A place is more than a mark on a map. These marks denote places called Ann Arbor (green), New Orleans (blue) and New York (pink).

The familiar part of the news includes severe staff reductions at the Times-Picayune and a shift in focus to online delivery, cutting back its printed edition to three days a week.

David Carr of the New York Times reported that changes at the Times-Picayune apparently would be modeled after the transformation in Ann Arbor. The Newhouse family – whose media holdings include the publications in Ann Arbor and New Orleans, among dozens of others nationwide – had made Ann Arbor its testbed for this approach in 2009.

Residents of New Orleans have my deepest sympathies.

The decisions about the Times-Picayune are disturbing, even if considered independently of other Newhouse operations. But especially disturbing is the idea that AnnArbor.com might serve as a model for anything.

The news from New Orleans coincided with an ultimately successful effort by The Ann Arbor Chronicle to push AnnArbor.com to correct a shockingly flawed analysis related to fire protection that had been originally reported by Ryan Stanton back in May of 2011. Within days of publication last year, Chronicle editor Dave Askins alerted Stanton to the likely source of the factual errors in Stanton’s piece.

Askins correctly analyzed the Ann Arbor fire department’s reports that Stanton had misinterpreted, and soon after that The Chronicle published that analysis. It wasn’t until this week, though, that AnnArbor.com’s “chief content officer,” Tony Dearing, wrote a column acknowledging the fact that the response times reported by Stanton were inaccurate. But Dearing’s accounting of AnnArbor.com’s errors is misleading and incomplete – in part because it fails to take responsibility for obvious reporting mistakes, blaming sources instead.

In that respect, Dearing’s column continues a pattern of disingenuous communication by AnnArbor.com with the community it purports to serve.

I realize there’s a certain etiquette I’m violating in calling out the leadership of another publication in this way. What I hear on a regular basis about the community’s perception of the quality of reporting and editorial oversight at AnnArbor.com ranges from idle snark to complete outrage. But our Midwestern culture exerts a firm pressure to make nice and get along. And for some community members, a certain fatigue has set in, along with a sense that it’s not worth the energy to rehash these things – it’s time to move on. To some extent I actually agree with that. It would be nice to move on.

But a polite culture and need to look forward do not justify turning away from some real problems with AnnArbor.com’s basic approach to community service. That’s especially true as the Newhouses roll out the Ann Arbor model in other markets.

What’s more, given the marketing resources of AnnArbor.com’s New York-based owners, there’s a risk that a funhouse-mirror version of reality will become accepted as accurate, and could inappropriately influence public policy in a way that causes long-term damage to this community. That’s unacceptable.

In this column, I’ll explain how the fire protection saga unfolded, what it reflects about AnnArbor.com and the state of traditional media, and the importance of being grounded in the community you cover.

Fire Safety: A Story of Flawed Reporting

Before I launch into the fire department response time analysis, let me acknowledge that not every reader will have the stomach for this level of detail. If you’d rather not read about “notify times” and “en route times,” or what it finally took to convince AnnArbor.com that its initial reporting might have been inaccurate, then skip to the next section.

The story, which Dearing finally acknowledged last week was in error, was written by Ryan Stanton and published in May of last year – just before the Ann Arbor city council considered an annual budget that called for a reduction in firefighter positions. The story served the basic editorial stance of AnnArbor.com: By decreasing fire department budget resources, the Ann Arbor city council was impeding firefighters’ ability to cover the distance between their stations and the scenes of major fires in a timely fashion.

To support that narrative, Stanton presented his readers with travel times for four major fires that he claimed exceeded the national travel time standard of four minutes for a first-arriving company.

Certainly, if a fire department typically records travel times that exceed the national standard, it indicates that the number of staffed fire stations in a geographic area is not sufficient. So the travel time is an appropriate place to focus for an investigative enterprise that seeks to answer the question: Are fire department resources adequate?

To start with a general observation, Stanton’s story was unfortunately vague with respect to its terminology – using “response time” instead of “travel time.” He did not explain explicitly to readers that “response time,” as used throughout his story, was meant specifically to refer to the “travel time” – the time interval from the station to the fire scene. But given the story’s use of the “travel time” standard of four minutes, it’s evident that Stanton’s use of “response time” throughout his piece is, in fact, a reference to travel time.

At a city council meeting, a day after publication of that story, Barnett Jones – who then served as the city’s chief of safety services – publicly called out Stanton for mistakes in the story, including inaccurately-calculated response times. In a scolding email that Stanton subsequently sent to Jones, justifying his story’s report of response times, it’s also clear that the intent of Stanton’s story was to present travel times to readers.

