John U. Bacon

This week, a company called “CareerCast.com” ranked more than 1,000 American jobs, and determined that the worst job in America isn’t garbage collector, dog cage cleaner or Lindsay Lohan sobriety tester – but journalist.

Yes! Score! Booyah!

They based their rankings on four criteria: the workplace environment, the industry’s future, average income, and stress.

Okay, it’s true: newsrooms usually aren’t pretty places, and the future isn’t any prettier for newspapers. You can make more money doing a lot of other things – and, yes, the stress is very real. The hours are long and late, and many of our customers think they can do our jobs better than we can. They’re often nice enough to take the time to tell us that – even if they’re complaining about a different news outlet that screwed up and somehow we’re responsible. Hey, at least they care.

Journalists themselves reacted to this ranking with all the calm, cool, collected professionalism of Geraldo Rivera and Nancy Grace. But here’s why: newsrooms aren’t for everybody, but we like them – the hustle and bustle and energy and urgency. We like the stress, too – no matter how much we complain about it – because it comes with doing work we believe actually matters.

We get to go right to the action and meet fascinating people, then tell their stories – and ours, too.

Kurt Vonnegut said, “Any scientist who can’t explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan.” But I think that applies to all of us.  For farmers, doctors and teachers, explaining what they do to an eight-year old is pretty easy.  Journalism isn’t as important as those jobs, in my opinion, but our answer would be just as simple: “We tell stories.”

As for the future, it’s true, newspapers are committing a slow suicide, and that’s hard to watch. But my college students read more stories on the internet every day than we ever used to read in newspapers. We just haven’t figured out how to make money from the internet, where everybody expects to get everything for free. But we will. We’re Americans. Figuring out how to make popular things pay is what we do best.

True, the salaries aren’t great, especially when you’re starting out. But everybody I know is doing much better than the average salary the survey cited, and if you stick with it, you can actually make a pretty good living in this business – certainly a lot better than the experts told me I would.

But that’s beside the point. I’ve been to too many funerals, but I’ve noticed that at every single one of them, no one mentioned how much money the guy made. If you think that’s how the quality of your life will be measured, you are headed for a very rude awakening – perhaps after you’re gone.

I don’t know a single soul who got into journalism for the money. And if they did – well, like Rick in Casablanca, “They were misinformed.”

It doesn’t bother me that many adults might agree with the job ranking. But it does bother me that 20-year-olds might think it’s true – and miss out on something immensely satisfying. Journalists, like teachers, preachers and nurses, to name just a few, love what we do for reasons the survey never considered.

These rankings are based on the assumption that work is nothing more a necessary evil, so our goal should be to minimize the pain while maximizing the gain. By this cynical formula, if you can limit your headaches while expanding your haul, you win.

That you might actually be passionate about what you do – or even that you should be – is not part of this equation. But the vast majority of journalists I’ve worked with are extraordinarily passionate about their mission – far more than the corporate suits that closed too many of their newspapers, instead of selling them to investors who wanted to keep them alive.

I caught the writing bug my junior year in college. The same semester my teacher asked me if I wanted to go to a party, and I said sure – not realizing the party was for the entire English department. After I embarrassed myself thoroughly – wearing a flannel shirt and jeans among turtlenecks and bow ties, for starters – I sought out the guest of honor, a distinguished writer named Al Young, to apologize for my ignorance. He accepted my contrition with grace and good humor, so I decided to press my luck: “Do you have any advice for a would-be writer?”

Mr. Young put his arm around me, and raised an index finger. “Only this,” he said. “Don’t want to write. Need to write.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

He smiled and said, “You think about that, son.”

I thought about that during my last two years of college, and my first three years out in the “real world,” until I finally got it: If you can’t shake the writing bug, you might as well surrender and try to make a living doing it.

So, I turned down law school to do this – one of the best decisions of my life. Most of my colleagues turned down similar opportunities to pursue something we consider not a career, but a calling. If you’re lucky enough to find something you love doing that much, you’d be a fool to trade it in for a job. (And if you think the higher-ranking jobs on this list will be magically protected, you haven’t been paying attention. At the end of the day, the only security we have is our own ability.)

When you spend your life doing something you love, you’re probably going to do it better, and with better people. The University of Michigan’s late professor Christopher Peterson discovered that the biggest factor in job satisfaction is not pay or prestige, but having one great friend at work. In this business, I’ve already made dozens of great friends, people I admire and respect immensely – and I’m still making them.

Another bonus: I am never bored. Let me repeat that: I AM NEVER BORED. Ever. I don’t need more vacation, just more hours in the day.

When you’re facing most decisions, analysis and feedback are crucial. But in the two most important decisions of your life — your work, and your partner – the heart has reasons of which the mind knows nothing.

When it comes to love and work, Freud said, you must follow your heart, and not your head.

Find work you love, and forget the rest – including moronic rankings in business magazines. Because if you apply their priorities to this vital decision, you might find yourself in a joyless job compiling moronic rankings in business magazines.

And that would be a terrible waste.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football” – both national bestsellers. His upcoming book, “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2013. You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Everybody knows Mike Wallace was one of the best journalists of his time – and his time spanned nearly a century.

But he also had a great love for his alma mater, the University of Michigan, where he wrote for the Michigan Daily, and got his first taste of broadcasting. Back then, that meant working for the student radio station.

Sadly, Michigan cut its department of journalism in 1979. But it was survived by something called the Michigan Journalism Fellows – a program that brings a dozen mid-career journalists to Michigan’s campus for a year to give them a fresh start. Basically, you’re a glorified grad student, but they pay you, and you have no tests, no papers and no grades – and you share the year with a fraternity of people in your field.  Yeah, it’s that cool.

It’s a great idea – one shared by Harvard and Stanford – but Michigan’s program seemed to be entering its death rattle when Charles Eisendrath took it over in 1986. The program was down to a mere $30,000, with no place to call home. The fellows met twice a week in a campus classroom. The future wasn’t bright.

Eisendrath had a vision for the program, but he knew he needed help – and he knew where to go, too. Mike Wallace didn’t hesitate. He gave his money – one million dollars, for starters – but he also gave his time, his energy, and his unequaled influence. When Mike Wallace told you Michigan had a first-class journalism fellowship worthy of your support, you probably were not inclined to argue.

A friend of mine graduated from the Wharton School in 1989. Twenty-three years later, he still remembers Wallace’s commencement address, in which he reminded the graduates – many of them on their way to becoming millionaires – to “Do good while doing well.”

Wallace did both.

After getting the program off its death bed, Eisendrath wanted to give it a permanent home of its own. Mike Wallace and his wife Mary agreed, and bought the Fellows a beautiful house near campus. Ask any former Fellow about the Wallace House, and you’ll hear the kind of stories people usually tell about their family cottages.

Charles and company have since built a $50 million endowment for 18 journalists every year. The program – now called the Knight-Wallace Fellows at Michigan – will outlive us all.

I wanted to get in so badly, I applied twice. Both times, Charles asked his signature question: What is your dream?

I didn’t dream of wealth or fame. My dream was simple: I wanted the creative freedom to tell the stories I want to tell, and to tell them the way I want to tell them. In my business, it’s a rare luxury.

Well, my second time was the charm – and I didn’t waste a minute getting started on my dream. I wrote a pitch to teach a course at Michigan on the uniquely American phenomenon of college athletics, which I’ve been teaching now for six years.

I also started interviewing former UM football coach Bo Schembechler every Tuesday for a book on leadership. We didn’t have a publisher. We didn’t have an advance. The fellowship was my advance. A year later, we had a book contract – just two months before Bo died. I’ll always be grateful for that.

At one of the many meals the Knight-Wallace staff hosted, I happened to chat with Steve Schram, who had just been named the director of Michigan Media. A year later, when Schembechler died, Schram remembered our lunch and called me to come down to Michigan Radio and talk about Bo’s legacy – and that’s how Schram got the idea to run my sports commentary every Friday morning.

The Knight-Wallace program made all these dreams possible.

Every year, Wallace came back to speak at his eponymous house, and he captivating, even in his nineties. Unlike most donors, he made his millions doing what we do – and doing it better than anyone.

It’s usually a mistake to meet your heroes – they too often disappoint – but some men, as they say, are like mountains: The closer you get to them, the bigger they are.

Wallace was like that. He loved chatting up the Fellows by the fireplace, and he would never leave without saying goodbye to the staff, his friends.

When I asked him to endorse the Bo book he helped make possible, he not only read the manuscript – and agreed to help – he called me up to leave a long, enthusiastic message on my machine. “John Bacon,” he started, in his famously dramatic manner. “Mike Wallace.”

Yeah, I saved it.

When most people saw Mike Wallace on TV, they saw a hard-hitting investigative journalist. Others saw a loyal alumnus. I saw someone who helped change many lives forever – including mine.

So, one more time: Thank you, Mr. Wallace.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” He also co-authored “A Legacy of Champions,” and provided commentary for “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game,” which has been airing on various stations in Michigan and nationally.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

The author's media credentials for the North American International Auto Show. (Photos by the writer.)

So what was I doing at the Press Preview of the North American International Auto Show a few days ago at Cobo Hall? Even though I’m an architect in my day job, I also do some writing for EcoGeek.org, a blog focused on issues of technology and the environment. And I’ve also contributed to several other online media outlets in the past few years.

My writing sideline started with a focus on green building technology. But because of my proximity to Detroit, I found myself receiving forwarded invitations to auto industry events.

So while I’ve never particularly thought of myself as a “car guy,” I’ve come to find myself acting in the capacity of an automotive journalist. I have now attended the North American International Auto Show three or four times as a member of the press.

Despite having developed some familiarity with the process, I still feel like an interloper – as though I’m getting away with sneaking in someplace I’m not supposed to be.

Auto Show Credentialing

Gaining admittance to the auto show as a journalist is a multi-step process. In order to get a media credential, I filled out my application back in December. I submitted the application, along with copies of three recent auto-related articles I had written, as well as an assignment letter written by my editor to the show’s organizers. Because I have attended a couple of years previously, I think this was easier than in previous years – but it’s still the same process. A few days later, an email arrived saying that my credentials were approved.

On Monday, Jan. 10, I arrived at Cobo Hall before the sun was up to spend my day at the show – though not early enough to attend the 6 a.m. “Porsche Breakfast.” Once inside the building, the first order of business was to pick up my press credential at the ticket window.

