Stories indexed with the term ‘Chronicle monthly milestone’

The monthly milestone column here at The Ann Arbor Chronicle provides a regular, systematic way to express our appreciation to readers and advertisers for their financial support. That support was strong enough to sustain the publication through its fifth year in operation. Thank you.

As we flip the calendar to a new year, the regular milestone column is also a chance to remind readers: To sustain itself, the business really does rely in part on “voluntary subscription” dollars.

The Chronicle’s continued ability to document local government and civic affairs depends on you and it depends on you now – not on someone else at some other time. So I’m asking you to think right now about using the online system or the old-fashioned check-in-an-envelope method to make a financial contribution to The Chronicle: Subscribe!

As a reminder, in case we don’t write a column about this in some given month, I’ve added a recurring monthly item to our event listings for the second day of every month: Time to Contribute Financially to The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

It’s worth pointing out that The Chronicle’s event listings are pretty extensive, and currently include somewhere around 15,000 local events. That’s made possible through the work of Jon Udell as part of his Elm City Project. Granted, 15,000 events might sound a bit overwhelming, but we have begun categorizing them into smaller mini-calendars that some readers might find easier to parse.

One of the regular events you’ll find listed in The Chronicle’s event calendar is live music every Sunday night at the Old Town Tavern. Customary at the Old Town, after the band has played its set, is for someone to carry around a pitcher to collect up money for the musicians. It’s somewhat like a secular version of passing the collection plate at a worship service in the Christian tradition.

When someone is holding the pitcher out in front of you, that’s the time you are called upon to act – not later.

So I’d like you to think of this month’s column as the Internet-equivalent of passing the pitcher for The Chronicle. Below the fold, I’m going to beat briefly (I promise) on this same drum. So if you’ve made a recent contribution, you should feel free to imagine that the pitcher has moved on to the next table. [Full Story]

The Chronicle’s November milestone column comes to you a few days earlier than the customary second day of the month. That’s because I wanted to include a quick preview of a performance scheduled for Nov. 1 at the Kerrytown Concert House – by mezzo soprano Laurie Rubin.

The Chronicle has rarely, if ever, written about entertainment. And as I explained to Laurie, when she called me up to make her pitch, our approach to covering Ann Arbor’s community doesn’t include standard “preview” pieces for live performances.

The boilerplate explanation I typically use on the phone includes a description of The Chronicle’s preferred strategy for giving readers advance notice of interesting performances. That strategy is an event listing that runs off Internet standards-compliant data feeds and helps to strengthen the community’s “calendar web.” So obviously the tactic here is partly designed to bore the caller to death, so that they’ll just give up and accept the fact that I’m not going to write a preview article about their performance.

You will find Laurie’s Nov. 1 Kerrytown Concert House performance included in The Chronicle’s event calendar, categorized as music.

Fortunately for you, dear readers, Laurie declined my gambit that she surrender to my boring, rambling talk about data feeds and technology platforms. Instead she expressed a weirdly geeked-out interest in these data feeds and calendars, which I probably seemed very excited about. She instantly grasped the concept of maintaining a calendar that automatically generates a data feed that any publication or individual can access. I didn’t figure that an opera singer would be such a receptive audience for that sort of thing. But at least she had stopped talking about her Nov. 1 performance at Kerrytown Concert House, so that was a good thing, from my point of view.

But in closing out the conversation, Laurie renewed her pitch for a preview article, based on her memoir, “Do You Dream in Color: Insights from a Girl Without Sight.” Even though I was still thinking to myself, “No preview articles! Not even for blind opera singers!” I figured Laurie might be a receptive audience for some additional conversation about a different topic.

That topic is an accessibility project for public meetings that The Chronicle has been working on somewhat sporadically. The idea is to provide digital streaming text for members of the deaf and hearing-impaired community to read – either live at public meetings or during a video replay. Yes, I fully understood that I was talking to a self-described “blind girl” – for whom this particular accessibility project offered zero obvious benefit. Yet Laurie turned out to be a willing conversation partner. And in The Chronicle’s basic technological approach, she saw a potential benefit to the blind and visually impaired community that would never have occurred to me. [Full Story]

Since we launched The Chronicle in 2008, we’ve met many remarkable people.

And for the past three years, we’ve thanked a few of them with our annual Bezonki awards.

This year’s winners are an extraordinary group: Derrick Jackson of the Washtenaw County sheriff’s office; community activist Lisa Dengiz; teacher and environmentalist Dan Ezekiel; the nonprofit Ann Arbor Active Against ALS; Paul Courant of the University of Michigan; and Linda Diane Feldt, an author and holistic health practitioner who’s one of The Chronicle’s most prolific and poetic Stopped.Watched contributors. I’ll tell you more about them in a bit.

We honored these folks at a reception on Aug. 9, when they received the physical Bezonki awards. Each of the six Bezonkis is unique, made in part with bits salvaged from equipment at the former Ann Arbor News – a totem of our profession’s past. They were crafted by local artist Alvey Jones, whose Bezonki cartoons are published monthly in The Chronicle.

The awards are unique in another way. Each winner of a Bezonki is a steward of the physical award for a year. Winners in the past year hand it off to the next year’s winners. This year the hand-off took place at the Aug. 9 reception held at Zingerman’s Events on Fourth. Our hope is that the awards create connections year after year between people in the community – people who might not otherwise have crossed paths.

At our annual receptions, we also hope to introduce attendees to new experiences. And we try to have some fun. We’re an online publication, but this year we tipped our hat to journalism’s heritage by making “pressman’s caps” out of newsprint. So in the photos below, you’ll see many of our guests wearing their own. [If you'd like to make one yourself, you can download the instructions here.]