Tony Dearing also admitted in a May 2, 2012 meeting with Chronicle editor Dave Askins that the intent of Stanton’s story was to calculate and present travel times to readers. That’s a point of common ground, actually – the idea that a relevant data point for measuring the adequacy of a fire department’s resources is the “travel time.”

After hearing Jones’ remarks at the May 16, 2011 city council meeting, that same evening Askins gave a cursory review to the records that Stanton used to write his story. He then emailed Stanton, also that same evening, pointing out to Stanton the likely source of his error.

To understand the significance of that emailed message, it’s important first to understand the difference between a time point – like “en route time” or “notify time” – and a time interval, like “travel time.” It’s time points, not intervals, that are recorded in fire department records. To get an interval from the fire department records, you have to do a calculation – in this case, starting from the time point recorded as “arrival time” – the time a fire truck arrived on the scene.

How do you calculate the travel time interval? The plain language of the National Fire Protection Association standards would lead a reader to conclude that it’s the “en route time” that should be subtracted from “arrival time” to calculate “travel time.” But in his email to Jones, Stanton justified the same conclusion in a different way – by citing an unnamed authority from Massachusetts: “I calculated the response times based on how an NFPA representative in Massachusetts told me I should calculate them, which is to clock the 4-minute travel time starting from the first vehicle’s ‘en route’ time.”

And to be fair to Stanton, all other things being equal, you should be able to look at some city’s fire department reports, pick out the “arrival time” and the “en route time,” perform the clock arithmetic and get an accurate travel time. Of course, that assumes the “en route times” in the reports are accurate.

But even at first glance, it’s evident that the Ann Arbor fire department reports show “en route times” that are likely inaccurate. That’s because they’re recorded as identical, down to the second, with another time point recorded as “notify time” – the time the alarm was given.

Ann Arbor fire department report for Sept. 16, 2010 fire reporting, illustrating the identical time point recordings for "notify time" and "en route time."

From the fire department reports, it’s not hard to reach at least a tentative conclusion that the fire department is only interested in the sum of the two intervals, which would be possible to calculate if it’s the “notify time” that’s accurate. That’s what Askins pointed out to Stanton in the email he sent the same evening as the May 16, 2011 council meeting:

In the AAFD reports, the times recorded for “enroute time” and “notify time” are identical. That may be the source of the confusion. I’d guess that “notify time” is accurate and filled in from call-center information, and that “enroute time” is just systematically copied from “notify time” into that slot.

Stanton’s emailed reply to Askins blamed Stanton’s sources:

If that’s the case, their reports are wrong and they’re blaming me? They knew I was calculating response times, and they give me bad data? How unfortunate.

I won’t venture to speculate what the fire department knew about Stanton’s reporting or intentions. But it’s clear that before he wrote the story, Stanton did not ask anyone locally a question that yielded an accurate description of the information contained in Ann Arbor fire department reports. Instead, he asked a question of someone in a place called Massachusetts.

The right question to ask of the local Ann Arbor fire department would have been: Which one of these two time points is accurate, and what is the actual value of the other time point? That way, you could calculate a “turnout time” interval for the fires as well as a “travel time.” The “turnout time” is the interval between the alarm and the start of the travel time interval. That’s an important interval, because it measures how quickly firefighters can get into their gear and onto their trucks. But at their May 2, 2012 meeting, Dearing admitted to Askins that AnnArbor.com had not attempted to calculate a “turnout time” for any of the fires.

For one of the fires that AnnArbor.com tried to analyze, the answer was already included in a screen shot taken from the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) screen, which was among the materials provided by AAFD to Stanton for his story. That screenshot showed different times for the CAD analogs of “notify time” and “en route time” – which the AAFD reports systematically show as identical. But Stanton apparently did not incorporate the information from that screen shot into his reporting.

Not long after initial publication of Stanton’s article, AnnArbor.com corrected the time for the one fire that had included a CAD screen shot. The note of correction, however, claimed it was “based on new information provided to AnnArbor.com.” When Askins confronted Dearing at their May 2, 2012 meeting about the disingenuousness of calling the CAD screen shot “new information,” Dearing insisted that AAFD had provided a new, corrected report to AnnArbor.com – and that AnnArbor.com’s correction was based only on that new AAFD report. When Askins pointed out that the corrected “travel time” in Stanton’s story matched exactly the time indicated in the CAD screenshot, Dearing admitted that it did – but he still insisted that the correction was based only on the “new information.”

Calling that a case of “new information” masks Stanton’s failure to notice existing information, and it’s a misleading accounting of the admitted error. But it gets worse, partly because that’s where AnnArbor.com staff apparently stopped working as reporters. If you got one fire wrong, what about the three others?

