters. The plan to install the devices, which will allow flexibility for payment and for rate-setting, has been reported in The Chronicle at least as long ago as last October.

The bases of the existing meters will remain in place, but they’ll be decapitated, with the coin receptacle to be replaced with a sign indicating a number for each parking space. The numbers are needed when parkers pay for their spaces.

On Wednesday, Joe Morehouse, deputy director of the DDA, said that the first of 25 units will be shipped on April 1 for deployment in the State Street and Liberty Street area. The 25 units represent an initial phase of assessment, with the idea that as many as 150-175 of these “smart meters” could eventually be installed. [Full Story]

Last week The Chronicle reported that Dream On Futon planned to close next month, and during our interview with owner Doreen Collins, she shared some memories from her nearly 15 years as a downtown Ann Arbor retailer. Among those were affectionate recollections – and several photos – of Jake Woods, better known as Shakey Jake.

She asked us if we’d seen the life-size wire sculpture of him. When we returned a blank look and said, “What?!” she filled us in.

First, some background: Jake died in September 2007. Then in his 80s, he’d been a fixture around town for decades, instantly recognizable in his shades, hat, suit and bow tie, often carrying or playing his beat-up guitar. Everyone wanted to say they knew Shakey Jake. He had his own “I Brake for Jake” bumper stickers. Hundreds showed up for his funeral at Muehlig Funeral Chapel, and many brought instruments that afterwards they played joyously in an impromptu parade in his honor.

Many knew of Jake, but few knew him well. Among those few were Collins and Carol Lopez, owner of the Peaceable Kingdom on South Main Street, around the corner from Dream On Futon. Collins wanted to pay tribute to her friend, and proposed to Lopez that they commission Stef Kopka to create a wire sculpture of Jake, just chilling, as he often did, in a white plastic lawn chair. [Full Story]

The Ann Arbor Observer has laid off five staff members, according to an article posted on the publication’s website. Says publisher Patricia Garcia: “They’re all good people who have contributed tremendously to the Observer’s publications. By sharing in a staff-wide pay freeze, they helped us adjust to a 10 percent decline in advertising sales last year. Just in the last two months, however, sales for the monthly Ann Arbor Observer have dropped another 20 percent.” [Source]

When The Chronicle came across a notice that the Ann Arbor PTO Thrift Shop was facing some challenges, we caught AATA bus No. 6 to South Industrial’s Resale Row to get the details.

Susan Soth, the store’s manager, said that donations of clothes, housewares and other items are down 50% since early December, compared to a year ago. And though sales had been going gangbusters earlier in 2008, since early December they’ve been flat or slightly down. On Sundays, for example, they’d generally bring in more than $1,000 – recently sales have been closer to $800. The winter season is typically a slower time of year, Soth said, but “it’s never been this slow, and we’re not alone.” [Full Story]

In the continuing saga that is the U.S. automobile industry, we got introduced to a new character in the Chrysler soap opera. Just 15 months after Chrysler’s bitter divorce from Teutonic spouse Daimler AG, it has taken on a new partner: the tall, dark and very Italian automaker Fiat SpA.

Fresh with $4 billion in federal loans and in line to receive another $3 billion, Chrysler has the critics wagging their fingers at this new union like a group of English church ladies passing judgment on the town widow dating just after her spouse expired and her life insurance kicked in. (For a picture of what an English church lady looks like, Google U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J.) [Full Story]

On Thursday morning, when The Chronicle used a front-door exploit on Arbor Networks’ State Street offices (i.e., went to visit the company), Jose Nazario made his computer screen display a steady vertical scroll of numerical strings separated with periods, one string per line, each in formats like 99.999.999.999.

The strings were recognizable as IP addresses (the numerical identification of a machine connected to the internet), but they were flying past fast enough that it wasn’t possible to visually track an individual number from the bottom of the screen to the top. That’s not surprising at  6.1 million lines per hour.

But who,  exactly, is Jose Nazario, and what’s he doing with screen-upon-screen full of IP addresses?

Is this actually the work of some mysterious cabal? Why yes, it actually is – even if “mysterious” overstates the case a little, given that the work, underway a couple of months prior, was announced on Feb. 12. [Full Story]

HealthMedia, says Ted Dacko, is “a company that shouldn’t be here.”

Just a few years ago, the Ann Arbor firm was left for dead. They had 85 employees, a burn rate of $685,000 a month, and very little revenue. Venture capital funding had dried up. Dacko was working there as vice president of sales and marketing when the previous CEO quit – two weeks before the firm would literally run out of money.

The board asked Dacko if he wanted the job. If he took it, he had two choices: Make a go of it, or lock the doors.

If you know the rest of the story, you know why Dacko was honored Thursday night with the New Enterprise Forum‘s Entrepreneur of the Year award. [Full Story]

The Masonic Temple on West Liberty seems an unlikely place to find a food entrepreneur, but when The Chronicle arrived there one Tuesday morning earlier this month, Mary Wessel Walker was already aproned and baking at the commercial kitchen there.

“I’m experimenting a lot with recipes I haven’t tried in large quantities,” she says, opening a jar of honey that had crystallized from the cold. Those large quantities are for her customers –  eight families who’ve signed up to buy a weekly amount of baked goods from CFK Bakery, Wessel Walker’s newest venture. [Full Story]

Since The Chronicle launched last fall, we’ve been covering the monthly meetings of the Ann Arbor Public Art Commission. At that first meeting we attended in October, the group discussed a project to take inventory of all the public art in the city – the idea is to create a database that can eventually be accessed by the public, giving details of where each piece of art is located, who the artist is, and any other relevant information.