Already at that point, the international scope of the show was apparent, as a group of four or five men in front of me conversed in Spanish. They were from Argentina, which I deduced from one of their passports. Then, after obtaining the badge, I had to show it, plus a photo ID, to another official in order to get a wrist band. The wrist band let me get through the doors and onto the show floor. Presumably this keeps people from swapping badges to let others into the show.

After clearing all of these hurdles, I walked through the doors and joined the other journalists for the Press Preview.

Auto Show Marketing Campaigns

I encountered the first marketing campaign even before I got to the line to get my credential badge. Stands with free copies of the Wall Street Journal were wrapped with an ad with Toyota’s tagline for this year’s show, “What’s the plural of Prius?”

Once inside, I decided to just walk a big loop through the entire show to get a sense of what the different manufacturers are promoting and to get an idea of what things I would like pursue further. The number of electric cars seemed to be a key theme last year, and even more electric vehicles are here this year – but they seem to be less in the spotlight, maybe because we learned so much about them last year.

It's not hard to figure out when a press conference is about to start.

What’s the difference between the Press Preview and the show that’s open to the general public? For one thing, you get to walk through the show with a relatively open floor. I’ve also attended the show during the days it has been open to the public, and it is much more crowded then than it is during the Press Preview.

The other key feature of the Press Preview is the company information that is provided to journalists. Throughout the day, press conferences are scheduled by different manufacturers, and hundreds of journalists will converge on that manufacturer’s booth to hear the presentation. They often include self-congratulatory sales information from the previous year, as well as some information about the company’s strategy and new model plans.

These conferences are little theatrical productions unto themselves. They are the kind of events when new models or concept vehicles are dramatically undraped with great flourish.

Even if you don’t have a copy of the floor map and the schedule of these conferences, you can tell when and where the next press conference is going to be held as the time nears: The current of people moving in one direction is a clear sign, as many of the attendees converge on the space for the next scheduled announcement.

Music precedes the introduction of the first speaker, who often has a title with labels like “executive,” “vice president,” “marketing,” and “corporate communications.” Lots of bass seems to be a musical requisite. Audi’s introduction featured lots of thundering drums, making it seem like an outtake from Battlestar Galactica – all the more when last year’s E-tron model was introduced. Theatrical lighting, large display screens, video clips, and little over-the-ear, foam-covered microphones also seem to be regular parts of these productions.

Some press conferences feature two or three different speakers, with one presenter talking about the company and the next introducing a new model, or speaking more about the new features the company is emphasizing.

Behind the scenes, some of these productions also have lavish and extensive production teams. A video production booth – that wouldn’t be out of place at a live sporting event – runs the show with a team of technicians, shifting between two or three cameras for alternating shots on the large screen displays of the speaker and the cars. They also cue the video clips showing cars out on the road or demonstrating particular features of a vehicle.

One of the last conferences of the day was BYD (Build Your Dreams), a Chinese automaker that began as a battery manufacturer. BYD was on the main floor of the show for the first time last year. The company is building hybrid and electric vehicles for China and is trying to move into the American market as well. BYD has begun its first testing in the U.S. with its F3DM hybrid car, which is being used in a fleet test with the Housing Authority of the city of Los Angeles. The director of the housing authority appeared on stage to speak briefly about the cars.

Chinese automaker BYD presented 3 Green Dreams.

The production values of the BYD presentation, as well as their booth, were not as elaborate and refined as many other exhibitors. Much of the BYD presentation was about their “3 Green Dreams,” which includes development of low-cost solar power systems to generate electrical energy, and electrical energy storage using environmentally friendly materials, along with an electrified vehicle fleet. BYD’s presentation included talk about integrating these three technologies, but only in very general terms, and without technical or commercial specifics – which made it seem much more like a political address than a business presentation.

Press conferences at the auto show serve as theater not just for the reporters in attendance, but also for a broadcast audience. This year’s Honda presentation was only partly about their cars – the 15-minute program included several minutes worth of talk about the Honda Civic concert series. Honda brought in Pete Wentz, member of the currently on-hiatus band “Fall Out Boy,” to announce a social media promotion encouraging people to compose songs about the Honda Civic. Indirectly, this is part of the corporate marketing, of course, and it serves to promote the name of the car. But it seems off topic for an automotive show.

Media Amenities

To post a story during the show, I need to use the press room, located on the third floor. I wasn’t even aware it existed the first time I attended, but I have since learned that this space is available to those of us with a press badge. It’s a very large space filled with tables and chairs for several hundred reporters, photographers, videographers, radio correspondents, and bloggers. The polyglot nature of the show is reinforced both by the numbers of national flags hanging from the ceiling overhead as well as the languages one overhears walking through the room.

The press room at the auto show.

A couple years ago, while I was writing and posting a piece for my blog, I heard how a radio reporter at the table behind me did repeated takes for a piece he was assembling for his program.

Ethernet cables and power strips cover the tables, allowing a data connection to the outside world, if you can find an open seat. Since I wanted to be able to post at least one story on the day of the show, after a few hours I made my way upstairs to the press room to write the article, as well as to have a chance to sit for a few minutes before heading back to the displays.

While a few years ago it was common for the different automakers to fly in bloggers from different outlets around the country, that has seemed less prevalent over the past couple years, though the practice still exists. When the owner of EcoGeek – the blog I write for – attended the auto show a few years ago as a guest of an automaker, it marked the only occasion I’ve met him in person.

I have also been invited on a couple of trips to other locations, and in those instances, my editors and I have disclosed the interest of the company involved in providing the invitation. But in this case, as I live in Ann Arbor, there was no need for anyone to fly me in to Detroit to cover the show, and EcoGeek will cover my expenses. I have always tried to be unbiased about my writing in any case, and although no one is paying me to write favorable things about them, I still find myself wanting to be extra clear about this.

There are still small gifts and tsotchkes the manufacturers hand out to publicize their products. The press kit has gone from the printed page (though there are still loads of printed brochures to be found) to CD- and DVD-ROMs, with high-resolution, print-ready copies of the publicity photos of all the new cars (though some manufacturers still have these, too) to USB thumb drives, which are the latest trend, and have been increasingly distributed for the last couple of years.

A sampling of memory stick press kits distributed at the auto show.

Sometimes the memory stick is packaged in a way to try to make it memorable. Fiat’s tiny flash drives were tucked into a bed of confetti inside an espresso cup and saucer set. Hyundai’s drives were in Swiss-army tools that also include a pen and LED light. Buick’s flash drive is in a wooden swing-out case. Others are simply prominently branded with the company logo.

Some manufacturers offered journalists other amenities to induce them to spend more time at their displays. Accura offered an espresso bar serving cappuccinos, lattes and mochas.

Toyota provided a table with charging stations to recharge cell phones and personal electronics, and a couple of computers for online access. These seemed to be popular with some journalists who wanted to check their flight plans.

Both of those features will likely have been reconfigured to provide additional space for the sales representatives, now that the show is open to the public.

Hands-On Fun

The lower level of Cobo includes a driving track with a number of vehicles that attendees can drive – after signing a liability waiver and taking a breathalyzer test. This year has fewer vehicles than last year, when nearly two dozen hybrid, fuel cell, and electric cars and trucks were on display and available for test drives.

Some vehicles appear only at the show for preview week and will not be available for the general public to drive. AMP, a small company that converts cars to battery electric drive, was there with a converted Chevrolet Equinox that they are starting to produce for some consumers. The converted Equinox has a 100-mile range.

Protean Motors featured a demonstration Ford F-150 pickup with its engine removed, replaced by four in-wheel electric motors to power it. Both AMP and Protean are only appearing at the preview week, and will not have their vehicles available for the public to drive. But they were attending the show in order to show their products to manufacturers and industry insiders, as well as to curious journalists.

I drove the new Chevrolet Volt, which I have been following and helping to report on since it was unveiled as a concept car. The Volt, as well as the Ford Fusion and several other cars, are available for test driving during the public show, which opened on Jan. 15 and runs through Jan. 23.

The basement area is also home to the “Smarter Living in Michigan” show, which stretches beyond cars and trucks to feature a range of displays from LED lighting and log homes to automotive battery system manufacturers and wind turbines. Also on display: a truck designed to run on biogas generated from waste material; the University of Michigan solar car; and Current Motor’s electric scooters.

A slot car race helps promote the Ford Mustang.

It struck me that this is a good year for kids at the show. Games and interactivity seem to be a popular theme with several of the exhibitors’ displays. Chevrolet has a driving game featuring the Chevy Volt that uses the Kinect for Xbox to allow two players at a time to race side-by-side, pairing the new automotive technology of the Volt with the new electronic entertainment technology of the Kinect.

Camaro includes a display that is ringed with cameras to take a 3-D picture as the subject jumps in the air in front of the car, giving you a “bullet-time” image that pans back and forth, showing you suspended in space. This example features science-fiction author Tobias Buckell and a couple of his friends: [link].

Ford has a truck-driving simulator mounted on a motion-control rig with three monitors for a widescreen display. The game was a timed race with the driver steering a simulated Ford truck along a dirt road – a motion-control simulator banks and swivels the seat to give the driver a sense of motion. Another Ford video game features an overhead view of a city and requires the driver to hit different checkpoints.

An impressively large, 4-lane slot-car racetrack helps promote the Ford Mustang.

Both Ford and GM are also notably tying back to their past with historical models on display. Ford is showing a 1960s Lincoln in that part of their display, and GM is featuring a 1950s Thunderbird in the Chevrolet display. The requisite movie car tie-in at this year’s show is satisfied with the car from “The Green Hornet,” on display in the lobby area of Cobo Hall.

Winding up the Day

Chevrolet was the last press conference of the day last Monday, starting at 6:15 p.m. Hundreds of reporters and photographers were already filling the seats by the time I got there, and I joined the throng standing to the sides to watch as a group of musicians performed with a variety of mobile electronic tablets and phones.

Three new Chevrolet Sonic models drove onto the stage behind the musicians. As the cars rolled onto the stage, dozens of cameras were held aloft, reminiscent of concertgoers with lighters, as people in the deeper rows tried to get the first pictures of these cars. Sonic executives then gave another version of the same kind of pitch I had heard a half dozen times already. They were excited about how solid the past year’s sales had been, they thought the new models were wonderful, and they would produce future models that would be just what the car-buying public needed.