It was only after a series of emails and a voicemail to Dearing that he finally agreed recently to meet with Askins. Among the facts that Askins had suggested Dearing review with Stanton was basic geographic information about the fires. In fact, that geographic information was included in a spreadsheet that Askins recently sent directly to Dearing, after publishing a link to it several months earlier as part of two different Chronicle reports. The spreadsheet contains CAD data for all four fires that AnnArbor.com tried to analyze – data The Chronicle was able to obtain through unofficial channels, because we continued to report on this topic. That CAD data allowed us to have confidence in our published conclusion about the four fires:

The time interval that seemed much longer than it should be (based on national standards), and that provides the greatest opportunity for improvement is the interval between the time a call comes to a station and the time a firetruck starts rolling to the scene (turnout time). That is to say, the other time interval – the travel time from fire station to fire scene – did not look like the place where the AAFD could improve most.

Why did Askins want Dearing to take a look at geography here? It’s not just because a “sense of place” is generally important for journalists serving a community. It’s because when it comes to calculating travel times, it’s an obvious question to ask: What was the distance traveled, and is it plausible that a fire engine would take that long to get there?

Fire scene locations plotted on a map used by Ann Arbor's fire department to model travel times for fire department response. The two fire scenes are significantly inside the green area that indicates a four-minute travel time, but AnnArbor.com's reporter did not question the accuracy of the travel times he calculated for those fires. He calculated both times inaccurately to be over four minutes. Four minutes is the national standard.

Yet at their meeting, Dearing told Askins that Stanton’s initial reporting had not considered geography.

Dearing also admitted that he himself had up to that point not considered the travel distance – even while claiming that he’d reviewed everything in detail, both with Stanton and with fire chief Chuck Hubbard.

Only when Askins showed Dearing where the fire scenes were on a map in relation to the fire stations did Dearing finally appear to take seriously the possibility that he and Stanton had been wrong about travel times all along.

At their recent meeting, Dearing finally admitted the obvious to Askins – that no, it was not really plausible that a fire truck would take 4 minutes and 9 seconds to travel roughly half a mile in the middle of the night. Also not plausible is that a fire truck would take 6 minutes and 15 seconds to travel roughly 1.1 miles, in the early morning hours when no traffic would be anticipated. Dearing told Askins: “You’ve given me more work to do.” It’s work Askins had already done.

To make any claim of being honest and forthright with his readers, Dearing’s column admitting the errors needed to include the geography of those fire responses – but Dearing’s column is silent on that subject. Including the geography would have made it clear not just that AnnArbor.com got the travel times wrong, but that the reporter and editor had no one to blame but themselves for getting those times wrong.

Instead, what Dearing’s column offered his readers was the same kind of disingenuous explanation that AnnArbor.com published with the initial correction of Stanton’s story – that there was “additional information” and that they “were told” something that turned out not to be accurate. From Dearing’s column:

Since AnnArbor.com first reported last year that the department was struggling to meet response time standards, a great deal of additional information is now available, and based on that information, we owe the community a more complete and accurate analysis of this issue than we have offered to this point. … Our original reporting was based on reports supplied to us by the city, which listed en route times. We were told that en route times represented travel times.

This “additional information” was already available – and that’s why The Chronicle had already published it, starting with the city council meeting report published within days of Stanton’s initial story, followed with later analyses.

An Aside: Some Thoughts About Awards

It’s worth noting that Stanton’s article about fire safety won a first-place award from the Michigan Associated Press for investigative reporting. And yes, I spewed my coffee when I heard about that.

Though the Pulitzers might be the most notable exception, journalism awards can be a rather incestuous affair. For the Michigan Associated Press, for example, only publications that pay to be members of the AP are eligible for the awards.

A Michigan AP award I won a few years ago. I adorned it with some sort of bone, to make it into a more interesting trophy.

I speak here from my experience as a contest judge during my tenure at the Ann Arbor News. In many contests, submissions are shipped off to judges in another market for review. The judges are typically overworked editors who have scant time to spare on this task.

It’s difficult to get a sense of an article that lands in your lap without context. There might be a cover letter with some explanation provided, but of course those are submitted by the organization hoping to win an award. Frankly, in many cases there’s little to distinguish one entry from another – and I’m sure that was the case for many of the awards that my colleagues and I won while working at The News.

Certainly there’s no time or inclination to vet the award submissions for accuracy, though it’s typically required that any correction made on an article should be noted in the submission materials. So the process relies on the integrity of each publication to be forthright about the quality of its submissions.