This year we also invited local artist/inventor Michael Flynn to display his “cooperative phonograph” to our event – a four-foot stainless steel spinning disk that’s truly a work of art. Using a card as the “needle,” you can pick up sounds from the ridges that he’s cut into the disk’s edge. One of the tracks was a repetition of the phrase “Love is all you need.” That’s fitting, because as we celebrate five years of Chronicling, Dave Askins and I are also celebrating our 24th wedding anniversary today. It’s getting better all the time.

But on Aug. 9, the main point of our reception was to honor a few of the many people who help make this community a special place. So please join me in celebrating the 2013 Bezonki winners! [Full Story]

Here at The Ann Arbor Chronicle, we traffic almost exclusively in the written word. One clear exception is made for center-column articles, where we do try to include some photographs. Still, it’s rare that we take advantage of the full multimedia capability of the Internet.

However, in the last couple of weeks, we’ve published two pieces that have included supplementary audio files. One was a write-up of a Ward 3 Ann Arbor city council candidate forum. The audio in that case served the purpose of grounding possible conversation about a she-said-he-said accusation in the actual facts of what-he-said.

The second one was a piece by regular columnist David Erik Nelson – about interviewing Noam Chomsky in the bar of the Campus Inn. The audio in that case served in part to provide a literal sense of what Chomsky “sounds like.” Just as a side note, I would argue that Nelson’s written treatment of the interview actually offers higher fidelity than the audio.

Today’s monthly milestone column also includes some audio. It was recorded from a roughly four-foot diameter “cooperative phonograph” fabricated out of stainless steel by local Ann Arbor inventor/artist Michael Flynn. Flynn had the phonograph on display last Saturday at Chelsea’s Sounds and Sights Festival.

Flynn was set up on Chelsea’s Main Street, just south of the iconic clock tower. He invited passers-by to use cards as “needles” to pick up the sounds from the ridges that he has cut into the edges of the metal disk.

I enjoyed watching as skeptical expressions from parents and kids dissolved into delight – as they discovered how the cards they were holding against the spinning platter were somehow generating music and words.

But an expression of delight won’t pay Flynn’s bills. The work of art took him over four years to develop – and he took on debt to make it possible. So Flynn is looking to sell the phonograph and to make more of them for sale – as a piece of public art or an interactive museum exhibit. That is how Flynn earns his livelihood. [Full Story]

In this monthly update, I will explain what Zooey Deschanel and Ann Arbor, Michigan have in common.

I’ll hazard a guess that some regular readers of The Chronicle’s local government news coverage might wonder: Who is Zooey Deschanel? OK. So here it goes. She’s that actress from New Girl – not the one who plays CeCe, but the one who plays Jess. Right. So Jess is the one who might wind up with Nick, but we don’t know for sure, but we’re still totally rooting for them to get together as a couple – because they’re both so, like, you know, quirky that nobody else would have them.

Ah, yes. New Girl is a TV sitcom, broadcast on FOX.

If that doesn’t give Ms. Deschanel enough cred for you to read any more of this column, try this: She gave a musical performance at Hill Auditorium last night, as part of the duo “She & Him.”

She was performing around the same time when regular readers of The Chronicle were following along with our live updates from the meeting of the Ann Arbor city council. [Spoiler alert: The council was all sorta Nick-and-Jess about their agenda last night, and postponed a bunch of stuff.]

Those city council meetings, by the way, are listed out on The Chronicle’s new-and-improved event listing display, along with myriad other happenings in Ann Arbor. I wrote about the basic technology behind that event listing earlier this year. If you’d like to add all your organization’s events to our listing all-in-one-go, it’s pretty easy.

The lead art for this column is made out of a screenshot taken from The Chronicle’s event listings. For calendar purists, this might be evidence that we are doing it wrong: The 4th of July parade is listed twice. Twice? That’s like making Jess and Nick go on a double date with CeCe and Schmidt, am I right?

Actually, I think that “double listing” illustrates perfectly why our approach to event listings is exactly right.  [Full Story]

The Chronicle’s monthly milestone column is by custom published on the second day of the month. It’s a chance for us to touch base with readers on topics related to this publication.

It’s not June 2 yet, so today’s publication means we’re jumping the gun a bit. That’s due in part to a selfish, practical interest I have in not writing separate emails to every reader who inquires: Where is your coverage of the Ann Arbor Public Schools? We’ve suspended that coverage for the indefinite future – but obviously not because we don’t think education is important.

When The Chronicle first launched back in 2008, we didn’t offer any coverage of the local public schools. Mostly through sheer good fortune we found independent freelancers – first Jennifer Coffman, and then Monet Tiedemann – who were able to provide coverage of AAPS to Chronicle readers.

It is not easy to find writers who believe that The Chronicle’s approach to coverage – through detailed reports of public meetings – is a worthy endeavor. And among those who believe it’s worth doing, it’s not easy to find writers who can actually meet the standard. And among that smaller group, it’s not easy to find those who are able to reconcile the economics of the compensation we offer with the sacrifice of time and effort.

It is really not easy to find a writer who is willing to sit through a school board meeting that lasts until 3 a.m.

The Chronicle’s publisher and I can absorb a certain amount of flux in available resources, but we’re past capacity. The size of our organization means that when a single person isn’t able to continue in a particular function, it can mean the end of the coverage that person was providing. So for the immediate future, we won’t be able to continue schools coverage.

And for the medium to longer term, I don’t anticipate being able to restore schools coverage unless our revenues through voluntary subscriptions and advertising were to dramatically increase and show evidence of sustaining that increase.

Ultimately, providing sustainable regular coverage of a public body will require more than the good fortune of finding people who, for a while, can wedge The Chronicle into their lives based on the compensation we can offer.