A new fuel combination unveiled at this year's auto show.

The speeches ended with a mass of photographers rushing the stage to crowd the new cars while other reporters crowded the press counter for one more flash drive.

Tables were set up nearby with bottles of Detroit Lager and waiters circulated through the crowd with trays of gourmet sliders for the assembled crowd.

Both the press and the industry people seemed to be glad that the whole event was over, and I saw lots of small groups talking shop among themselves. Some company people were giving follow-up interviews to reporters, while other groups of industry people chatted together; two reporters were talking about website design services.

Twelve hours after I had arrived, I finished my slider and headed back into the night to drive home and hang up my automotive journalist’s hat for another day.

EcoGeek articles by the writer from this year’s auto show:

• Chevy Volt Is 2011 North American Car of Year
• Toyota Searches for a Plural for Prius
• Green Cars at NAIAS 2011
• Efficient Conventional Cars at NAIAS 2011
• Ford Goes After Both Hybrid Competitors with One Car

The North American International Auto Show, located at Detroit’s Cobo Hall, is open to the public through Sunday, Jan. 23. More details are on the NAIAS website.

It’s election day, so I’ll start this monthly milestone – our 26th, for those keeping score – by badgering you to tell your family, friends and neighbors to go vote. (As a Chronicle reader, you will need no reminder yourself, of course.)

George Packer (right foreground), a staff writer for The New Yorker, spoke to a recent workshop for nontraditional journalists at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. (Observant Chronicle readers will spot me sitting at the back of the classroom.) (Photo by Jim Stem, courtesy of The Poynter Institute.)

Frankly, I’ll be glad to bid farewell to Election 2010. Regular Chronicle readers know that while we’re huge fans of good governance and the democratic process, our patience is pretty thin for typical horse-race coverage of elections – complete with endorsements and accusations trotted forth by candidates, which mainstream media then use to whip themselves into a breathless, panting herd.

I’ll also be glad to have elections behind us because the month leading up to Nov. 2 has been especially taxing for The Chronicle – in good ways. But I’m looking forward to a return to our baseline level of overwork. One reason for the extra effort relates to preparation for the first candidate forum ever hosted by The Chronicle. Held on Oct. 21 at Wines Elementary for Ward 5 city council candidates, the event took a nontraditional approach. Chronicle editor Dave Askins described our thinking behind the forum’s task-based format in a recent column. You can read about the forum itself in a separate report. And if you want to review The Chronicle’s election coverage, you can find a list of election-related articles here.

Another reason that the month was busier than usual relates to an out-of-state trip I made to The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. I was a visiting faculty member there at a workshop for nontraditional journalists. In this month’s column, I’d like to focus on the Poynter visit, with some observations about The Chronicle’s work, plus a national perspective based on remarks by George Packer of The New Yorker, who also spoke at Poynter.

What Is the Poynter Institute?

The Poynter Institute is a nonprofit founded in the mid-1970s by Nelson Poynter, who was owner of the St. Petersburg Times. His intent in founding the institute was twofold: 1) to start a training center that promoted journalistic excellence; and 2) to protect his newspaper from the threat of non-local ownership, particularly by Wall Street-owned corporations. (The institute holds controlling interest in the Times.)

Poynter died in 1978, but he would no doubt have been keen to observe the media “experiment” that’s been using Ann Arbor as a petri dish for a bit more than a year now. In 2009, the East Coast owners of The Ann Arbor News decided that closing the daily newspaper here – and launching a new, mostly online publication – was their best business option.

Why Does Poynter Care About Ann Arbor, or The Chronicle?

We launched The Chronicle in September 2008, about six months prior to the announcement that The News would be closed. The closing of The News brought national attention to Ann Arbor, and to our own publication. In fact, the changes in our media market drew Poynter’s Kelly McBride to Ann Arbor last year, as part of the institute’s Sense-Making project. The project – funded in part by the Ford Foundation – is researching and supporting work in the “Fifth Estate,” a term used to broadly describe nontraditional, new media ventures that are linked to digital technology. Kelly led a workshop in Ann Arbor a year ago, as well as a public forum that I attended on the changing media landscape in this town.

When Kelly contacted me earlier this year and extended an invitation to speak at Poynter’s October workshop for nontraditional journalists, I was excited to have the opportunity. I was honored because Poynter exemplifies the kind of work we’re trying to do: The institute describes itself as “dedicated to serving journalism in the interest of democracy.” I also knew that a lot was being asked of me. I’d attended a week-long seminar at Poynter several years ago, when I was business editor at The Ann Arbor News. Their workshops are an intense experience, and expectations from participants and faculty are high.

Kelly specifically asked me to share at Poynter The Chronicle’s experience in becoming a viable business venture. In preparing my talk and reviewing our efforts to raise revenue through advertising and voluntary subscriptions, I realized again how far we’ve come and how grateful I am to those who’ve supported us. I also understand very clearly how much work we have ahead to sustain The Chronicle. Sustainability will require evolving from a small operation that’s crucially dependent on its two principals – me and Chronicle editor Dave Askins – to a more robust enterprise that, we hope, will continue to thrive long after Dave and I are gone.

Poynter Participants

The 30 or so workshop participants were geographically diverse, coming from all across the country as well as from Brazil, Colombia and El Salvador. The group included several journalists who’d worked for mainstream media, just as I have. But many participants didn’t have training or experience in traditional newsrooms. Almost all were interested in starting their own ventures, or, in several cases, had already launched some kind of online publication or blog.

I learned a lot from the participants themselves – from their own experiences, observations and thoughtful questions – as well as from other visiting faculty. Shawn Williams, founder and publisher of Dallas South News, shared the remarkable story of building his online local news site, which just recently received its 501(c)3 nonprofit status. And Mayhill Fowler, who gained fame as a blogger for The Huffington Post, described how she broke news on the Obama campaign trail in 2008, despite obstacles encountered because she wasn’t running with the mainstream media pack. She’s gutsy.

I wasn’t able to stay for the entire week – work at The Chronicle beckoned me home – but the time I did spend at Poynter was, as I’d hoped, energizing and inspiring. In particular, a thought-provoking talk by George Packer, who writes for The New Yorker, caused me to reflect on The Chronicle’s own goals, and how those fit into what’s happening at the national level.

Some Thoughts from The New Yorker’s George Packer

Even before hearing Packer speak, I knew we shared at least two areas of common ground: A formative experience in the Peace Corps (his in Togo, mine in the Central African Republic), and a commitment to long-form journalism.

The author of several books and a play, Packer has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2003, and his articles regularly surpass the 10,000-word mark. In that context, The Chronicle’s 5,000-word pieces – which some readers find exhausting – seem like picture books.

He noted that The New Yorker is “pretty healthy” as a publication, in terms of revenue and circulation. (As an aside, the magazine is owned by Condé Nast, the higher-profile branch of a media conglomerate that includes the former Ann Arbor News and its newer iteration, AnnArbor.com.) Yet long-form journalism is not enjoying similar good health, Packer said. Every economic and technical trend is moving in the opposite direction, he observed. “It’s a battle, but I do continue to believe it’s an important form.”

Packer also spoke about the importance of news-gathering at the local level. As he’s traveled the country to report on stories for The New Yorker, he’s noticed a void where local news should be. People are less likely to experience their community through the lens of local reporting – instead, they get their news (and talking points) from national media. That has the effect of homogenizing the country, he contends, saying that “the thing that defines a community is its newspaper, or source of news.”

In fact, the decline of news sources was one of three factors Packer cited as contributing to the country’s overall decline. The other two, which you could argue are related, are political polarization and economic inequality. When people can’t even agree on a common set of facts, he said, that reflects an ailing society and an ailing democracy.

His comments resonated with me. The Chronicle’s obstinate commitment to in-depth, fact-based contextual reporting flies in the face of media trends, but is a commitment I believe is crucial to the health of our nation’s democracy. Without a reliable source for information about our local government – its actions, and the facts upon which those actions are based – we have no hope of having an informed citizenry, capable of intelligently interacting with our elected and appointed leaders from a position of strength.

I’ll share one more observation from Packer’s work that struck home. At one point he described some research he’d done for an article on the U.S. Senate. It’s a fascinating – though in many ways disturbing – look at how work gets done in Washington, as this very brief excerpt reveals:

The Senate is often referred to as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” Jeff Merkley, a freshman Democrat from Oregon, said, “That is a phrase that I wince each time I hear it, because the amount of real deliberation, in terms of exchange of ideas, is so limited.” Merkley could remember witnessing only one moment of floor debate between a Republican and a Democrat. “The memory I took with me was: ‘Wow, that’s unusual – there’s a conversation occurring in which they’re making point and counterpoint and challenging each other.’ And yet nobody else was in the chamber.”

I don’t know if influence on legislative behavior trickles up or down, but I’d say the Ann Arbor city council is more akin to this disheartening description of the Senate than it should be. While there are certainly words being spoken during the council meetings, it would be overly generous to describe their interactions as “deliberations.” Deliberations might occur, but generally not during their public meetings.

In contrast, meetings of the Washtenaw County board of commissioners often do include the kind of genuine discussion that I would expect from a legislative body. Of course there are all sorts of behind-the-scenes machinations, too – that’s to be expected. The difference is that commissioners, for the most part, are willing to respond to each other, to disagree and attempt to persuade, and to sort out at least some of that work in full view of the public. Even at their most awkward, those kind of meetings give you a much better sense of what public officials believe, and that’s a good thing.

The Chronicle’s work is very much grounded in the public meetings that we cover. We try to capture deliberations, when they happen, as best we can. One highlight of the Poynter workshop was some feedback about our tagline – “It’s like being there” – which one participant described as genius. I wouldn’t call it genius, but I would say it’s an accurate reflection of our intent, for better or worse.

I liked having some time away from Ann Arbor, but I like being here even more, doing the work of The Chronicle – even on election day.

About the writer: Mary Morgan is co-founder and publisher of The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Gareth Morgan is a scientist working on problems of protein folding and stability.

The Dec. 11, 2009 edition of the scientific journal Molecular Cell includes an article called “Optimizing Protein Stability In Vivo.” It’s a paper co-authored by nine people. The first two names on the list of nine authors are Linda Foit and Gareth Morgan. The paper combines expertise in genetics and chemistry, reflected in the specific strengths of Foit and Morgan, who are two young scientists working in James Bardwell’s lab at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Michigan.