In this case, given that Dearing’s column outlining problems with the analysis wasn’t published until well after the awards were handed out, there’s no doubt that the judges were unaware of that full context.

We’ve asked AP’s regional bureau chief if Michigan AP will be reviewing its award to the fire response story, but haven’t received a reply. I’m not holding my breath – AnnArbor.com is a member, and The Ann Arbor Chronicle is not.

New Model of Doing Business?

I should pause here to note that my criticism of AnnArbor.com is not based on some self-righteous belief that if a mistake is made it must be because the reporter wasn’t conscientious. It’s not possible to do this job – or any job – without error. Even the most meticulous, conscientious reporter will screw up from time to time. We make our own share of mistakes. Corrected Chronicle errors are easy to spot in the text – because “deleted material” is denoted with red strike-through text and added material is denoted with blue text. The result is not pretty. Believe me, it’s not fun to make such an ostentatious accounting of our mistakes, but we do.

AnnArbor.com’s approach to errors is different. Dearing has simply added a note to the top of Stanton’s article. The errors that remain in the text are apparently left to readers to sort out for themselves.

AnnArbor.com’s approach to correcting Stanton’s story is part of an ongoing pattern – failing to be forthright with the community. It’s a pattern that I’ve noted previously.

In a March 13, 2011 column “History Repeats at AnnArbor.com,” I described how some news about a round of layoffs at AnnArbor.com had not been shared with the Ann Arbor community. The layoffs were eventually acknowledged, after a reader posted a question about the dismissals a few days after the fact, on a section of the AnnArbor.com website called the Community Wall. The response was a two-paragraph comment from Dearing that started off with the corporate-speak of “personnel issues are an internal matter and we don’t discuss them publicly…” He continued by acknowledging that ”I can confirm that we reorganized our newsroom this week to put our focus more squarely on local news coverage.”

As I wrote at the time, his explanation was insulting – who on earth would view cuts to local reporting staff as a way to focus on local news coverage? It was also evocative of a column written by former Ann Arbor News editor Ed Petykiewicz in December 2008, a few months after we launched The Chronicle. In the wake of buyouts at the newspaper and a shrinking staff, Petykiewicz claimed that the newspaper would be focusing more on local content – and just four months later, the announcement came that the News would close. Perhaps Dearing and Petykiewicz were both looking at the world through a common Newhouse/funhouse mirror of reality – I don’t know.

The misrepresentation of basic reality is shown on the business side as well. When the Newhouse family closed the Ann Arbor News in 2009, the narrative relied crucially on the idea that the newly-formed business to replace the News was a “startup” like any other startup. No one in the community really bought that story, so there was no surprise or objection when the AnnArbor.com executive leadership subsequently accepted an award from the Ann Arbor Ypsilanti Regional Chamber of Commerce, honoring businesses that had been members for several decades.

An early marketing campaign for AnnArbor.com also tried to highlight longevity. Responding to criticism about the inexperience of their reporting staff – because many of the senior editors and reporters at the Ann Arbor News were not rehired by AnnArbor.com – the company took out billboards trumpeting the collective experience in journalism of its entire staff, measured by adding up each employee’s years of experience. Since then, turnover has been frequent. Many of the original staff are no longer there, including most of the initial key hires, and the experience level of reporters has continued to drop.

That means even fewer people remain at AnnArbor.com who have deep connections to the community, with a sense of history and context. But here’s the thing: It’s easier to operate under those conditions when these qualities don’t really matter.

What does matter in the age of “churnalism” is the ability to quickly push out spot news, rewrites of press releases, rewrites of other publication’s articles, “instant analysis” – an oxymoron if there ever was one – and other fodder to drive site traffic, and in turn generate ad revenue.

Highlighting drama and conflict has always been a staple of mainstream media, and provocative, misleading headlines are nothing new. Some readers of AnnArbor.com like to grouse about the bottom-feeding nature of the comments left on articles, but in many cases the comments seem like simply an amped-up version of the stories themselves. When a publication trades on fomenting artificial controversy, is it really a surprise when the comments written there reflect the community’s lowest common denominator?

That kind of storytelling approach to journalism, which relies on identifying characters in conflict, comes with inherent dangers. In last month’s Chronicle milestone column, Dave Askins laid out the perils of that approach, and contrasted it with The Chronicle’s emphasis on description, analysis and explanation.

There are many problems with storytelling as a way to convey news and information, but chief among them is that the reader must rely on the integrity of the storyteller, because facts don’t play a prominent role. You rely on the writer having a deep understanding of the topic, its history and context – and a strong sense of place. Absent that integrity, all you’re left with is a hollow collection of words.