Isn’t some schools coverage better than none at all? Perhaps so. In this column, I’ll lay out my thoughts on that in terms of a metaphor familiar to regular readers of The Chronicle’s milestones: marathon running. [Full Story]

We’re roughly midway through The Chronicle’s fifth year. That means in September we’ll mark a half-decade of publication.

At that point, we will likely write a column with some reckoning of total words, or total number of public meetings covered, or some other statistical breakdown.

And even though we will say, “It’s a half decade,” those numbers will not mean we are half way there. Because there is where the finish line is. And in this race The Chronicle has been running, there is no finish line.

In that respect it is not like a marathon – when you know at the start that if you settle into a sustainable pace, you will eventually finish. But for a race that has no finish line, what does a sustainable pace even mean?

Here at The Chronicle, a sustainable pace means that the business is financially stable enough to cover the freelance writers, basic business expenses and the livelihoods of a full-time editor and publisher. But The Chronicle is not sustainable in an important sense. It requires a full-time effort from two people – and here I don’t mean 40 hours, or 60 hours, or even 80 hours a week. I mean basically every waking moment.

So The Chronicle is not sustainable in the sense that it’s a business that could be sold to someone else to carry on – unless that someone else were two people who are willing to run down a race course that offers a simple livelihood with few water stations and some occasional cheers.

To pound this running metaphor completely into the ground, The Chronicle is not sustainable in the sense that it could passed like a baton to the next runner in a relay. And that reminds me of a relay race I ran a quarter century ago in my hometown of Columbus, Indiana.

It was called the May Day Medley.  [Full Story]

The Chronicle’s milestone column was originally conceived as a monthly feature – an opportunity for either the editor or the publisher to relay housekeeping news to readers, or offer opinions on topics related to media and journalism. It was also conceived as a monthly reminder to readers that actual human beings who live among them are reporting, writing and editing this publication.

The monthly milestone column was also a vehicle for reminding readers that it takes regular financial contributions from readers like them to sustain this publication. As we look to transition this from a monthly to an occasional column, we’d like to maintain a monthly schedule of reminders to folks: If you perceive a benefit from The Chronicle to yourself and the broader community, then please consider contributing financial support so that benefit can be sustained.

So, to maintain a regular monthly reminder, especially in those months when we don’t publish a milestone column, we’re trying out a blue overlay – which should have appeared on your screen if you visited the website today (Feb. 2, 2013). In some ways, it’s an awful and ostentatious way to greet Chronicle readers. But to make it go away, just click in the upper righthand corner on the “close button.” It shouldn’t appear again for the duration of your visit.

Of course, instead of clicking on that “close button,” we’d prefer you clicked on the SUBSCRIBE link. Or failing that, we’re hoping that the blue overlay might remind you to review your check register for the last time you wrote out a check to The Chronicle.

And of course, if you’re already sending your regular financial support to The Chronicle, we’d like you to interpret that blue overlay as a thank-you. We hope it will encourage you to mention to your friends, co-workers and acquaintances that you voluntarily subscribe to The Chronicle, and suggest they do the same. [Full Story]

The start of a new year is a plenty good excuse to talk about calendars – or event listings.

Ordinarily, I would be inclined to bore you to death by discussing Internet standards, syndication, multiple-data entry problems, connections to authoritative sources, the myriad ways I am smarter than our pet cat, and how all this should cause us to grumble and make very serious faces as we lament the future of journalism.

But I figure I have a whole year to do that.

For now, I’d like you to consider this: The Chronicle’s calendar listings currently include 4,217 events.

That’s because we’ve embraced an approach to event listings based on the idea that: (1) event hosts are in command of the most accurate information about their events; and (2) event hosts should be able to just maintain their own calendars, and expect their event information to show up all over the Internet, without doing one bit of extra data entry for any publication.  [Full Story]

Today, The Ann Arbor Chronicle celebrates the four-year anniversary of its launch.

Judged against the developmental milestones of human four-year-olds, The Chronicle can now be expected to command a vocabulary of at least 1,500 words, express itself in relatively complex sentences, use words that relate one idea to another, and express number and space concepts.

Over the last couple of weeks, as University of Michigan students have streamed into Ann Arbor for the start of the fall semester, I’ve wondered what this four-year-old kid called The Chronicle will be doing when it reaches college age.

And should I perhaps be thinking about starting a college fund?

Funding for The Chronicle is, of course, one theme we typically highlight in these Monthly Milestone columns – as a reminder that part of our funding comes from voluntary subscription dollars contributed by readers.

That’s a reminder to some readers to translate a good intention into action. And it’s a hearty thank you to those who already send in regular contributions in the form of a voluntary subscription.

This month, I’m putting The Chronicle’s funding in the context of a public art millage that the city council has placed on the Nov. 6 ballot.

But to start off, I’ve tallied up some summary statistics on the items published in the first four years.  [Full Story]

As The Chronicle approaches its fourth anniversary, it’s time to continue a new tradition that we began last year – the annual Bezonki awards.

A year ago, we looked for a way to recognize some of the many people who make this community special. The Chronicle’s inaugural Bezonki awards were given to an amazing, eclectic group – and this year’s recipients were equally inspiring: Roger Rayle; the digital archives team at the Ann Arbor District Library – Andrew MacLaren, Amy Cantu, Debbie Gallagher, and Jacki Sasaki; Anna Ercoli Schnitzer; Jim Toy; Common Cycle; and Jeff Micale.

You’ll read more about them below. They are representative of so many others who work to make this community a better place, in ways that are well-known in some cases, or that more often play a critical but less high-profile role.