Foit’s name might already be familiar to Ann Arbor Chronicle readers in connection with what might be called a “unsuccessful physics experiment” near downtown Ann Arbor – an attempt to achieve greater residential density with a project called The Moravian. Foit addressed the city council in support of the project.

Morgan’s name is certainly familiar to our readers, but he’s no relation to the publisher of The Chronicle, Mary Morgan. Gareth Morgan was visiting Ann Arbor from England for a two-week span recently and will return to Michigan in October for around a month to continue his collaboration with the Bardwell lab.

The fact that Gareth and Linda’s contribution to the paper was equal is made clear through the last of seven footnotes on the author line:

⁷ These authors contributed equally to this work.

The collaborative nature of modern science was one of the topics that Gareth and I talked about on the teeter totter last Saturday afternoon, just before the University of Michigan football team started its season against the University of Connecticut Huskies.

We also touched on the issue of health and safety culture in U.S. labs compared to British facilities, and the role that game-playing might play in the future of science. For details, read all of Gareth’s Talk. By way of preparation, it might be worth thinking about where it’s easier to drink a cup of coffee – a U.S. lab or a British lab.

I took the occasion of Gareth’s explanation of the credit conventions for a scientific paper as a chance to reflect very briefly on how the allocation of credit is indicated in other lines of work, including journalism.

Distribution of Credit in Teeter Tottering

In my specialty – teeter tottering – the activity is inherently a collaborative effort between at least two people, one on each end. So it’s natural that the world record for teeter-tottering is credited to two people – Brandi Carbee Petz and Natalie Svenvold. They established the initial Guinness World Record for teeter tottering back in 2003, tottering for 75 hours. Yes, Petz and Svenvold would make excellent guests for Teeter Talk.

Responding to an invitation to participate in Teeter Talk, Petz wrote in a 2006 email: “… I have not set a single cheek on a teeter totter since crawling off the one after 75 hours, and now I will avoid tottering again until it is in your backyard.” Petz lives in Washington state, where she coaches track and field at Western Washington University, so a visit to Ann Arbor just to ride the teeter totter seems somewhat unlikely – still, there’s a possibility that serendipitous travel could land Petz onto my backyard teeter totter.

While teeter tottering is, in fact, at least a two-person endeavor, the convention of Teeter Talk as a publication is to list just the riders on the other end of the board from me. It’s just implicit that I was one of the people on the teeter tottering board, so I don’t require an additional credit in that sense.

Distribution of Credit in Movies

I can’t tell from its promotional trailer if a recent movie documenting the assault on Petz and Svenvold’s teeter tottering record was successful. The movie’s title is “A Tale of Two Totters.” The director, Andy Lorimer, wrote to me that he hopes to submit “Two Totters” to the Ann Arbor Film Festival. But that festival focuses on experimental films, and I don’t know if Lorimer’s movie fits that classification. If it’s not accepted by the film festival this next year, I think it’s worth trying to figure out some other way to give that “Two Totters” an Ann Arbor screening.

Movies, of course, have their own way of acknowledging contributions to the monumental effort reflected in the finished frames projected on the screen: opening and closing credits. Few movie-watchers will sit through the endless scroll of closing credits that list out names they do not recognize and describe tasks they do not understand – best boys, grips and the like. What do those people care about having their name listed?

For independent films, those kinds of credits are actually part of the motivation for some people to invest their time and effort in the movie’s production. Those credits document a contribution of effort, time and energy to the project, and that documentation itself can help a person establish a credential for doing that kind of work.

And that way of acknowledging and distributing credit can even partly underpin a general approach to getting projects done. Last summer, Bill Tozier presented as a topic of one of the brown bag discussions at the Workantile Exchange something called “The ‘Independent Film Model’ for Project-Driven Businesses.” From the description introducing that brown bag discussion:

… which is inspired by independent film production companies but intended for projects that are not necessarily films. The business structure is different from most entrepreneurial models, since the goal is not to start a long-lived business or get a job, but to get a project done as an ad hoc group, distribute credit and revenue, and move on past “distribution” as a group of independent collaborators with no long-term affiliation.

I think the absence of a longer-lived business entity that ties collaborators together on a project at least partly accounts for the more explicit acknowledgment of a person’s contribution to those kinds of projects.

For the kinds of projects associated with a business entity, or some other kind of longer-lasting affiliation, many contributions are simply taken as background assumptions that need not be explicitly stated. In a given Teeter Talk, which is by now a relatively long-lived endeavor, the background assumption is that I was one of the riders.

Distribution of Credit in Journalism, Science

Instead of a teeter tottering interview website, let’s consider a news publication – like The Ann Arbor Chronicle – as an example of a longer-lasting, business-type entity under which a vast number of projects are organized and completed. We give them names like articles, stories, columns, or pieces.

Unlike the practice in the scientific community, a news publication will typically acknowledge only a single author – we call them bylines – for a given article. Others who may have contributed in small ways aren’t singled out for credit – or blame. For example, in my guise as a lowly editor, I am not allocated a byline just for changing some of the words so that they convey coherent meaning, or adding relevant factual context the author might not have known about. Nor are editor folk allocated any explicit credit for having had the idea in the first place to devote some resources to following an issue and writing about it.

In that regard, the field of journalism seems to differ slightly from scientific fields. Take the paper that was first-authored by Gareth Morgan and Linda Foit. Listed as the last two authors out of nine are Sheena E. Radford and James C.A. Bardwell. The last position in the author listings designates the principal investigators – footnotes with contact information accompany Radford and Bardwell’s names, but not other authors’. It is Radford and Bardwell’s program of research that Morgan and Foit were executing in that paper, so Radford and Bardwell get author credit for that.

The Chronicle has a kind of “program of research” as well, but we don’t call it that. We’ll typically refer to “editorial direction.” The editor doesn’t get credit for that direction or the actual editorial work on every single occasion an article is published in The Chronicle. For example, when I asked Hayley Byrnes to write a profile of city planning commissioner and environmental commissioner Kirk Westphal, she turned in a piece, I edited it, and it then was published in The Chronicle with Byrnes’ byline – no byline for me.

Even though I conceived of the occasional “Know Your” profile series, and specifically thought it would be a good idea now to include Westphal in it, gave Byrnes the assignment to write the piece, changed many of Byrne’s original words, and added some of my own, my name is not associated specifically with that article. Instead, I’m indicated elsewhere in the publication as its editor.

That’s just the way it’s done. There are several good reasons why the pattern and practice of news publications is to leave editors’ contributions unacknowledged. For one thing, career advancement of editors does not depend on a count of bylined articles in the way that it does for reporters. So editors aren’t necessarily clamoring for their names to be tacked onto the articles they edit.

What possible positive effect would it have to add “Editorial direction and writing consultation provided by [NAME]” to every news article? One effect might be to provide readers with an assurance that someone is actually minding the store – besides the reporters, who we assume are trying the best they can, but might fall short despite their best efforts.

But an assurance to readers that someone is actually minding the store has historically come from the masthead of the publication itself. It’s implicit that any news publication employs someone else besides the reporter – an editor – who looks at everything before it’s published. Readers are supposed to take that on faith.

In the same way, the readers of Molecular Cell take it on faith that there are people who verified the merit of the papers that appear in that scientific journal – peer reviewers. The reviewers of each paper are not listed anywhere in the papers themselves. Readers simply make the fair assumption that each paper was reviewed and properly vetted.

As traditional news organizations try to compete in the mass online marketplace of news and information, one way they could try to differentiate themselves from the work of “mere amateurs” is to give explicit credit to the work of editors with every article. But I’m skeptical that tactic would be an effective way to distinguish a publication’s quality in the online marketplace.

What if there’s no perceptible difference in the quality between material that’s posted unedited online by just some guy – as compared to the articles of journalists who do the work for a living and who’ve had actual editorial assistance? If that difference is not already apparent to a mass market readers, then an extra editor’s byline isn’t going to help those readers understand that its quality is any better.

So for now, The Chronicle will be sticking with the traditional byline – with the implicit understanding that each article is carefully edited before publication.

As for Teeter Talks, I’d like to take the occasion to thank the 179 people who’ve taken a ride over the past five years, dating back to the first talk with Rene Greff on a wintery day in December 2005. Like the paper co-authored by Linda Foit and Gareth Morgan, alums of the totter have contributed equally to the Teeter Talk effort – and they all deserve some explicit credit for that. If a book is ever published, then this is what the title page should look like:

“Teeter Talk,” a story, in reverse chronological order, by Gareth Morgan, Brian Kerr, Metta Lansdale, Scott Rosencrans, Brian Tolle, Caryn Simon, Shawn McDonald, Brenda Bentley, Ariane Carr, Zachary Branigan, Christopher Taylor, Fred Posner, Kay Yourist, John Floyd, Bridget Weise Knyal, Jameson Tamblyn, Neal Kelley, Dawn Lovejoy, Elizabeth Parkinson, Carsten Hohnke, David Lowenschuss, Charity Nebbe, Stewart Nelson, Jennifer Hackett, Patti Smith, Jeremy Keck, Jeremy Nettles, Jeff Gaynor, Paul Cousins, Colleen Zimmerman, Linda Diane Feldt, Gary Salton, Dan Jacobs, Jeremy Lopatin, Julia Lipman, Andrew Sell, Sara S., Dave Lewis, Bruce Fields, Debra Power, Debbie T., Stephen Smith, Kate Bosher, Charlie Partridge, John Roos, Mary Rasmussen, Alpha Omega Newberry IV, Richard Murphy, Rob Goodspeed, Greg Sobran, Brian Ruppert, Steve Edwards, Chicken Keeper, Debra Schanilec, Cindy Overmyer, Matt Naud, Trevor Staples, Michael Paul, Lucy Ament, The Andersons, Barbara Brodsky, Burrill Strong, John Weise, Laura Rubin, David Wahlberg, Edward Vielmetti, Brooklyn Revue, Mark Lincoln Braun (Mr. B), Bryant Stuckey, Doug Selby, Al Sjoerdsma, Kyle Campbell, Amanda Edmonds, Strange Fruit, Chris Buhalis, Richard Wickboldt, Chris Zias, Russ Collins, Peter Beal, Kris Talley, Derek Mehraban, William J. Clinton, Peter Sparling, Will Stewart, Arrah and the Ferns, Patrick Cardiff, Mark Bialek, Royer Held, Matt Callow, Coco Newton, Shannon Brines, Gina Pensiero, Pete J., Liza Wallis, Diane Ratkovich, Peter Thomason, Iden Baghdadchi, Lou Rosenfeld, Bob Droppleman, Charlie Slick, Josh Funk, Nyima Funk, Zach London, Jimmy Raggett, Aimee Smith, Matt Greff, Dale Winling, Tracy Artley, Steve Kunselman, Doug Husak, John Hieftje, Paul Schreiber, Tom Wall, Melinda Uerling, Nancy Shore, Brandon Wiard, Lisa Dugdale, Geoff Eley, Annie Palmer, Dave Sharp, Eileen Spring, Todd Leopold, Matt Erard, Brandon Zwagerman, Matt Lassiter, Sam Vail, Dave DeVarti, Chris Bathgate, Chris Fici, Mark Ouimet, The Boyds, Tom Crawford, Alan Henes, Neil Cleary, Doug Kelbaugh, Scott TenBrink, Barnett Jones, John Roberts, Shelly Smith, Khurum Sheikh, Chris Pawlicki, Jesse Levine, Patrick Elkins, Sam Nadon-Nichols, Dennis Rymarz, Jim Roll, Karl Pohrt, Scott Schnaars, Josie Parker, David Collins, Erica Briggs, Ed Shaffran, T. Casey Brennan, Andy Bichlbaum, Ingrid Sheldon, B.J. Enright, Jeremy Linden, Gaia Kile, Laura (Ypsi-Dixit), Alan Pagliere, Stephen Rapundalo, Alicia Wise, Leigh Greden, Eli Cooper, Joan Lowenstein, Dustin Krcatovich, Adam de Angeli, Todd Plesco, Larry Kestenbaum, Susan Pollay, Chris Easthope, Brandt Coultas, Henry Herskovitz, Rebekah Warren, Tom Bourque, Conan Smith, Dan Izzo, Steve Glauberman, Rene Greff.

Roger Kerson at the AATA board retreat on Aug. 10. (Image links to higher resolution file.)

The AATA, branded on the sides of buses as “The Ride,” aims to be the public transportation provider for Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, as well as all of Washtenaw County. Kerson is one of seven members on the AATA board.

While he may be the newest board member, Kerson does not lack for eagerness in promoting the AATA’s current initiative to develop a countywide transportation plan. “We’re engaged in a planning process,” he says, “for developing mass transportation and we encourage people to go to MovingYouForward.org … We need to engage in a lot of conversation.” The Moving You Forward website seeks community feedback on every aspect of public transportation.

“Where do you live? Where do you work? Where do you shop? Where do you go to the movies? Are there ways in which you could reduce your carbon footprint by using transit, using the bike?” Kerson asks, adding that the AATA welcome views from all Ann Arborites and county residents, whether they use transit or not.

Encouraging that kind of communication is familiar ground to Kerson. He is currently a media consultant at RK Communications, his consulting firm. Kerson’s roots in Ann Arbor stretch from his time at the University of Michigan, where he graduated with distinction in 1980. “I think Woodrow Wilson was president then,” he quipped. Kerson stayed in Ann Arbor after college, soon becoming interested in journalism.

He began writing for a publication called The Alchemist, which he describes as “The Ann Arbor Chronicle in its day, before the Internet.”

[The editor of The Alchemist back in 1980 was James Delcamp, who's currently running for the state House seat in District 66, which includes parts of Livingston and Oakland counties. Though his time at The Alchemist apparently didn't overlap with Kerson, Delcamp wrote to The Chronicle that he has an old 1981 issue containing a Kerson piece with the headline: "Ann Arbor's Oldest Food Coop on the Brink." Delcamp called it "a great article."]

In 1988, Kerson moved to Chicago to become a freelance writer. Though he has written for mainstream publications like the Chicago Sun-Times and Columbia Journalism Review, Kerson identifies his main work as “indie media,” writing for publications such as The Michigan Voice, Michael Moore’s newspaper in Flint before Moore became a filmmaker.

Although Kerson was a stringer for the Hammond Times in Indiana, he says, “I never had a nine-to-five job … I just became a freelance writer by doing it, so I guess I’m a citizen journalist, rather than a professional one.”

Before moving to Chicago, Kerson held “one sort of leisurely job” as an intern [in 1984-1985] and ultimately a staff writer [in 1986-1987] for Solidarity, a UAW monthly publication. The job marked the start of his long affiliation with the labor union. Four years later, he ended his freelance writing to become a communications consultant, still in Chicago.  While there, the UAW became one of Kerson’s chief clients: “That was pretty interesting to me because I wasn’t just writing about it; I was being part of the issue.”

In 1999, Kerson relocated back to Michigan to become the assistant director of public relations for the UAW. By 2006, he had become the director of public relations, a job he held until earlier this year. When asked what some of the highlights were to the job, Kerson answered lightly, “We saved the auto industry.” He quickly went on, “I mean, that wasn’t just me, but that’s what happened while I was there.” As public relations director during the auto crisis, Kerson led a UAW advocacy campaign throughout 2008 and 2009 for federal aid to the auto industry.

Yet as an AATA board member, Kerson’s tendencies favor bikes and buses over cars. Kerson contrasted the shrinkage of the auto companies with his experience on the AATA: “We’re talking about expanding … Yesterday we talked about a fixed service to Ypsi, a potential train to Brighton, a potential bus service to the airport, all different kinds of services that either exist now in some form, or the AATA could do them.” Kerson was referring to a discussion that he and his fellow board members had held about those various strategic initiatives in a four-hour long board retreat/meeting on Aug. 10. [Chronicle coverage: "AATA Targets Specific Short Term Strategies"]

A good transit system, he continued, facilitates economic development and is economical to the consumer. Citing statistics from the American Public Transit Association, he said that switching to transit can save an individual $9,000 a year.

Not only is transit economically viable, he says, it’s also environmentally viable: “Transit jobs are the original green job. Every bus driver is keeping fifty cars off the road.” He cautioned, “We have to do this. We have to change how we move around because climate change is real, and the human and economic costs of that are maybe, in some ways, beyond calculation.”

Environmentalism has been a theme common to Kerson’s community activism. For three years he has served as president of the Ecology Center’s board of directors, though he ultimately considers transit and housing his two principle issues. Along with his service with the Ann Arbor-based Ecology Center, Kerson has served on the board of directors of the Washtenaw County chapter of the ACLU and the Ann Arbor Housing and Human Services Advisory Board.

In reflecting on his impressions of the AATA as a new member, Kerson emphasized the importance of forming partnerships. Although Ann Arbor is the only municipality that collects a tax to support the AATA, economic activity spreads throughout the county. He says the AATA has collaborated successfully with Ypsilanti, various townships, the University of Michigan, and private bus companies.

That spirit of collaboration runs through the rest of Kerson’s life. For example, the former journalist cites Facebook as a main medium for gathering news. While allowing he reads the New York Times and Talking Points Memo, he says, “I also get news that’s not always news of the world, but the news of the community and friends I care about.” For additional knowledge, Kerson often relies on his knowledgeable Facebook friends to scope out relevant news: “My universe of things I can look at has gotten larger – I have other people looking for me, if you know what I mean.”

Hayley Byrnes is an intern with The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Owen Gleiberman, film critic for Entertainment Weekly, grew up in Ann Arbor. (Photo courtesy of Owen Gleiberman)

Today, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly enjoys a position as one of the country’s most influential movie critics, his opinions read and respected (and sometimes reviled) by millions. Forty years ago he was a precocious middle-schooler who carried a transcript of the Chicago Seven trial in his pocket as he roamed downtown Ann Arbor, exploring the head shops and hanging with the hippies.

Soon after enrolling at the University of Michigan in 1976, Gleiberman was bit by the movie bug and began reviewing films for the Michigan Daily. He struck up a long-distance friendship with Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who encouraged him in his writing and helped him to land his first job after graduation as a critic for the Boston Phoenix.

Though he now lives in Greenwich Village, Gleiberman makes regular return trips to Ann Arbor to visit family and friends. Over tea at Café Felix on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, he related what it was like to grow up in the countercultural milieu of Ann Arbor in the late ’60s and early ’70s, how that experience influenced his career as a film critic, and his thoughts and hopes on the future of journalism.

Were you born in Ann Arbor?

No, I wasn’t born in Ann Arbor, but I moved here when I was about five or six.

You were a young kid living here when Ann Arbor was at its radical peak. Were you aware of what was going on? Did the counterculture have an attraction for you, even as young as you were?

I was ten years old in 1969. I don’t know if I can speak for other kids, but growing up in Ann Arbor I very much felt the romance of the counterculture. I remember the first Earth Day in 1970, when I was 11. You felt all this energy burbling around.

Where it really kicked in for me was in seventh grade when I started to get a little older and was able to go downtown by myself. Then I got immersed in it. I still have these incredible memories of going to State Street and seeing underground newspapers, and going into the head shops like Middle Earth, which was then really a head shop. Seeing the black-light posters, seeing the underground comics, and even the beads that you would string. All of this was part of the same thing. It was part of this counterculture that was very, very real to me.

And I was into the politics then. I always say that I went through my radical Marxist-Leninist phase when I was 11, and then was smart enough to get out of it and become a centrist when I was twelve-and-a-half. But I really felt the romance of the counterculture. To me then as a kid it seemed like American culture was being changed in a good way by all of this hippie energy, which I think in a way that it was. It was very, very important to me. It really almost defined Ann Arbor for me, or defined what I loved most about Ann Arbor.

I used to have a transcript of the Chicago Seven trial that I would carry around with me and read all the time when I was in seventh grade. So I knew that by the time I was 12 years old that Ann Arbor was not just this kind of cool, fun, mellow place with a lot of candle shops, but that all of this stuff meant something, culturally – that Ann Arbor was at the forefront of things that were going on nationally. That was true, and I perceived it, and I thought it was really cool about Ann Arbor. It made me very proud of the kind of city it was. It just made me love the place.