Implications for Community

So should AnnArbor.com be the “model” for the future of the New Orleans Times-Picayune? From my perspective and for much of the community, the AnnArbor.com model isn’t working well in Ann Arbor. I conveyed that sentiment to Steve Myers, managing editor of Poynter.org, for an article he wrote following the Times-Picayune announcement.

Ann Arbor is a community that’s relatively small, relatively wealthy, highly educated, with a high percentage of people who have access to the Internet. For those who don’t, there’s a strong library and school system to help pick up the slack.

These same conditions don’t exist in New Orleans.

A book has been circulating among local business and government leaders called “Economics of Place,” published by the Ann Arbor-based Michigan Municipal League. The ideas in it aren’t new, but they’ve been packaged in a way that seems to resonate with people who are looking to articulate what they like about where they live.

A newspaper – online or printed – can play a crucial role in reflecting and bolstering that sense of place, and in leading the community to an even better version of itself. But it can’t do that with a superficial, false understanding of the community it serves, or by misleading readers.

That’s true in Ann Arbor, in New Orleans – and anywhere else.

Mary Morgan is publisher and co-owner of The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Chronicle’s Sept. 2, 2008 launch – is an opportunity for either the publisher or the editor of The Chronicle to touch base with readers on topics related to this publication.

It’s also a time that we highlight, with gratitude, our local advertisers, and ask readers to consider subscribing voluntarily to The Chronicle to support our work.

Redline highlights are those AnnArbor.com staff whose names have disappeared from the staff roster.

I wrote about their decision at the time from a personal perspective. Even though I had left the News the previous year to co-found The Chronicle, it was still a place that employed many friends and colleagues I respected. Watching that organization get dismantled was emotional, for many reasons.

Although we began to hear about the layoffs on Thursday last week, we decided not to write immediately about that news. In part, we reasoned that it should be AnnArbor.com’s story to tell first, and I held out hope that executives at AnnArbor.com would be straightforward in letting the community know about their decision, and the rationale behind it.

I also hoped they would wrap into their coverage the news that three other key staff members – news director Amalie Nash, higher education reporter David Jesse and point person for reader interaction Stefanie Murray – had all been hired by the Detroit Free Press. All three left at the end of February. All had previously worked for many years at The Ann Arbor News, and had been initial hires at AnnArbor.com.

Considered separately, either the set of layoffs or the three departures would have had a significant impact on the organization. But with both events taking place within two weeks, it counts as the most dramatic personnel change since AnnArbor.com’s launch.

Community Wall “Reporting”

But the only “reporting” on the AnnArbor.com website – as of Sunday afternoon – was a brief post on Saturday by a reader called glacialerratic. The reader posted a comment on what AnnArbor.com calls its Community Wall, a place where anyone can post pretty much anything. It included a link to a Friday Michigan Radio report about the layoffs, which itself is scant on details.

It was this Community Wall post that prompted a response by Tony Dearing – the firm’s chief content officer, or what’s traditionally called an editor-in-chief – in the comment thread. Here’s what he wrote, in its entirety:

While personnel issues are an internal matter and we don’t discuss them publicly, I can confirm that we reorganized our newsroom this week to put our focus more squarely on local news coverage. As a new organization, we have tried a lot of things. Now that we are well into our second year, the community has told us very resoundingly that what it wants most from us is hard news coverage, particularly in the areas of government, education, police, courts, health, the environment, University of Michigan sports, and business. These areas of coverage account for all but a tiny percentage of our readership and revenue. Meanwhile, we also have put a lot of effort toward other things – including lifestyle topics like Passions and Pursuits, The Deuce, Homes and some areas of Entertainment coverage – that our community has shown much less interest in, and we are scaling back in those areas.

We have made tremendous progress since we launched, and we continue to be very happy with the growth we’re seeing in audience and revenue. But from the beginning, we said that we would be shaped by what the community wants, and the community wants us to focus more sharply on local news reporting. We have repositioned ourselves to throw our energy and resources into our local news coverage and that is how we will operate moving forward as we continue to grow.

That’s just insulting – to those employees who were laid off, to those shell-shocked employees who remain behind, and to the Ann Arbor community, which deserves better.

First off, a “personnel issue” is when your employee gets fired for looking at porn on a work computer. It doesn’t apply to the departure of more than a dozen people – whether they quit or were laid off. Their departure will fundamentally change what gets done at the publication, and how. The fact that most of these departures were from the newsroom has an even more direct impact on the publication. AnnArbor.com has marketed itself relentlessly over the past 18 months as being all about the community. It’s hard to trade in that currency while not being straightforward about decisions that readers actually care about – namely, how you’re reporting the news.