The physical awards were fashioned by local artist Alvey Jones, creator of the inscrutable Bezonki cartoons published monthly in The Chronicle. Each of the six Bezonkis is unique, and captures this community’s quirky attributes. The awards embody a nod to the past – some of the parts were salvaged from equipment at the former Ann Arbor News – and a wink to the future.

There’s another twist to these awards. We ask that each winner of the Bezonki be a steward of the physical award for a year. They then pass it on to the next year’s winner – that happened at a July 27 reception held at Zingerman’s Events on Fourth. Our goal is for the awards to create connections between people in the community year after year – people who might not otherwise have crossed paths.

That’s actually one of the things that has been most rewarding for me since we launched The Chronicle – crossing paths with so many remarkable people that I might not otherwise have met. So the Bezonki awards are also an opportunity to thank the many people who have supported us along the way – as advertisers, subscribers, commenters, contributors or Chronicle readers and enthusiasts. We thank you all.

And now, I’m delighted to introduce our 2012 Bezonki winners! [Full Story]

In a comment on last month’s milestone column, reader Jim Rees wrote, “If I had a million bucks to endow a reporter’s desk at the Chronicle, I would ask that Bill Treml be hired for the crime desk.”

For readers who are not familiar with Treml, he was a long-time reporter for the Ann Arbor News. Some of Treml’s work is already part of the Ann Arbor District Library digital archives project.

From the lede of a piece by Treml, “Police Believe Several People Saw Murder Victim Enter Car,” published on July 10, 1968: “Police hopes of solving the Joan E. Schell murder case spurted sharply upward today with the revelation that as many as three persons may have seen the Eastern Michigan University coed get into a car on the night of June 30.”

While The Chronicle doesn’t currently cover crime, we do reflect occasionally on possible models for covering that topic – as a contingency for an unexpected million-dollar endowment. Several possible newer approaches are sketched out in a recent piece by Jonathan Stray for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab: “Beyond the Crime Scene: We Need New and Better Models for Crime Reporting.”

As Stray notes, police departments no longer need to rely on third parties like newspapers, radio and television stations to disseminate information about crimes that have taken place. A police department can communicate directly with the public about those crimes – using its own website and RSS feed, for example. The University of Michigan department of public safety maintains a crime alerts public data feed and a daily incidents log like that. The Ann Arbor police department contracts through crimemapping.com to provide publicly accessible basic information about crime location, type and time, which is updated once a day. And the Washtenaw County sheriff’s office uses the Nixle service to let people sign up for crime alerts and other information, delivered via text message or email.

For this basic “spot news” type of information, public safety agencies are a single-point source of authoritative information, which they can share directly with the public. It’s authoritative, because a police department has unique access to basic descriptive information about crimes.

Now, I’m going to draw an analogy that might seem at first like a non-sequitur: A police department’s unique access to descriptive information about crime events is comparable, I think, to a party host’s unique access to details about an upcoming party. And that has consequences for a reasonable model of at least one small component of crime reporting. [Full Story]

Last month, news broke that owners of the New Orleans Times-Picayune are planning a major restructuring of that publication. The message arrived in Ann Arbor with an eerie familiarity. The same folks owned the former Ann Arbor News, a newspaper they closed in order to create a new company called AnnArbor.com.

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. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor 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.

Description. Analysis. Explanation. Remember those three concepts.

Last month I participated in a video teleconference with students who are members of Bowling Green State University’s Online News Association. It’s a group that’s advised by department of journalism and public relations faculty member Dave Sennerud. The focus that evening was on hyperlocal news sites, which is a specialty of BGSU’s Mike Horning. Horning recently completed a dissertation on that topic at Penn State University.

I view any interaction like that video conference as a chance to evangelize a bit about The Chronicle’s approach to writing the news – which prioritizes description over storytelling. And that chance came when a general question was posed about advice to journalism majors who will be entering the field.

My advice: Got a journalism degree? That’s great, but I’d prefer that you were a scientist.

As we used to say back in Indiana, that is currently a mute point. Right now, although the amount of advertising and individual subscriber support continues to increase each month, not enough readers subscribe voluntarily and not enough advertisers purchase ads for us to contemplate hiring additional full-time staff. But that’s the direction we’re working towards, to supplement our freelance reporters and to make our own workload more sustainable.

So while we’re not in a hiring mode now, we do anticipate a time when we’ll be making those decisions, and it makes sense to think about the type of skills we’d like a reporter to have.

The main skill a Chronicle reporter needs – and the one I think the entire field of journalism has largely forgotten – is the ability to describe, in detail, an event or an issue in a way that is designed mostly to engage the intellect of readers, not their emotions. It’s actually a scientific skill. But that approach to writing the news contrasts with the way institutional journalism has evolved to train its next generation of practitioners.

If basic description is a part of traditional, institutional journalism, it’s typically well-hidden, behind attempted analysis and attempted explanation – in the form of “stories.” And when I write the word “stories,” I put those scare quotes around it consciously. That’s so it’s not confused with other ways of referring to items that might appear in a journalistic publication, like “articles,” “briefs” or “reports.”

Most items that are written by traditional journalists these days are attempts at “stories” in that term’s literal sense – a narrative with a conflict, a plot, and characters who say interesting and provocative things. But as a reporter, if you begin with the idea of a story you want to tell, you’ve ordered your task backwards. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor 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.

This little taxi ride is going to start where Mary Morgan’s milestone column last month left off – she drew a comparison between news media choices and transportation choices.

This column also will deliver readers to a destination that asks them to consider applying for a mayoral appointment to Ann Arbor’s taxicab board.

If you’d like to take a shortcut, then go ahead and download the application form for the city’s boards and commissions, and return it to the mayor’s office. The address is printed right on the form.