My favorite thing to do was to go downtown. There was such a continuity among all these countercultural activities, that you felt like you were sort of participating in the counterculture just by going to play pinball.

Owen Gleiberman's graduation photo from Pioneer High School. (Courtesy of Susan Cybulski.)

When I was in junior high and high school, I really got into going to the city council meetings, after they’d elected the two members of the Human Rights Party. It was such a great weekly human drama in seeing these two Human Rights Party people, Nancy Wechsler and Jerry DeGrieck, be these kind of token hippies on this very straight city council. It was like the Chicago Seven trial every week, in miniature, in the way these people would clash with each other.

That’s as close as I ever got to being politically active. Because I am not an activist. As I grew older I started to develop a sort of disdain for protesters with signs, because I actually am a centrist at heart, and I think that protesters often call attention to nothing so much as themselves. I really am for political action getting done, and finding the middle way, and doing things. And yet, the protests did serve a function back then, and I really identified with it.

Also there was so much about the counterculture that wasn’t about politics. It was about music, it was about fashion, it was about drugs, it was about new ways of seeing. That’s the side of the counterculture that I really identified with.

There was a sense of optimism in those days, even though looking back it seems like it was a dark time for America.

Those were dark times for America. Yet all of that was giving such life to popular culture. That’s one of the reasons that the movies of the ’70s were so vital, and are now so mythologized. It was because popular culture was so vital back then. The incredible music, the incredible movies. How could you look at that stuff and not feel a certain optimism about America?

Yes, we had a corrupt government, we had a corrupt president. But the outrage at that was reflected in our popular culture, and we had a system that worked. We had a system that spat out the bad guys. And we had a press that sort of came to the rescue. So ultimately, although there was a lot of negativity, I don’t think the ’60s and ’70s were a negative time for America.

I think the beginning of the real negative time was the election of Ronald Reagan. I think that was the paradigm shift, because that’s when we went through the looking glass. That’s when we seemed to be moving into this greater optimism, but it was a phony optimism. I think that’s when we moved from the politics of reality to the politics of unreality. And I think that’s what led to where we are today.

Do you think that growing up in Ann Arbor had a significant effect on your later life?

I’ll tell you how I think that I’m totally a product of Ann Arbor. What I loved about the ’60s, and what I still do, is that there was something very hard-headed and no-bullshit about the Ann Arbor view. There’s always been a certain skepticism that the people in Ann Arbor have.

During the counterculture era they were skeptical of the lies being told by government. But I also grew up with a certain skepticism about the Left. I saw the kind of groupthink mentality that was there. It seemed to me that the Ann Arbor point of view that I learned was, don’t trust packaged truths, wherever they come from. Look for your own truth, and stick to that.

That, to me, was the real message of the counterculture. To be true to yourself, and to look at who you were as an individual, and express that. That’s what the ’60s meant to me. And that’s the side of Ann Arbor that I still try to carry into my work today.

Groupthink is what’s killing this country, in every form. There’s a lot of groupthink in my profession, film criticism. Even the mentality now that says you’re supposed to stand up for independent films, you’re supposed to stand up for small films.

Wait a minute – who said you’re supposed to stand up for any kind of film? You’re supposed to stand up for good movies. You’re supposed to stand up for your own individual, idiosyncratic judgments. That’s what I believe film criticism should be about.

Do you come back to Ann Arbor a lot? Is it a second home, or maybe a getaway of sorts?

In some ways I think of it like that. I love coming back here. There is a certain spirit of the place, that I think it still has, that I reconnect to. Everybody likes to reconnect with their roots, but in my case the roots are something I still believe in. They still nurture me.

I don’t know if I would be a film critic if I hadn’t grown up in a place like Ann Arbor. It always inspires me to come back here.

Tell me about your road to becoming a film critic. There was a thriving community of film buffs in town during the ’60s and ’70s. Were you a part of that?

Absolutely. The film culture in Ann Arbor is really what gave me my own start as a movie buff. I was nurtured in that environment. It’s what showed me what love of cinema was all about.

This was an era in which being a movie buff was just part of the atmosphere of the time. There was a phrase around in the ’70s, called the film generation. It was the idea that people who came of age around that time were maybe the first generation that saw film as their literature. That they took film seriously, the way that an earlier generation had taken novels. A lot of people on campuses felt that way. I mean, students were just really into going to the movies, and taking them seriously.

The University of Michigan was a big enough place to support a lot of film societies. And on certain nights you would go and these screenings would be packed. Especially if it was a certain kind of movie. A Woody Allen double feature on Saturday night would have lines around the Modern Languages Building. Screwball comedies, Hitchcock films, they got that kind of response. Other movies were more obscure, but in general there were a lot of people who went to these movies.

It doesn’t seem that surprising for Woody Allen to draw a big crowd at the campus cinema. What does surprise me is that crowds would turn out for a Bogart picture, or even a silent comedy by Chaplin or Keaton.

I think this was the first era where going to see old movies had become kind of cool. I think part of that was that the ’60s were about overthrowing a lot of old stuff, and about only seeing new things as cool.

But by the time the ’70s really settled down, a lot of that was over, and for the first time I think a lot of students started to go back to those earlier models of movie stars, and of romantic comedies, things like that, and realized these were incredible movies, too. And there was something actually quite cool about them.

At some point you started writing about movies for the Michigan Daily, and even took a turn as Arts Editor.

I think one of the things that really got me involved in the Daily is that in my second semester, freshman year, I had really connected with a couple of Robert Altman films that I got very excited about. That semester a student group put together a whole Robert Altman festival, where they showed all his films, and they had all these people from his films come and give talks, like Elliot Gould, and Joan Tewkesbury, writer of “Nashville.”

I decided I wanted to be involved in that, and to cover it for the Daily. It was covering that event over my whole second semester that sort of fused being a movie buff and writing, for me.

The Daily was a first-class newspaper in the 1960s, competing with the professional papers in the area, and often having its stories picked up by the national news media. How was it in your day?

I think it was pretty good. One thing I know for sure is that the attitude we had at the Daily was that, in addition to just wanting to put out a good paper and serve that community, we felt that we were competing with the Ann Arbor News.

Now, the Ann Arbor News wasn’t necessarily the greatest paper, but they were a respectable paper, and they were a real paper, and they were professionally staffed. We just took it for granted that they were our competition, and I think that was a healthy attitude to have. How often did we scoop them, or do better coverage, I don’t know. But I think that was the right attitude to have.

What are your thoughts about the folding of the Ann Arbor News?

Well, from what I’ve read, they did it in part as an experiment. Ann Arbor was considered one of the most wired communities in the United States. So this was an experiment to see if a town that was sophisticated, that had a lot of people that used the Web, like Ann Arbor, could make the transition to getting their news online, as opposed to reading a newspaper. If in fact the experiment – a rather reckless experiment, I’d say – was successful, then it would sort of show how this could happen in other communities.

I believe what’s happened so far – and this is very anecdotal because I don’t live here, but I do know people in Ann Arbor so I try to keep up with this a little bit – my feeling is that if I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would say that the community of Ann Arbor misses the Ann Arbor News. That they still miss it, and it’s not just nostalgia.

What that paper provided, a sense of the information in one place, a sense that everybody would be reading that same information that you read – that gave you something. It gave you a certain feeling of unity about the information in the community, which is what a newspaper provides, and that that has not really been replaced.

If that’s true, then I would say the experiment was not really a success, and may actually aid the preservation of newspapers. Because yes, they’re up against it economically, yes, their business plan has been eroded, yes, it’s going to continue to happen. But if people genuinely like newspapers and continue to find a use for them, then that’s a reason to keep them around.

Would you say then that you’re cautiously optimistic about the future of journalism?

I think that moving into the digital era doesn’t need to affect writing that much. I mean, I’m not sure there needs to be a mystical difference between reading a piece through a digital medium or reading it on dead trees. I don’t know if the definition of a good piece of writing has really changed. I don’t know if people’s hunger for good writing has really gone away.

Now, of course, the big question in journalism is, people seem willing to pay for journalism and writing if it’s on dead trees, and they seem hostile to paying for it digitally. That’s the big question looming for journalists. Will we ever get to a point where people actually want to pay to read things digitally?

My feeling is, maybe yes. Certainly that’s what I think should be. But going forward that’s a great unknown.

About the writer: Alan Glenn is currently at work a documentary film about Ann Arbor in the ’60s. Visit the film’s website for more information.

Rough notes for the first rough draft of Ann Arbor history.

In this month’s milestone message, I’m going to explain what we do here at The Ann Arbor Chronicle. And I’m going to do it in a way that is intended to inspire additional voluntary subscriptions to our publication.

About 47 years ago, in a speech delivered in London to correspondents for Newsweek magazine, Washington Post publisher Philip Graham called journalism the “first rough draft of history.” The contention that journalists are writing history – even just a first rough draft – is pretty high-minded talk. Writing any draft of history certainly sounds sexier than the sheer drudgery of taking notes through a six-hour city council meeting seated on hard pew-like benches and condensing that material into a few thousand words for Ann Arbor Chronicle readers.

That’s an aspect of the job Graham meant in the first, less famous part of the “rough draft” quote [emphasis added]: “So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand …”

I think that digital technology allows journalists the possibility of providing a far better first draft of history than was previously possible. It’s better in the sense that it can be more comprehensive, and more detailed than the drafts that were constrained by printed newspaper column inches.

But seriously. Why does Ann Arbor need someone to write down its history? Do we here at The Chronicle really imagine that 100 years from now anyone will care that some new parking meters got installed in front of the Old Town Tavern? Nope. I don’t. Not really. Well, maybe. Okay, no. Not, really.

Sure, in an unguarded moment, I’ll indulge in the reverie that Ann Arbor’s 2110 version of Laura Bien will be mining The Chronicle archives and writing – for some next-century information distribution system – an article called “The Man Who Loved Parking Meters.”

More useful than 100-year-old history, however, is the history of five years ago, a year ago, or even a month ago. Because it’s the things that were said and done one month ago or one year ago that matter for elected officials making policy decisions, and for voters making choices at the polls.

So this month’s milestone provides a couple of examples demonstrating that The Chronicle is a pretty decent  source of recent local history – a better source than the recollections and conversations of our local political leaders.

