The Purple Rose Theatre – founded by the actor Jeff Daniels, who lives in the area – is a nonprofit professional theater located in downtown Chelsea. The resolution of appreciation cites several contributions, including the theater’s weekly Wednesday matinee held for the community, and its partnerships with local businesses and entities like the Chelsea District Library. [.pdf Purple Rose Theatre resolution]

Chelsea Lanes, a bowling alley owned by Eddie Greenleaf III and located at 1180 S. Main, was commended for its support of the SRSLY community coalition, and for hosting many community events and fundraisers. [.pdf of Chelsea Lanes resolution]

The resolutions noted that Chelsea Lanes received the Chelsea Area Chamber of Commerce’s 2012 Small Business Award, while Purple Rose Theatre received the chamber’s 2012 Large Business Leadership Award.

No one from either organization attended the Feb. 20 meeting, and there was no discussion on these items.

This brief was filed from the boardroom of the county administration building at 220 N. Main. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

The three-way accord had been approved by the council on May 2, 2011. The agreement – an interagency agreement for collaborative technology and services (IACTS) – is meant to provide a way to procure and maintain common technology platforms and services centrally.

The modification to the agreement, approved by the city council on Feb. 4, allows for adding other entities into the agreement in a more streamlined way, by “giving each founding member the ability to approve a process to enable an administrative individual to sign on behalf of that founding member for purposes of this adding new participants.” Other members could thus be added without modifying the agreement itself. With the amendment, Ann Arbor’s process for adding a new participant would include simply the approval of the city administrator on recommendation of the IT director and chief financial officer.

According to city of Ann Arbor IT director Dan Rainey, responding to an emailed query, one of the entities interested in participating in the IACTS is the Washtenaw Intermediate School District.

In May 2011 – when the Ann Arbor city council approved the IACTS with AATA and Washtenaw County – the council was also asked to consider the approval of an agreement with Washtenaw County for data storage services and for backup services. At the May 2011 council meeting, Rainey explained the nature of the shared storage and shared backup – there will be one machine at city hall and one at the city’s Wheeler Center.

The topic of backup and disaster data recovery issues was identified as one area of minor concern in the city’s most recent audit in late 2012. In chief financial officer Tom Crawford’s response to the auditor’s note on that topic, he outlines how the city uses a “separation of risks” approach and has always been able to backup and recover data in individual computing environments. Crawford’s written response also describes the city’s current work to improve its disaster recovery plan in terms of the IACTS: “Because of the nature of our interdependences, the information technology departments of the city of Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County and the AATA are collaborating on developing a common disaster recovery plan. The current state of the plan is that all parties know what is being backed up, where it is stored and that there is the ability to recover backed up data on a small number of servers.” [.pdf of revised auditor's letter] [.pdf of Crawford's Jan. 24, 2013 response]

Responding to an emailed query, Washtenaw County IT manager Andy Brush explained that certain IT services are already provided by Washtenaw County to various entities – like the city of Ypsilanti, Dexter’s fire department, and the 14B District Court – although they aren’t yet parties to the IACTS agreement.

The agreement between Ann Arbor and the city of Chelsea, also approved by the council on Feb. 4, dates back to 2011. The council agreed to extend the agreement, under which Chelsea will pay the city of Ann Arbor up to $55,614 for the following services: helpdesk, management of the city’s website, server hosting, data backup and recovery, overseeing IT contractors, project management, and representing the city of Chelsea in regional technology efforts and meetings.

This brief was filed from the city council’s chambers on the second floor of city hall, located at 301 E. Huron. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

The home page for Chelsea Update, a new online local news site.

As a journalist, Heather Newman is perhaps best known for the technology column she wrote at the Detroit Free Press. Though she left that newspaper last year for a job at the University of Michigan, the Chelsea area resident has found another way to use her journalism skills. This month, she launched an online news site called Chelsea Update, focused on news and information in the town just west of Ann Arbor. In an email interview, we asked Newman to tell us about her new venture.

What got you started down this road? As you were thinking about the possibility of starting this venture, what were the pros and cons in weighing whether you’d actually do it?

I’d been writing for newspapers for almost 20 years when I left to join the marketing staff at the University of Michigan Press (its book publishing division) in December. Working here has been terrific, but I really felt that journalistic itch, so I was looking for something I could do in the evenings and on weekends to keep my hand in. I’ve lived in the Chelsea area for nine years, so I’m naturally nosy about what goes on there, and the only newspaper in the area is a weekly. It seemed like a great place to start.