Separately, we were later contacted by a Chronicle reader who said she’d like to see a series about public art in the city – essentially, the same kind of thing that AAPAC is compiling. So until their project is online, The Chronicle will be taking up our reader’s request in an occasional look at this city’s public art. In our definition, we’ll look at art on public and private buildings, as long as it’s visible to the public. We’re starting with something that’s connected to the field of journalism: the Art Deco reliefs on the Ann Arbor News building. [Full Story]

“It’s just so sad,” Doreen Collins told The Chronicle on Tuesday morning, standing in the front room of Dream On Futon. “I love this building. I love being on this corner. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like not to have this to come to every day.”

Doreen and John Collins opened Dream On Futon 15 years ago at the southeast corner of Liberty and Ashley. Last Friday, Doreen put up large “Store Closing” signs, and plans to shut down the business at the end of March. She said they just couldn’t pay their bills anymore – the monthly heating bill is around $400 – and they haven’t been paying themselves salaries for a while. [Full Story]

This fall and winter Shaman Drum Bookshop went into a steep financial decline. Textbook sales declined $510K from last year. We managed to cut our payroll and other operating expenses by $80K, but that didn’t begin to cover our losses.

There was some good news. Our trade (general interest) book sales on the first floor were actually up in December from last year by 10%, which is extraordinary given what many other retailers were reporting. And trades sales in January were up 15%. Still, this hardly compensates for our losses in textbook sales.

The evaporation of our position has been astonishingly swift. We had been holding relatively even financially until September. Suddenly we’ve moved into the red.

I sort of saw this coming. [Full Story]

At its Thursday meeting, Ann Arbor’s historic district commission gave approval for the demolition of a service station at Second & West Liberty streets.

At its next meeting in March, the HDC will consider whether to give permission to proceed in demolishing two houses next door to the service station.

The permission for demolition was sought by Morningside Ann Arbor LLC, which developed the Liberty Lofts residential project in the former Eaton factory on the same block. Morningside’s reasons for seeking permission to demolish the three structures are related to another historic structure on the block: the former greenhouse space adjoining Liberty Lofts, which runs along First Street and the railroad tracks.

In order to market the former greenhouse space to retail tenants as having potential for more parking than the current 54 spaces, Morningside wants the option of expanding parking in the area where the three structures currently stand. [Full Story]

Occasionally, we like to remind readers of the reason The Ann Arbor Chronicle is able to keep publishing: Advertisers have invested their dollars in ads that appear in the sidebars of the site. So every once in a while we’ll highlight those advertisers here in the center column. [Full Story]

Marlena Studer sports a moniker that sounds like she might have a career promoting Piesporter or Lowenbrau. But after spending 10 years in academia with a sociology PhD, the Ann Arbor transplant became a wine entrepreneur, creating and importing the Solterra label of Chilean wines since the 2001 vintage.

Last football season, it was difficult to miss the banners, store displays and tailgate parties all over Ann Arbor to promote Bo Merlot, the wine named for legendary Michigan football coach Glenn “Bo” Schembechler. Studer quarterbacks the diverse team that runs the project, which includes Bo’s widow, Cathy, local wine distributor Doug Wanty, sportscaster Jim Brandstatter, and Dr. Kim Eagle, director of UM’s Cardiovascular Institute, which receives a $2 donation from each bottle sold.

Around the same time, I found myself temporarily banished from Studer’s friends list after I called Bo Merlot a “gimmick wine” in a web article. So when we recently sat down to talk, picking that scab seemed like an optimal place to start. Here’s how things went. [Full Story]

Bill and Matt Ransom clearly are experts and take their work seriously, but there was plenty of good-natured ribbing between the father and son when The Chronicle peeked into their cloistered workspace on the 8th floor elevator lobby of the University of Michigan Hospital. When Matt poked his father with a tape measure while Bill was slathering tile mud on the wall – Bill just kept on working.

The Ransoms were installing an 8×10-foot mural designed by Motawi Tileworks, one of 14 “Tile Quilts” – each one unique – that the hospital has commissioned from Motawi since 2005. It’s a project that started out small but has now become a signature part of the building, and a kind of artful wayfinding system for patients and visitors.

The Chronicle heard about the recent installations at an Ann Arbor Public Art Commission meeting, when commissioner Elaine Sims reported to the group that another set of murals was going up in January. Sims is director of the Gifts of Art program at the University of Michigan Health System, which is responsible for the project. [Full Story]

Even in down economic times, there are opportunities – I’m seeing this in my work with the local food, agriculture and natural resources sectors. In fact, in some cases the economy that is hurting so many of us is making it possible for new businesses to find surplus equipment and commercial real estate at incredible discounts relative to prices of just a couple of years ago. [Full Story]

The update this month from The Ann Arbor Chronicle addresses a housekeeping tweak to the Tip Jar, some reflections on the Meeting Watch section, and a few remarks on bicycling as a transportation option for reporters. [Full Story]

The Chronicle arrived midway through Thursday’s day-long Local Food Summit 2009, and found evidence of the morning’s work plastered all over the walls of the Matthaei Botanical Gardens conference room: Colorful sticky notes on butcher paper, categorized by topics like “Food policy/legislation,” “Resources for young/new farmers,” “Distribution,” “Heritage” and “Community Self Reliance.”

Each note listed a resource, idea or goal, and together represented hundreds of ways to strengthen and expand this region’s local food system. About 120 people had gathered to focus on that topic, and organizers hope the momentum from Thursday’s event will transform the way our community thinks about food, and in turn transform the health of residents and our local economy. [Full Story]