Whereas: History is important

Legislative bodies, like the Ann Arbor city council, have an opportunity to record their own version of history when they write resolutions. Resolutions are divided into two blocks of statements, first the “whereas” clauses followed by the “resolved” clauses. It’s the “whereas” clauses that provide an opportunity for establishing a historical record of events that give background for the action that the body is taking. The action part of a resolution is expressed in the “resolved” clauses.

This ground was actually covered by Chronicle commenters back in March 2010 in a thread about a Chronicle city council meeting report. A question was posed by Rod Johnson [link]:

I’ve never understood the function of “whereas” and “resolved” clauses in resolutions. Do they actually have some specific force, or are they just part of the rhetoric of resolution-talk? Some sort of archaic survival from the 18th century?

And a response to Johnson’s question came from Vivienne Armentrout [link]:

… there is a very specific meaning to whereas and resolved clauses. Basically, the whereas statements are background to establish the thinking behind a legislative motion. They are also used as political puffery. [...]

But the “resolved” is actually the law being made. [...] It’s the resolved clauses that you have to watch.

Just as an aside, that’s a pattern of interaction for comments on this website – question followed by answer – that’s worth highlighting. It’s the sort of commenting that I think adds value to The Chronicle.

Whereas: Implied history is also important

While Armentrout is right that it’s the “resolved” clauses that have a material impact on the world, I think it’s worth watching the “whereas” clauses as well – not just what gets written into them, but what gets redacted from them. Tracking the versions of different “whereas” clauses can reveal that councilmembers care deeply not just about the history that’s explicated in “whereas” clauses, but about history that might be implied by the language of “whereas” clauses.

Consider, for example, a resolution approved at the city council’s most recent meeting on May 17, 2010 concerning the city’s future discussions with the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority. Those discussions will address a revision to the contract under which the DDA manages the city’s parking system. It’s a topic The Chronicle has covered in detail starting in January 2009.

Considered by the council on May 17 was a resolution that for the second time created a city council committee to meet with a corresponding committee of DDA board members to negotiate a revision to the parking contract.

Among the “whereas” clauses was this:

Whereas, It is in the public interest that these negotiations are conducted transparently;

As The Chronicle reported out of that meeting, Stephen Rapundalo (Ward 2) wanted that clause stricken. Why? Is Rapundalo against transparency? No. Rapundalo was working from the premise that the city council’s work is always conducted transparently and that the city council in general values transparency. To include such a “whereas” clause would be redundant. So by including the clause, Rapundalo felt it somehow implied, through redundancy, that to date there had been less-than-transparent behavior.

The fact is, there had been less-than-transparent behavior. This is not something open to dispute or interpretation. Specifically, a working group of city councilmembers and DDA board members had met for the first four months of 2010 out of public view, and outside of the committee structure that the two bodies had established to undertake the work that the working group actually did.

But the “whereas” clause was stricken – with dissent from three other councilmembers, who are apparently better students of recent city council history than Rapundalo. At the council table, he subsequently revealed that he was not in command of some basic facts crucial to his contention that there’d been no less-than-transparent conduct.

Whereas: The Ann Arbor Chronicle writes a historical record

Rapundalo contended that he’d done “due diligence” in reviewing city council minutes and that he’d found no action by the city council since January 2009 on the issue of the DDA parking agreement. He thus questioned whether the council had ever appointed a committee for the purpose of renegotiating the parking contract with the DDA. At the council table Sandi Smith (Ward 1), supported by the city clerk, corrected Rapundalo’s gap in knowledge of recent history.

The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s coverage of the issue has featured prominently the fact that the city council did create and appoint a committee – but only reluctantly, because city councilmembers did not like the composition of the DDA’s committee. On multiple occasions, The Chronicle has published timelines featuring the city council’s creation and appointment of its own committee.

Chronicle coverage confirms what Rapundalo could have confirmed for himself – even if he’s not a Chronicle reader – using the city’s publicly accessible online Legistar system that manages the legislative history of all the city’s public bodies. Legistar turns up the council appointment of its committee on a simple search.

Whereas: Talking about parking in parks is upsetting

The city council meeting that featured Rapundalo’s worries about the implications of including transparency language in a “whereas” clause was the same meeting when the council approved its FY 2011 budget.

In the city administrator’s proposed budget there’d been a very modest amount of revenue factored in for introducing a program to allow parking in two city parks – Allmendinger and Frisinger – only on University of Michigan football Saturdays. The council amended out the parking-in-the-parks proposal.

Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3) expressed some irritation that the proposal had even been part of the proposed budget. He wanted to include a “resolved” clause in the city budget amendment that would direct the city administrator to refrain from proposing it in the future. It was the city administrator’s budget to propose, so the direction to the city administrator, Roger Fraser, seems on target.

But where did that idea of Saturday football parking in the parks come from? If you were forming an opinion based only on the conversation at the council table that night and at the council’s previous meeting, you might reasonably assign the “blame” for the idea to the city’s park advisory commission (PAC). Mayor John Hieftje said that PAC had recommended the idea. Christopher Taylor (Ward 3) went on at some length praising PAC for leaving the proposal in their recommendations, saying that PAC had less latitude to look elsewhere to address budget challenges than the city council did.

Not included in the remarks by Hieftje and Taylor was the salient point that PAC did not conceive of the parking-in-the-parks idea. PAC was reacting to a proposed budget from city staff, who ultimately report to the city administrator. So it wasn’t PAC’s idea. Maybe it was Fraser’s.

That’s a convenient historical narrative and one consistent with Hieftje’s comments the night the budget was approved. Hieftje moved the conversation past Kunselman’s suggestion to give the city administrator explicit direction on parking in the parks, by assuring Kunselman that Fraser had “gotten the message.”

But I don’t think it’s just Fraser who needed to hear the message. It was also Kunselman’s fellow councilmembers. For FY 2011, the idea for parking in the parks could reasonably be analyzed as sprouting back in October 2009 – in the form of a resolution placed on the agenda by four councilmembers, but which was then subsequently deleted from the agenda. From The Chronicle’s reporting in October, which we cited as a part of the budget meeting report:

Placed on the agenda on Oct. 2, with sponsorship from Sandi Smith (Ward 1), Sabra Briere (Ward 1), Carsten Hohnke (Ward 5), and Mike Anglin (Ward 5), was a resolution that would have allowed the city to generate revenue from parking cars in Frisinger Park on home football Saturdays. Frisinger Park is just south of East Stadium Boulevard between Woodbury and Iroquois. It was pulled off the agenda on Oct. 5.

Here’s how the resolution read:

Whereas, Frisinger Park is well situated to provide special event parking, in particular for University of Michigan home football games; and

Whereas, The City is providing home football game parking at other City-owned facilities, including its facility on S. Industrial and these parking revenues are a new source of funds for the City which is striving to maintain high quality level of service for its citizens;

Resolved, That the City Administrator establish a parking program for University of Michigan home football days at Frisinger Park, including the option for pre-game/post-game tailgating.

Sure, it’s Fraser’s budget to propose and he need not have included parking in the parks as part of it. But in answering the question of why it was in the budget at all, it’s appropriate to say out loud that six months earlier there was at least some support on the city council for the concept.

Whereas: History is sexier than bridges

The city council got an update at one of its recent meetings on the planned reconstruction of the Stadium bridges over South State Street and the railroad tracks. At one point during the meeting, there was frustration expressed by some councilmembers that the University of Michigan was not shouldering a share of the cost for the project.

Sandi Smith (Ward 1) raised the issue with respect to the bridge reconstruction itself. Margie Teall (Ward 4) raised the issue of UM helping to pay for street reconstruction due to road surface damage that the football stadium reconstruction project had caused in the same corridor.

City administrator Roger Fraser, and city project manager Homayoon Pirooz, were essentially diplomatic in their responses to councilmembers. They both reported that the university had not indicated it would be shouldering costs for either of those two issues.

It would not have been out of place, however, for the pair to have mentioned that the council had three months earlier heard from Fraser, during a council meeting, that the university would be footing the bill for $450,000 worth of street and utilities work that the city itself would ordinarily fund. The work will be done in connection with the transit station on North University Avenue – improvements to the corridor are taking place this summer. The Chronicle included the $450,000 as part of a February city council meeting report.

City councilmembers equipped with The Chronicle’s reports fresh in mind on that occasion might have mentioned the $450,000. That could have led to a conversation framed by the question: What’s the balance of payments like between the city and the university? It’s a conversation that I think would be really useful for the city council to conduct in a comprehensive way, instead of the piecemeal way that the council currently thinks of city-university relations.

That conversation is unlikely to happen, I think, if on obvious occasions no one points out relevant recent history – like the university’s willingness to pay for $450,000 worth of work the city would normally fund. I think city councilmembers and Ann Arbor citizens who have the city’s recent history in mind, as recorded in detail by The Chronicle, are more likely to point out the facts that will start good conversations.

But recent history is in many ways like the Stadium bridges as described to me recently by Eli Cooper, the city’s transportation program manager. We were out on a field trip to the bridge on the occasion of a visit from the U.S. assistant secretary of transportation.

Said Cooper: “It’s a bridge. It’s not sexy.”

History is not all that sexy, either. But with all due respect to the engineers in The Chronicle’s readership, history is sexier than bridges.

Resolved: Readers will subscribe to a valuable historical record

The Chronicle’s business model is based partly on voluntary subscriptions. What voluntary subscribers are helping to buy for themselves and the city is a decent historical record of much of the city’s civic life.

And that’s valuable not just for the 100-year archives, but for the community’s shorter-term collective memory. I think The Chronicle provides what President Obama, in his UM commencement address, suggested was necessary for useful dialogue: “a certain set of facts to debate from.”

And that set of facts is something I think is worth paying journalists to write.  Many of you readers have shown you think so, too, by subscribing voluntarily to The Chronicle. And for that, I thank you.

About the writer: Dave Askins is editor and co-founder of The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Even though Mary Morgan and I usually alternate writing The Chronicle’s Monthly Milestone column, April marks the third month in a row that I’m providing the update. I’d like to say right up front there’s no scandal in this. It does not reflect an internal struggle for power here at The Chronicle. Although if it did, it’s worth noting that my three-month streak would mean that I am winning. And I’d also like to say right up front: If there were to be an internal struggle for power here at The Chronicle, I would totally win. [No, there will not be a poll at the conclusion of this column, asking readers to weigh in on that.]