But the longer route will include some discussion about who’s paying the fare for this media cab we call The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Last Friday evening, Mary Morgan and I ordered an actual cab to cover the 3/4 mile from our Old West Side neighborhood to the near edge of downtown Ann Arbor. Who on earth orders a cab to cover that short a distance? A journalist who needs a piece of art for a column involving taxis, that’s who. The trip required a detour from the planned route. That’s because Washington Street between Ashley and Main was closed for the FoolMoon festival – which we were headed downtown to see.

The taxicab driver circled around to have another go at it from Huron Street.  And he told us he’d knock a quarter mile off the final distance on the meter. He could exercise that discretion, because taxicab drivers function essentially as independent contractors, who lease the vehicles from the taxicab company each night.

There’s a limit to a cabbie’s discretion. I’m guessing he wouldn’t earn a livelihood if he decided just to let passengers ride for free, for as long as they liked, and expect that they might later send him an equitable fare. Yet if operating The Chronicle were like driving a cab, that’s what the voluntary subscriptions part of our business model would look like.  [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor 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.

In this month’s Chronicle milestone column, I’d like to talk about options, and how some recent experiences with transit caused me to reflect on the current somewhat chaotic media landscape.

In my household, a few years ago we made a decision to get rid of our one car. So when I need to go somewhere, a car parked in my driveway is not the go-to option. Instead, I choose to walk, ride my Ruckus, take the bus, use a Zipcar, or on rare occasions, bum a ride from a friend or call a cab.

Generally, I don’t miss having a car. But so far this year, I’ve had occasion to get smacked by our decision not to use our community’s mainstream mode of transportation. At times like those, I fantasize what it would be like if car ownership weren’t the norm in most of America, including Ann Arbor. Surely the options we have would become more second nature to everyone, and there would be sufficient demand to support better service and access. Everyone would develop different expectations, and habits.

By way of analogy to media, the decision about a mainstream mode has already been made for us here in Ann Arbor. The media “car” – the one daily newspaper that most people received because there were no other options – has been pulled off the road. But for some of us, our expectations and habits haven’t fully adapted, and the alternatives can seem confusing, disjointed and unreliable.

I (still) regularly hear complaints that Ann Arbor lacks a “real” newspaper, and I react in two ways. First, I do feel nostalgia for the Ann Arbor News – I spent a good chunk of my life there, after all. I miss a daily local newspaper, too. But what I really miss is the ideal of a daily local newspaper – and that’s something I’m not sure The News, at least in its final years, actually delivered.

In its place is a collection of options for news and information, some better than others. I would expect to see even more in the coming years. The Chronicle is certainly one of those options, but will not satisfy the full range of our community’s information needs. Still, I’d argue that The Chronicle’s focus on local government provides Ann Arbor residents with far better coverage of local government than it’s enjoyed in the nearly two decades I’ve lived in Ann Arbor.

I’d like to circle back to the topic of media options later in the column.

But first, my transit tales. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor 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.

Some eagle-eyed regular readers might have noticed that in the spot on the “masthead” where the current date used to sit are now four links: Civic News Ticker • Stopped. Watched. • Comments • Events. We’re also expecting the sad grey box at the top of the left sidebar to be retired sometime soon.

This does not signal that a major design change is in the offing. We have no plans, for example, to implement a choice of “skins” for the website, especially not one that would allow readers to view the publication as if it were printed on the scales of a dragon we slew.

That initial change – swapping out the masthead date with links we’d like to highlight – was prompted by some confusion that resulted from the appearance of a current date … on the same page as an article originally published three years ago.

It’s actually somewhat encouraging that The Chronicle has now been around long enough that this kind of confusion could result.

What I’d like to share with readers this month is a little vignette from the city council’s last meeting, which concluded near midnight – so I was draggin’ tail. And the vignette itself is a little dragon tale. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor 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.

The Chronicle spent part of its New Year’s Eve – the midnight part – at a small gathering in Kerrytown Market & Shops. Owner Joe O’Neal credits Mary Cambruzzi, proprietor of FOUND Gallery, with the idea: Open up the building for a few people to toast the new year with champagne or sparkling juice, and give people a chance to ring in 2012 by playing the carillon.

We were able to join the small event, because earlier in the day on New Year’s Eve, I happened to run into Joe at the Ann Arbor farmers market.

As Joe and I chatted, he showed me a new alcove outside the building – with benches and a plaque – honoring Ginny Johansen, a former Ann Arbor city councilmember and farmers market supporter who died last year. We also talked about the success of this year’s KindleFest, which on one night in early December drew several thousand people to Kerrytown. The regular stores stayed open late, and the farmers market was filled with vendors – selling everything from holiday greenery to glühwein. The energy of the crowds was exhilarating, and made me wish for more events like that.

In that context, Joe mentioned the New Year’s Eve gathering later that night, and invited us to drop by and play the carillon. Though it’s been a small affair for the past couple of years, he sees the possibility for more. His vision 10 years from now is to draw 10,000 people to Kerrytown on New Year’s Eve. Maybe someone could build a sort of reverse Times Square ball, he said, that would shoot up instead of dropping down. There could be fireworks. And carillon-playing, of course.

His vision made me think of how some of the most special things in this town start small, with one or two people thinking just a little bit bigger. So in this month’s Chronicle milestone column, I’d like to share a few thoughts on that as we head into the new year. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor 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.

When I worked on the business desk at The Ann Arbor News, we were awash with press releases about various business anniversaries, awards and other achievements. In hindsight, it’s fair to say we did not treat these accomplishments with the respect that many of them deserved.

Perhaps it takes being closely connected to a small enterprise – whether it’s a business, nonprofit or independent professional, or a program you launched or service you’ve been providing  – to appreciate the milestones that might seem trivial to an outsider. If you understand that making it through the day without quitting your business can be a pretty significant achievement, it gives you a visceral connection to those announcements.