Dearing’s statement that they’ve reorganized is also specious. A look at the current staff directory shows no changes to the organization of the list. The only difference is the disappearance from the page of some people’s names who’ve been laid off.

To confirm exactly who’s missing, and what parts of the publication they worked for, we retrieved the Google cache of the staff page and “diffed” them out – those now missing from the page are highlighted in red: AnnArbor.com staff list highlighting departures. That list includes: Ed Vielmetti, the publication’s lead blogger; James Dickson, a general assignment reporter; photographer Lon Horwedel; two support staff for entertainment – Renee Tellez and Chrysta Cherrie; Pam Stout on the community desk; sports clerk Kaleb Roedel; and sales manager Lisa George.

If the idea of the “reorganization” is to focus more sharply on local news as Dearing contends, it’s not clear how eliminating a general assignment reporter (who in a traditional newsroom would fill in the gaps on local news) would serve that sharper focus. Perhaps even more puzzling is the decision to eliminate lead blogger Ed Vielmetti – whose name was the only one at AnnArbor.com that many members of the community even recognized.

Of those who are now missing, only the job of news director – formerly held by Amalie Nash, who’s now an assistant metro editor at the Detroit Free Press – is posted on the popular JournalismJobs.com employment website. The implication is that AnnArbor.com isn’t making other replacement hires at this point, though that’s unclear. Current K-12 education reporter Kyle Feldscher believes he will be covering David Jesse’s former University of Michigan beat only until a replacement hire is made.

Back to the Future

Dearing’s comment on the Community Wall was disturbingly evocative of a column written by former Ann Arbor News editor Ed Petykiewicz in December 2008, in the wake of buyouts at the newspaper and a shrinking staff. An excerpt [emphasis added]:

In the coming weeks, your News will begin to focus more on local people, local issues and local events.

Some of the changes include more stories about local government, increasingly local flavor in sections such as our Food pages and more columns from our staff.

Over time, we’ll add stories and columns by area residents, who will provide additional and varied views of our communities.

You’ll continue to find a mix of local, state and national news in your newspaper, but our ongoing evolution puts us on a decidedly local path that we’ve discussed for years. It’s what we do best. [.pdf of Petykiewicz's full column]

As it applies to local coverage, Dearing’s Wall comment sounds exactly like the doing-more-with-less motif in Petykiewicz’s piece.

In response to Petykiewicz, I wrote a column that asked a simple question: How can you provide more local content with fewer local reporters?

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.

For all the talk about how AnnArbor.com would be dramatically different from The Ann Arbor News in its interaction with the community, Dearing’s comments are all too familiar. We’re still left guessing.

Just a Business?

In my weekly interview on Lucy Ann Lance’s Saturday radio show this past Saturday, she asked why AnnArbor.com is different than any other private business. Why should a news publication be obligated to disclose their management decisions, any more than, say, Tios or Google?

I wasn’t very articulate in my response to Lucy Ann, so I’ll give it another shot here. There is absolutely a difference between a publicly traded company, where certain disclosures are required by law, and a private business like Advance Publications, a privately held Newhouse family company that owns AnnArbor.com. For private companies, there are no legal obligations to disclose internal staffing changes or to release financial information.

But a news publication, I believe, should be held to different standards – especially one like AnnArbor.com, that has tried so desperately to be embraced by the community. If your stated editorial mission is to respond to the community and give readers what they want, you ignore at your own peril some basic communication about these radical staff changes – communication that thus far has been almost completely lacking.

Most readers aren’t idiots. It doesn’t serve your interests well to treat all of them as if they were.

If you accept the premise that readers aren’t idiots, then you should trust that they’ll be well aware of the economic climate, and understand the business constraints at play. While I disagree with many of the decisions made by Steve Newhouse and other executives concerning first The Ann Arbor News and now AnnArbor.com, I certainly understand what it’s like to operate a business in this economy. Since we launched The Ann Arbor Chronicle in September 2008, I have new appreciation for the challenge of managing cash flow – it’s a worry for me every single day.

As a small online-only publication that focuses on coverage of local government and civic affairs, The Chronicle doesn’t have the corporate resources to buy billboard ads or rent two floors of a downtown office building or hire more than two dozen people to staff its advertising department, as AnnArbor.com has. Our plan was to start modestly, stay true to our mission, and hopefully grow our revenues steadily – through voluntary reader subscriptions and local advertising, including many businesses and institutions that support us mainly because they believe in what we do.