The possible cons were a shortage of time on my part (always) and the fact that I was reasonably certain this wasn’t going to amount to much in terms of pay. That’s ok. I work better when continually busy, and I’ve done a number of things for free in the course of my journalistic career; all have resulted in something great down the road. Call it karma.

What are your broad goals for this venture, both for you and for the community?

Chelsea needs a reliable source of daily local news. Folks here want to know what the City Council is doing, but they also want to know what the rock at Pierce Park is painted like today, and who passed away recently, and what the gas prices and weather are like right now. They want to know what to plan for, what’s new and what’s happening this weekend. A continuously updating site can provide all of that.

What type of content will be on the site, and how did you determine that? Who will be writing/reporting? Will you be hiring freelancers? Who’s doing photos?

The site focuses on news and information about the Chelsea area, with some features (I’m launching a Virtual Gallery for local artists, for example). We already have a wonderful events-oriented site in the area (www.chelsea-mi.com), and my focus was on filling the gap: timely, extremely local news for folks who live in and care about the town.

So far, it’s mostly been a one-woman band, and the likelihood of my hiring freelancers is slim unless the income reaches a level I honestly don’t expect. I’ve been doing some of the photos, but other family members have contributed as well (my mother, my husband), so that part of it has been a group effort. I’d like to see some regular features that include local residents’ writing and photography, and the Virtual Gallery is a small start to that (the copy and photos are provided by the artist in that case).

Are you partnering with anyone or any group on this, like the chamber of commerce or local bloggers?

Membership in the chamber is on my budget as one of my first reinvestments of income from the site. Everyone from the Downtown Development Authority to the city to the Chelsea Center for the Arts to local merchants have been extremely helpful in passing along news tips and helping out with special projects like the Gallery, but the site is independent. I’ve had too many years in newspapers for it to be any other way.

What are you calling your venture – an online newspaper? Publication?

It’s a news and information site. There are no plans for a printed edition, so calling it a newspaper or publication seems counterintuitive. My attitude toward newspapers has always been that they are, in some cases, all the right information in exactly the wrong package. My site attempts to take some material that would have been at home in a tiny, local daily and combine it with special features only possible on the Web.

You designed the site yourself. What were you trying to accomplish in the design?

For the techies and bloggers out there, the site runs on a self-hosted WordPress backbone, with a tweaked version of the Amazing Grace theme by Vladimir Prelovac providing the basis for the design. WordPress is what makes this site possible on my short time allotment; much of what I need is already plug-and-play, thanks to one developer or another, meaning that the plugins and widgets I have to design from scratch have been limited. That lets me concentrate on the writing, since this is a solo effort.

The Amazing Grace theme is pure Chelsea: town and country, classy and natural, all rolled into one. I couldn’t have asked for a better palette to start from. The objective of the site is to represent Chelsea honestly, but with affection; I love living there, and I admit that bias up front. Then again, looking at the slide show of pictures that show up in the postcards at the top of the page each time you visit, who could blame me?

Heather Newman

What’s the business model – have you incorporated? If you’re selling ads (and it looks like you are), who’s selling and how did you set your rates?

The paperwork is still in progress, but Chelsea Update is being incorporated and registered with the state. It’s for-profit, though the chances of it ever actually bringing in positive cash flow are pretty small.

You’re talking to my ad sales department. Rates vary depending on the size and placement of the ads (one thing I’m still tweaking is all the locations where they’ll appear – the one in the right sidebar seems solid, so it’s staying, but there’ll be at least one more vertical and one horizontal position).

Setting the rates has been one of the struggles of the formal launch. Chelsea draws a highly interested and involved community of people from Jackson to Ann Arbor – the Facebook page for the events site in Chelsea, for example, has about half as many fans as [The Chronicle's] own, when Chelsea itself is only a bit over 4,000 residents. But it thinks of itself as an insulated little town, so merchants don’t welcome big-city ad rates. The final rates won’t be set until the day of formal launch.

What’s your goal – do you envision this eventually creating a livelihood? How much have you budgeted for startup costs, and how are you funding that? Any plans to take on investors?

I never expect this site to create a full-time livelihood for me. I enjoy my job at the university, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m careful to keep any work on the site to evenings and weekends; I like what I do, and don’t want to intrude on my day job.

Startup costs have been minimal; a bit of hosting space, a few promotional materials. I’ve paid for them out of pocket. Investors would be welcome, but I’m not going out of my way to solicit them. I’ve reserved the name in a few other nearby towns, but I think one of the things that has the potential to make Chelsea Update successful is its intensely-local focus, which would be more difficult to replicate in towns where I didn’t live.