That’s one reason why here at The Chronicle, we’ve started allotting some of our monthly milestone columns to congratulating others who’ve reached some kind of marker. Generally, large institutions are more likely to log higher numbers and get more attention for that. The University of Michigan, for example, is gearing up to celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2017, and is already marshalling its considerable resources for that event.

But I have a soft spot for smaller, human-scale endeavors.

This month, we’re highlighting three such ventures: Local businesses – Acme Mercantile, Le Dog, and Anderson Paint – that all celebrated recent anniversaries, and whose owners have strong ties to this community.

And because tonight, Midnight Madness and Kerrytown Kindle Fest are launching many Ann Arbor shoppers into the holiday shopping season, with several downtown stores open late and offering special deals, I’d like to start by sharing a couple of thoughts about that, and by sharing a Twitter hashtag: #a2shoplocal.  [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s 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.

This fall when I visited the Green Road offices where the Ann Arbor District Library is keeping The Ann Arbor News archives, I was fascinated by the page proofs that lined the walls of the entryway.

The proofs are from a 1985 publication commemorating the 150th anniversary of The News. In addition to the usual hagiographic articles you’d expect to find, the pages also were full of ads from local businesses, many of them congratulating The News for its milestone anniversary, and noting their own longevity in the community.

There was so much optimism in those pages – and now, so many ghosts. The News, of course, was shut down by its owners in 2009. Many other advertisers in that publication – Jacobson’s department store, Bill Knapp’s restaurant, Schlenker Hardware, a menswear shop called Marty’s, Fox Tent & Awning – are now found only in places like AADL’s Old News, where articles from newspapers’ past are being archived in digital form.

One of my takeaways from that visit – and I’ll admit it’s no great insight – is to take nothing for granted. Having now run this publication for just over three years, I more fully appreciate just how much work, luck and support it takes to keep something afloat – whether it’s a business, nonprofit, religious institution, marriage or anything else that counts its longevity in years, decades or centuries.

That’s one reason why, as noted last month, we’ve decided to use The Chronicle’s monthly column to celebrate other people’s milestones, too. This month, we’ll share milestones from a church, a holistic health practitioner, a nonprofit and a business. We’d love to hear from you, too – what’s worth counting in your life? [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s 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.

The appearance of this monthly column does not mark any particular quantifiable achievement, but rather the simple passage of time. It’s just an occasion to note that another month is in the books for The Chronicle.

It’s a measurement of survival.

Other kinds of milestones are easy enough to contemplate as well. Among those are the finer-grained milestones – the odd statistics that reflect the actual activity that goes into the survival of a publication. For example, a query of the Chronicle’s database shows 540 government meeting reports filed in a little over three years. Included in 141 of those reports is the public commentary of Thomas Partridge. The database also contains 2,832 Stopped.Watched. observations. Of those, 614 were made along Liberty Street.

These smaller kinds of incremental milestones are important, too, because they reflect not the passage of time, but the actual stuff out of which survival is made. I was reminded of this by news of an upcoming event, sponsored by Ann Arbor Active Against ALS (A2A3), which continues that organization’s effort to ensure survival for patients with ALS – a neurological disorder commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

The event itself will take place next summer. It’s a six-woman relay swim across the English Channel, in both directions. That’s 42 miles of swimming. As part of the fundraising effort, A2A3 is inviting people to do their own swims (or runs) locally. They’ve computed a running-miles equivalent of 73.5 miles for a one-way channel swim. The six-woman relay hopes to break the world record for such a channel swim of 18 hours 59 minutes.

Thinking about people who want to participate in the event locally, most of them would not be able to hop into Half Moon Lake and swim for 19 hours. And most local runners would not be able to lace up a pair of shoes and hit the pavement, knocking out 73.5 miles all in one go.

So A2A3 is providing a log sheet for those who register to participate. That way people can keep track of their miles over a longer period of time. There’s no requirement that people complete their miles at the same time the channel swim takes place, in the summer of 2012. You can start right now.

Those log sheets will measure milestones that aren’t counted with a calendar. And those are the kind of milestones I want to think about this month. [Full Story]

Three years ago today, we launched The Ann Arbor Chronicle with a lot of hope but no certainty of success – we didn’t know if others would embrace our passion for intense coverage of local government and civic affairs. We’re grateful that you did – and on July 29, we hosted an open house to thank the people who’ve helped us get this far, and to honor a few of the people who make this community special.

The lead photo in this column was taken at that event, and like the other photos below, it was shot by my former Ann Arbor News colleague, Lynn Monson. Many of you will recognize Jeremy Lopatin in this image – he and his wife Aubrey are owners of Arbor Teas. They’ve been Chronicle supporters from Day One, but that’s not why we chose this photograph.

The image shows a quiet, gentle moment between a father and his child, amid the cacophony of a crowded room. It’s an intimate detail that likely passed unnoticed by most people around them. But if you were paying attention and witnessed it, it was one of the most special moments of the evening.

Details are important to The Chronicle. We pay attention to them – some might say to a fault. But we see value in the interplay of fine lines that define our community. We’ve strived to bring a finer-grain of detail to the workings of our local government, to record the context in which decisions are made that involve taxpayer dollars. For whatever role you’ve played in helping us do that – as an advertiser, subscriber, commenter, contributor or Chronicle reader and evangelist – we thank you. It’s been an interesting three years.

When we launched The Chronicle on Sept. 2, 2008, we thought we knew this community pretty well. But over the past three years we’ve encountered even more people whose generosity of spirit and commitment to the Ann Arbor area have amazed us.