We didn’t anticipate the incredible upheaval caused by the closing of The Ann Arbor News, which has made the market significantly more competitive, and confusing for readers and advertisers alike. I’m proud that we’ve been able to establish a reputation for solid, in-depth coverage of the workings of local government, and I hope we continue to have the wherewithal to support our unique journalistic venture, and to grow.

AnnArbor.com has a more mainstream business model, one that seems cast from the same mold as traditional newspapers. It relies on driving traffic to its website – a variation of the old “If it bleeds, it leads” approach to gaining readers, or what’s known these days as “churnalism.” Their new weekly “Best Of” poll – asking readers to vote for different categories, like best brewpub or best grocery store – is designed to achieve the same goal. Advertisers are “partners” – not because they support the publication’s journalism, but because AnnArbor.com works with them to develop ad campaigns like the Groupon-esque “Real Deal.”

For all of that energy put into the advertising and marketing end of the business, the news of last week’s layoffs indicates that AnnArbor.com isn’t meeting its revenue or profit goals. The company hasn’t disclosed what those targets are – I wouldn’t expect them to; we don’t disclose details of our financial performance, either. But I would expect a bit more candor about their general outlook, starting with more openness about their staff changes.

In September of 2009, I participated in a panel discussion at the Kerrytown BookFest with Dearing and others, talking about the future of local media. When pressed about what kind of timeline the new AnnArbor.com would have to prove its financial viability to its owners, Dearing indicated some urgency – he ventured that they’d have about two years from their launch in July 2009 to prove the viability of the model.

If that timeline holds, then this recent retooling could reflect an effort to reduce expenses before the start of the next financial quarter on April 1 – the final quarter they’ll have on the books for an evaluation at their two-year anniversary mark.

I don’t believe the Newhouses will just give up this market – despite the struggles of AnnArbor.com, they still hold essentially a monopoly in the state’s most stable, affluent community.

But this community has been blindsided by their business decisions in the past, and it still stings. Whatever the future holds for them, they owe it to the residents of Ann Arbor to be upfront about what’s coming. Or, in this case, what’s already been done.

About the writer: Mary Morgan is publisher and co-founder of The Ann Arbor Chronicle, which launched in September 2008. She previously worked for The Ann Arbor News for 12 years, where her positions included opinion editor and business editor.

David Canter, former head of Pfizer's Ann Arbor research campus, is now director of healthcare research at UM's William Davidson Institute.

An eclectic mix of speakers at Wednesday’s Morning Edition breakfast talked about healthcare in developing countries, commercials promoting tourism in Michigan, computer security, the upcoming Ann Arbor Restaurant Week and an update on the venture that will replace the Ann Arbor News.

Russ Collins, the event’s emcee and executive director of the Michigan Theater, also noted that they were now installing a state-of-the-art 3D projector, just in time for the May 29 opening of Disney-Pixar’s animated film “Up” – which features, he noted, “a hyperactive nine-year-old named Russell.”

David Canter, former head of Pfizer’s Ann Arbor research campus, kicked things off with comments about the University of Michigan’s acquisition of that site.

Canter is now director of healthcare at UM’s William Davidson Institute, but for many years he led the local research operations for Pfizer. The 174-acre site on Ann Arbor’s north side was acquired in pieces over the past four decades, he noted, but much of it, ironically, was part of UM’s north campus over 50 years ago.

When Pfizer decided to close its local research operations and pull out of Ann Arbor, the firm received a lot of inquiries from people who wanted to buy little pieces of the property, Canter said. But anyone who wanted to acquire the entire site also wanted to fill it with a big tenant – and the only big tenant in town is the university, he said. Having UM buy the property in its entirety “is by far the neatest solution,” Canter said. ”The tax problem, I just ignore it – but we’re going to have to deal with it,” referring to the fact that UM’s purchase will take the property off the tax rolls. Pfizer had been the city’s largest taxpayer. It’s better by far to have the site full of people and activity than to have it shuttered, he said. The site is “rich with potential,” but it’s now up to the university to capitalize on the purchase. It presents an amazing opportunity to develop public/private partnerships there, he said.

Canter also spoke of his work with the William Davidson Institute, where he’s developing ways to bring management and organizational expertise to healthcare systems, especially in emerging countries. This work stems in part from the six months he spent in Rwanda as a Pfizer Global Health Fellow, working with Columbia University’s Access Project. “I came back from Rwanda a different person,” he said.

Most people assume that healthcare is mostly linked to science, but in fact about half of its success hinges on the ability to lead, organize and manage, Canter said, and that’s the focus of his work. He gave an example of working with a clinic in Rwanda and asking them what their budget was for hiring. “What’s a budget?” they asked. It turns out they’d been awarded money that would cover the hiring of additional nursing staff, but since they didn’t have the funds in hand, they weren’t willing to go ahead and make the hires. Effective organization and management can lead to saving as many children’s lives as any other major medical intervention, he said.