Looks like you’ve done a soft launch – what bugs have you been working out? Who have you been “testing” the site on?

Projects like this always start with a million ideas: What would I want to read? What are we missing in local coverage? What should it look like, what’s easy to navigate, what links need to be there, what additional information are people going to want? Soft launching meant that I could test all that on the fly, with an audience consisting mostly of people who were contributing news tips to the site. The sidebars, in particular, keep changing as I tinker with what information people want most and how to keep things uncluttered.

Just this week, I added the “Top News” feature after reading a well-thought-out critique of one of [The Chronicle's] competitors. The blog format is wonderful for news, that critic wrote, until you have to wade through three screens of events and less-urgent information just to see that the city courthouse burned down four hours ago.

How do you plan to publicize the site?

I’m sending postcards to members of every local group I can get my hands on (and working with groups and businesses that have been contributing news tips to the site to publicize it at their events and locations). I have Facebook and Google and MSN ad credits, thanks to my hosting company, and I’m making good use of those. I’m making use of very limited advertising/display space: a display at the area’s farm markets, for example, and magnetic signs on our cars. That’s another advantage to being so locally-focused.

Tell us about your background.

I won’t bore you with the whole resume. I started professional life as a sports reporter for the Tucson Citizen in Arizona after doing some stringing work for the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette (back when they were separate papers). I moved on to cops, then courts, then city hall, then left for a job on the business desk at The (Nashville) Tennessean, where I edited our technology page, wrote about the auto plants and transportation and unions, filled in as the Business Editor when she was out and did investigative stories involving analysis of computer databases. My nationally syndicated column on technology started there.

I joined the Detroit Free Press in 1997 as part of its Enterprise Team doing special projects, and the paper quickly picked up my tech column again, which led to my covering tech full-time for a number of years. Eventually tech was moved to the Features department, and the last few years of my work there I covered everything from casinos to health and fitness to video games. Now I’m the Trade Marketing Manager for The University of Michigan Press, where I work on publicity for the books we expect to reach a mass market audience.

[On the personal side], I live just outside Chelsea with my husband Kevin, an auto-body painter; two cats; and my 8-year-old daughter, Kaia, who rocks.

"Betty Anne Waters" filming in Chelsea. (Photos courtesy of Qin Li)

Filming of the movie “Betty Anne Waters” continued in the environs of Ann Arbor this week. The Chronicle was not out in Chelsea to see it for ourselves, but resident Qin Li emailed some photos and called in a report from her family’s encounter with the movie crew. She and her husband, Vinay Joneja, and son, Dave (five years old), enjoyed a pleasant day of shooting with their house as the backdrop.

In the scene, Betty – played in the movie by Hilary Swank – drives up and picks up two kids from the house. In response to our question, Qin Li said there was no crying or yelling, or high drama involved.

She said that it was striking to her how understated and low-key the actors were. When Loren Dean came in accompanied by other crew, she said, it wasn’t apparent to her who was who, and when he was pointed out as “the actor,” she still needed to appeal to an internet search. Dean plays a role in the film described in industry publications as “the resentful husband” of Hilary Swank’s title character.

But Dean himself didn’t make a resentful sort of impression on Qin Li. She said that he took the time to chat with them, and didn’t come off like a Hollwood star at all – he’d won her over as a fan from now on, she said.

Qin Li was a little surprised that there wasn’t more media attention on the set. She contrasted the complete lack of newspaper reporters or other media there with what she imagined would have happened in China, where she grew up. She imagined that even in an out-of-the-way hamlet, there would have been a gaggle of media following the Chinese equivalent of Hilary Swank on a movie production. Having just recently returned from a Chinese New Year visit to Shanghai, Qin Li reported that even the smallest villages are getting more and more developed.

So who might qualify as the Chinese Hilary Swank? Qin Li said that Ziyi Zhang (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) or else Gong Li (“Raise the Red Lantern”) might be comparable.

Snack Report

Because we asked, Qin Li described some card tables set out for the crew laden with chips and bagels, but could not confirm any cupcakes, and certainly not any particular flavor.

Director of "Betty Anne Waters," Tony Goldwyn. The "G" in Goldwyn is the same "G" as in MGM, the motion picture production company.

"Betty Anne Waters" filming in Chelsea.

"Betty Anne Waters" filming in Chelsea.

Vinay Joneja and Loren Dean.