So as we started thinking of how to celebrate our first three years in business, it seemed obvious that in addition to thanking people who’ve helped us get this far, it was a fitting time to honor some of the people who represent the qualities we admire and respect. And that’s the genesis of the Bezonki Awards, which we gave out at the July 29 open house, held at the Workantile Exchange on Main Street.

We asked local artist Alvey Jones, creator of the Bezonki cartoons published each month in The Chronicle, to make a physical artifact that reflected the uniqueness of this community. And each of the six Bezonki Awards is gleefully unique, at the same time futuristic and grounded in the past – some of the parts were salvaged from equipment at the former Ann Arbor News.

The people who received the 2011 Bezonkis are also unique. Yet for everyone who received an award that evening, there are dozens of others who make similar contributions, shaping this community in special ways. We are thankful for all of you, and thankful that the past three years have allowed us to get to know you in ways we didn’t anticipate.

These awards are a bit unusual in another way. In some sense, they’re just on loan. We’re asking that each winner of the Bezonki be a steward of the award for a year. They will then pass on the physical award to next year’s winner. We hope that in this way the awards will create connections between people in the community year after year – people who might not otherwise have crossed paths.

So who received the inaugural Bezonkis? They are people you likely already know for their work in the community: Claire and Paul Tinkerhess, Jason Brooks and Matt Yankee, Vivienne Armentrout, the teachers and students at Summers-Knoll School, Yousef Rabhi, and Trevor Staples. You’ll read more about them below.

And now, on to the Bezonkis! [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s 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.

Today, on the occasion of the primary elections for the Ann Arbor city council, The Chronicle reminds readers to vote and to encourage their neighbors and co-workers to do the same. Not sure where your polling place is located? Type your address into the My Property page of the city website.

Next month, publisher Mary Morgan will write a column commemorating the third anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The achievement of that chronological milestone will be a big deal. Given the overall economic climate in Michigan, I think it’s a big deal for any new enterprise to stay in business for three years.

But the milestone I look forward to achieving is not chronological. It’s a milestone that will depend on The Chronicle’s meeting more than modest pay-the-bills financial goals. It’s the milestone of … dog ownership.

I’d like a dog.

Owning a dog is a big time commitment. And currently, the demands of reporting, writing and editing for The Chronicle make it impossible even to contemplate adding the burden of that commitment.

That’s fine for now. Besides, the two cats that share our house would likely not vote for the addition of any dog to the household. They have been known to register their dissent on various (unknown) household issues using standard feline communication channels.

So for now, I’d join the feline party in voting against a dog. That vote is based in part on deference to the cats. But it’s also based on the fact that The Chronicle has not yet achieved the financial success required to add a dog to the household. Some of our work is already farmed out to paid freelancers. But only when we are able to distribute more of the current work load to other people (by rewarding them with cash money), will I be able to think about taking on a dog.

So once again, I will use the monthly milestone column in part to sit up and beg: Here’s how to support The Chronicle with a voluntary subscription.

To lend some detail to this month’s pitch, I’d like to stress that it’s not just any dog I am looking for. I’m looking for a dog that can easily carry the name Shep the Newshound. He’ll come from the Humane Society of Huron Valley’s shelter. And I will refer to him always with his complete name – Shep the Newshound. This is not rational. (Shepherds are, of course, not hounds.)

But when it comes to other animals, humans are not a completely rational species. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor 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.

For about a dozen years, I was employed by the local newspaper, The Ann Arbor News, a publication that no longer exists. As one of the editors, I had influence but not control over what was published.

Now, as publisher of The Chronicle, it’s liberating to have the discretion to choose exactly what appears in our pages. But that freedom is somewhat checked by an over-arching decision to focus on coverage of local government and civic affairs.

It’s not a cherry-picking approach to journalism, which selects topics that might draw the most controversy. Instead, it relies on a methodical, relentless depiction of what happens at public meetings, where decisions are made about how taxpayer dollars are spent, or about public policy that affects our daily lives, even if we’re not aware of it.

Much of The Chronicle’s time is allocated based on our commitment to this model. If there’s a meeting of the city council or planning commission or county board or library board …  or the humane society construction bond oversight committee … you’ll likely find us there.

On occasion, we do find time for more playful fare. A recent example of that was a Sonic Lunch photo essay, with fake captions, that we published earlier this week.

I was able to take in another event this week that also reflected the playful side of local media – from 1936. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor 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.

The May meeting of the University of Michigan board of regents was remarkable for a rare display of discord. It’s the only time I can recall that this particular board has publicly voiced disagreement with the administration. It’s the only time I can remember some unscripted debate unfolding among regents on a substantive issue – the issue was a resolution recognizing the right of graduate student research assistants to unionize.

After the meeting, I happened to be leaving at the same time as UM president Mary Sue Coleman. As we walked down the hall together, I told her that despite the tension and clearly deep disagreement on this issue, I had found it refreshing to see an actual public debate at the meeting. It simply never happens.

Whatever disagreements exist among regents – or between regents and the administration – seem to be aired privately. When tuition rates are set, some regents will read statements of polite disagreement, before casting their votes of dissent. But most action items are approved unanimously, with little if any comment. I told Coleman that I realized the meeting had been at times uncomfortable, but that I appreciated the debate.

She gave me a withering look. “I’m sure you do,” she said, crisply.

Her pointed disdain took me aback – though I should have seen it coming. From her perspective, she’d been delivered a very public defeat on an issue she is passionate about, grounded in her personal experience. She seemed weary. But her comment also revealed a view of the media that’s more prevalent and more justified than I like to admit. It’s a view of reporters as hungering for headline-grabbing, website-traffic-sucking stories – and if the facts don’t quite deliver the juice, well, there are ways to spice up reality. There’s a reason why news gathering is sometimes called “feeding the beast.”