Dave Lorenz, Travel Michigan: Next up was Dave Lorenz, managing director of PR for Travel Michigan, the branch of the Michigan Economic Development Corp. that’s focused on tourism. They’re part of the MEDC because “it’s all about jobs,” he said. They developed the Pure Michigan campaign to capture the essence of the state and attract tourists – Lorenz joked that they rejected several other slogans, including one he proposed: “Michigan – At Least We’re Not Indiana.”

Actor Jeff Daniels was doing spots focused on attracting businesses to the state, so they decided to approach comedian Tim Allen, another Michigan native and someone who’s known for his voice work in animated films. Allen, whose brother teaches high school in Muskegon and who vacations in the state every year, agreed to do the work at a greatly reduced cost, Lorenz said. With that, Lorenz played five short commercials from the campaign that are airing nationwide – you can view them on the Pure Michigan website.

Yan Ness, Online Tech: Collins ribbed Ness for liking Michigan’s climate. Why? Because it’s often cold, and that gives firms here a competitive advantage if they operate data centers and need to keep thousands of computer servers cool. Ness said the biggest cost for operating computers on any scale is the energy required for powering and cooling.

But the biggest challenge, he said, is security. The several thousand servers that Online Tech manages receive hundreds of attacks by hackers each day, trying to gain access to the machines and the data they contain. The main culprits now are hackers backed by governments that are training to get control of the nation’s electric grid. “It’s a real issue,” he said. Ness then asked a series of questions about the passwords that audience members used – including how many people use the name of their dog in their password. The main way that computer systems are compromised is by people simply divulging too much information, he said – just as the audience had done by responding to his questions. Finally, he cautioned people not to write down their passwords – Post-It notes are the No. 1 cause of security breeches.

James Macdonald, owner of Bella Ciao Restaurant, is promoting the Main Street area's Ann Arbor Restaurant Week from June 14-19.

James Macdonald, Bella Ciao Restaurant: Macdonald is the driver behind the upcoming Ann Arbor Restaurant Week, an idea he championed after seeing a similar promotion in San Francisco. From June 14-19, nearly two dozen restaurants in the Main Street area will offer special one-price dining: $12 for lunch, $25 for dinner. Parking isn’t a problem after 6 p.m., he said, and he encouraged people to come downtown and try new restaurants. Soft shell crabs will be in season, he said, so at Bella Ciao they’ll offer that as an entree. You might also try an appetizer of fresh asparagus and arugula with champagne vinaigrette and puff pastry with strawberries and rhubarb. “You’ll just die,” he said, “and these are all low calorie.”

Macdonald said they couldn’t persuade local restaurants to offer the specials for an entire week, but only from Sunday through Friday. “How dumb is that?” he quipped, adding that Bella Ciao is extending its special pricing through Saturday of that week.

Laurel Champion, AnnArbor.com: Collins noted that Champion is the first and last female publisher of the Ann Arbor News – the newspaper will publish its last edition on Thursday, July 23. In its place, Advance Publications – which owns the News – is starting a new, primarily online venture called AnnArbor.com. Champion is executive vice president for that entity, and said she was pleased that the owners recognized how special Ann Arbor is and that they’re willing to invest in this market.

She assured the crowd that they aren’t abandoning local journalism, and that “content is king.” They’ll also publish two print editions each week, on Thursday and Sunday, plus a “total market coverage” edition that will be delivered weekly to non-subscribers. The Sunday paper, which will be published for the first time on July 26, will look a lot like a traditional newspaper, she said. They’re still figuring out what the Thursday edition will include, but it will likely contain hard news as well as entertainment and sports information leading into the weekend. They’re planning to launch their online content during the week prior to July 23.

[Later in the day, Tony Dearing – chief content director for AnnArbor.com – gave more details at a talk hosted by the LA2M group at Conor O'Neill's. He said they plan to hire between 30-35 employees focused on news coverage, plus freelance staff. In addition to coverage of topics like local government, education, crime, business, sports and entertainment, other features of the site include a section called The Deuce, with content aimed at people in their teens, 20s and early 30s, and a focus on neighborhoods like the Old West Side and Kerrytown. He said they're also forming a local advisory group, which he'll announced in the coming week. Slides of his presentation are here.]

Morning Edition is a monthly event hosted by the Ann Arbor Area Chamber of Commerce and held at Weber’s Inn on Jackson Road.