From that perspective, Coleman perhaps heard my remarks as the comments of someone who was hungry for more drama of regents mixing it up in front of the plebeians. Ouch.

So on my drive home from UM’s Dearborn campus – where the regents meeting was held – I thought about why the exchange had touched a nerve for me. For one, I’m dismayed that elected officials and other civic leaders are so often reluctant to hold difficult discussions in public. The board of regents is not the only body that does its business like a tightly choreographed kabuki dance. But as a journalist, I’m angered when irresponsible actions by those who earn a livelihood as part of the news media give public bodies a cheap excuse to be even more closed-off. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s 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.

Writing on Damn Arbor, a blog maintained by a half-dozen self-described “grad students, townies, and derelicts,” Quinn Davis wondered recently: “So. If a citizen gasps during a city council meeting but no one reads about it, what’s the point?”

Davis posed the rhetorical question in the context of an article she’d written for the Washtenaw Voice, a Washtenaw Community College publication she edits. About that article, her advisor ventured: “I worry that our readership may not be that interested enough to get through 800 words you have so far.”

Here at The Ann Arbor Chronicle, we would also worry about an 800-word article. We’d wonder what happened to the other 5,000 words.

Count that exaggeration as a rhetorical flourish.

In fact, since since June of last year, we’ve routinely published items shorter than 500 words. These  items are outcomes of individual public meeting votes and other civic events – they’re collected in a sidebar section we call the Civic News Ticker. Readers can view all those items in one go on the Civic News Ticker page. Readers who prefer to receive The Chronicle using an RSS feed reader can subscribe to just the Civic News Ticker items with this feed: Civic News Ticker Feed.

But back to the rhetorical question: What is the point of ever including details that most people might not ever read, in an article that tops 10,000 words?  [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s 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.

I’d like to begin this month’s milestone column by sharing some good news about one of The Chronicle’s writers – Jennifer Coffman, who covers the Ann Arbor Public Schools board of education for us. Last week she gave birth to a baby girl: Eleanor Olivia Coffman. So she’s on a break from The Chronicle for a while.

Until Coffman returns, Eric Anderson will be providing The Chronicle’s AAPS board coverage. Eric grew up in Ann Arbor and is a graduate of Hope College. His experience includes work as a reporter at the Hillsdale Daily News and an editorial intern at the Washington Post Express. He’s planning to attend graduate school later this year.

Coverage of the AAPS board has become part of the meat-and-potatoes reporting provided by The Chronicle, along with reports on the Ann Arbor city council, the Washtenaw County board of commissioners and many other public bodies.

But not everything published in The Chronicle is meat and potatoes. I think it’s a relatively small portion of our overall corpus, but some of our material is probably more like a Twinkie than a piece of meat.

Many of the Stopped.Watched. items, for example, might be analyzed as more like Twinkies than a T-bone steak. Which, I think, is fine – for Twinkies, like T-bones, are also food. I wouldn’t want to make a meal out of Twinkies, though.

The Ann Arbor Active Against ALS Twinkie Run, which took place on April 1, serves as a nice analogy to the way we think of The Chronicle material that’s more like Twinkies.

On Friday evening in Gallup Park, the 271 runners who competed in the 5K race were presented with a choice on each of two laps through the park: (1) Take the time to eat a Twinkie and earn a 1-minute deduction to their finish time, or (2) Just keep running and take the straight-up meat-and-potatoes time. The annual run was observed last year as a Stopped.Watched. item. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s 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.

We no longer number the monthly milestones here at The Chronicle. If we did, this one for March 2011 would be number 30. Parents with young children can probably peg 30 months to 2.5 years without even doing the math. Two and a half years does not seem like a terribly long time for a publication to stay in business – especially compared to the nearly 175-year run of The Ann Arbor News. The announcement of that paper’s closure came two years ago – on March 23, 2009. Coming as it did late in the month, the grim news did not figure in The Chronicle’s March 2009 monthly milestone.

Instead, publisher Mary Morgan filled the column that month with mostly lighter fare, including a mention about the addition of the Skyclock widget to the right sidebar of this website – scroll down to the bottom under the advertisements. Now, exactly two years later, Skyclock has again earned a spot in the milestone column – which this month is a quick tour of twilight, marijuana, and snow. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s 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.

Less often than I would like, I use a membership-funded co-working space on Main Street in downtown Ann Arbor called The Workantile Exchange to write and edit the material in this publication.

But even when I do work there, I am not all that productive, if productivity is measured by the number of words I type. Of course, I do type some words there. Some of these very words you are reading right now were typed at the Workantile. But number-of-words-typed is not how I measure the Workantile’s value to me.

So how do I assess the value of what I accomplish there?

It’s like describing the result of a snowstorm. [Full Story]

Editor’s note: The monthly milestone column, which appears on the second day of each month – the anniversary of The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s 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.

Holiday mail received by The Chronicle this year included an envelope addressed to “Dave Askins, Newspaper Man.”

I knew who had sent it without looking at the Virginia return address. It was from a guy nicknamed “Huck.”

Inside was a bonus – Huck’s holiday letter. It was a two-pager. The second page featured a paragraph that drew my gaze in that way your own name will when rendered in print: “So I Googled all Ann Arbor newspapers and emailed the first one for help – three hours later Mr. Dave Askins of The Ann Arbor Chronicle …”

Long story short: Richard Huckeby – “Huck The Elder” – and his lovely bride Rita were traveling across the country in early December, and were hoping to visit their friend Tom Stockton in Ann Arbor. But they were having trouble connecting via email or phone, which they’d used reliably in the past to communicate with him.

Otherwise put, Huck was looking for Tom. And Huck had asked a newspaper man for help. [Full Story]