More seriously, the alternating authorship of the Monthly Milestone column reflects The Chronicle’s commitment to shared work – internal to our organization. But externally, our strategy for providing coverage of the Ann Arbor community is also partly rooted in sharing the work load.

So this month, I’d like to take a look at how that plays out on The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s website – in the form of reader comments – as well as among The Chronicle and other local media.

Shared Work: Reader Comments

Last month’s Monthly Milestone included the bullet point that “We [The Chronicle] don’t care much (only some) about comments.” To be clear, we do take seriously the “some” part of that point. In fact, one of the functions of my Monthly Milestones is sometimes to highlight particularly noteworthy comments written by readers.

Some of the most useful comments are those that ask simple factual questions. And sometimes it’s a question that someone at The Chronicle can answer immediately – or respond to by tracking down the requested information. Here’s an example of that ["County EDC: Money to Loan but No Deals"]:

By Karen Sidney
March 17, 2010 at 12:04 pm

Would these bonds be backed by county or city tax revenues or is the only entity on the hook the private or non-profit entities who use the bond proceeds?

The followup comment to Sidney’s question was made possible by the fact that she asked a simple factual question in a timely way:

By Dave Askins
March 17, 2010 at 3:26 pm

“Would these bonds be backed by county or city tax revenues or is the only entity on the hook the private or non-profit entities who use the bond proceeds?”

At a committee meeting today, I asked Washtenaw County corporation counsel Curtis Hedger this question. He clarified that it was not the full faith and credit of the county that backs these bonds — the party on the hook is the private entity.

Fortunately, readers don’t just ask good questions. They also know things. And sometimes they’re in a unique position to know things, and they share the knowledge that answers a question ["AAPS Weighs Schools of Choice Program"]:

By Chuck Warpehoski
March 24, 2010 at 10:46 am

When evaluating the cost of the outsources vs insourced food service, did Rolland Zullo include the cost of payments to the state pension fund in the cost of in-sourced food service?

That question was answered by Zullo himself:

By Roland Zullo
March 24, 2010 at 1:57 pm

Hi Chuck,
The short answer to your question is yes, I included all costs, including pensions.

The analysis is a bit more involved, because costs and revenues change over time, and both affect the total budget.

The study is available at: [link] If you have questions, please feel free to contact me.

Roland

When a reader can provide the answer to a factual question posed by another reader, that’s a perfect sharing of work. It means that here at The Chronicle, we don’t have to do everything ourselves.

Shared Work: Other Media and The Chronicle

The idea of not trying to do everything ourselves is something that extends to our choices about what aspects of the community to cover in The Chronicle. A certain amount of that material is set by our commitment to trying to cover the work – in a fair amount of detail and context – of the public bodies who are responsible for spending public dollars.

But there’s some discretionary coverage we provide that falls outside of public meetings. For example, I recently wrote a piece about a University of Michigan group who knit scarves for homeless people. Why would The Chronicle invest time and resources writing about some student knitters, but take a pass on sending someone to the Google Fiber rally on the UM Diag? After all, isn’t fiber optic cable more or less like very high-tech thread? If we care about wool, why don’t we care about fiber optic yarn?

In favor of knitting, part of the story’s appeal was an opportunity to connect the knitters’ venue – Couzens Hall – to some of our UM regents meeting coverage. The regents authorized a major capital investment in refurbishing that dormitory over the next year, which will be closed during the renovation. Also, The Chronicle already has a certain history of giving knitting its due, when we stumble across it in other contexts.

So why not a rally for Google Fiber? First, we’d already included the general subject of the city’s response to Google’s request for information (RFI) in our city council meeting coverage – which included a public hearing on a council resolution of support. Christopher Taylor (Ward 3) was point man on the council for promoting the city’s response to the RFI and inviting public participation. He spoke to that issue at meetings prior to the public hearing – remarks we included in our reports of those meetings.

But seriously, why not just head over to the Diag already and document the Google rally? Did we not know about the rally? Did we not even think about the rally?

Yes, I thought about the rally. I thought about it in some detail. Here’s how detailed my thinking was. In announcing the public hearing on the council’s Google Fiber resolution, Taylor had expressed his hope that the public hearing in council chambers would include, perhaps, a song – he noted that there was some precedent for songs sung in the council chambers. He was surely alluding to Libby Hunter – who generally renders her public comment to the council in the form of a song. But Hunter did not oblige at the public hearing, and neither did anyone else.

So, to me, the burning open question about the rally was this: Would Taylor’s wish for a song be realized?

To get the answer to that question, I could have attended the rally, or I could have done what I did, which was stay home and read about it on Twitter, Facebook, or myriad other online sources. We didn’t “get the story” for The Chronicle.

When we don’t get a story like that, it does not bother us. When there’s an event like that, which every other media outlet will predictably cover, The Chronicle is mostly relieved that we don’t have to cover it. We’re focused on being there on those occasions when most other media outlets are not going to be there – or when most other media outlets are not going to report out the comprehensive detail that we’re committed to providing. We don’t try to do everything ourselves.

Coda: What About the Song?

As it turns out, there was a group sing at the Google Fiber rally on the UM Diag. An Associated Press article reported that it wasn’t merely a song – it was an anthem. Question answered.

I was not able to obtain the complete text to the Google Fiber Anthem, but it seems to have included the line “Ann Arbor Google Fiber, ain’t nothing any finer.” So it’s probably a good thing that I elected not to attend the rally, because I would have felt compelled to bellow forth the competing song below. I undertook to compose it in an effort to render a more accurate translation of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” If you’re keeping score, an ode trumps an anthem.

NODE TO JOY

Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium
Fiber surely, Google’s funky, download now made easier

Wir betreten feuertrunken himmlische dein Heiligtum
We’ll be trading urban [trans. note: possibly 'drunken'] fairies, in for holy optic towers

Deine Zauber binden wieder, was die Mode streng geteilt
You’re the Fiber binding, winding, what the modems strongly tore

Alle Menschen werden Brüder, wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.
All the mentions will be broader, when you search on Google’s World

Seid umschlungen, Millionen! Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!
Sung it song-like, millions sing now, this will kiss the world wide web.

Brüder, überm Sternenzelt muß ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Broadly, sternly, ever mustard, is a lovely Fiber well.

Singing that would clearly not have served anyone’s best interest. Fierce debate would have erupted over the accuracy of the translation, and that would have distracted from the point of the rally. [I would accept the criticism that the translation is somewhat casual in places, but to its credit, its meter scans the same as the original – so it's eminently singable.]

So readers who voluntarily subscribe to The Chronicle are supporting, in part, the extraordinary discretion I displayed in choosing not to attend the Google Fiber rally.

Dave Askins is editor of The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

Mary Morgan, Ann Arbor Chronicle publisher

It’s Monday afternoon and I’m sitting in a terminal at Detroit Metro airport, waiting for a flight to Texas to be with my father and sister.

News of my mother’s death and the planned closing of The Ann Arbor News came inside a 12-hour span. The two events are orders of magnitude apart in their emotional impact on me, but in an odd way I find myself processing both and finding a metaphor for one in the other.

My mother was ill for a long time. Once a woman who loved to sing, she became unable to articulate the simplest concept. She grew to be fearful of even the shortest trips outside her home, though once she’d been eager to travel – so much so that all our family vacations when I was young were camping trips, far before it was popular. Piling us into a station wagon hauling a pop-up camper was the only way my parents could afford to see the country.

By the time she died, my mom was a shadow of her former self. And for the people who knew her only in the final months of her life, I’m sure it’s hard for them to imagine the woman I knew, and loved.

All of this was on my mind when word came about the decision to close The Ann Arbor News. And what I’ve heard from people in the aftermath of that decision looks very much like grief.

For the people who work at The News, or those who work at any of the hundreds of other struggling newspapers nationwide, it’s a grief linked to the uncertainty of their livelihood, for sure. But for the many journalists who are deeply committed to the idealistic goals of their profession – that the very foundation of a democracy relies on an informed public, which a free press serves – the closing of a newspaper is a frightening symbol. For them, it’s not a business. It’s a calling – even when it sometimes fell short of that idealistic goal.

But what about the rest of us, those who are no longer linked to traditional media, or never were? What are we grieving? It’s the loss of something that’s been part of our lives as long as we can remember. Of something that’s been entwined in our daily routines, often thoughtlessly. Of opportunities missed, of potential unrealized. Of witnessing a long, sad, sometimes maddening decline – and feeling powerless to do anything about it.

Of course not everyone is sentimental about the closing of The Ann Arbor News – one blog headlined its post with “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead.” I believe this animosity stems at least in part from an us-versus-them mentality. Over the years the News had grown inarticulate about its vision, and fearful as well. I’ve heard people at the News described as arrogant, and no doubt there was some truth to that, for some. But more recently, whatever arrogance newsroom leaders had was replaced by fear and a kind of desperation – not an eagerness for what the future was bringing as it barreled toward them, but a resentful apprehension. They felt embattled and under-appreciated, too – and all of this contributed to a destructive bunker-mentality that only exacerbated their alienation from the community.

These were the death throes. Yes, the economy is brutal and advertising revenue has been leeching away. Despite the economy, I believe the newspaper could have survived if its leaders had better engaged and embraced this community – not as sycophants or vacuous boosters, but as people with a vested interest in the lifeblood of Ann Arbor, its politics and government, arts & culture, schools, businesses, nonprofits – and in the people who live and work here every day, who, like us, call this patch of Michigan home.

Maybe their new venture, backed by the resources of the Newhouse corporation, will do this. Based on the community meetings they’re holding to help shape what the new online publication will be like, it sounds like they’re going to give it a shot.

I also wonder what this means for The Ann Arbor Chronicle – all day long people have been asking us that question. We have a clear vision for what The Chronicle does well – eyewitness, first-hand accounts, whether it’s a public meeting or a fun community event. And we’re committed to covering the community where we live in a way that reflects what it is, quirks, warts, and all. With the news yesterday, expectations from some readers of what The Chronicle could be and should be have risen dramatically. And so have our own.

But just for a little while, I’ll pause to indulge in unabashed nostalgia. Because when The News ceases to publish in July, I will miss it. Whatever takes its place – the new business promises to publish a print version on Thursdays and Sundays – it will almost certainly not look or feel like a daily newspaper. That model has been broken, at least in the minds of the number crunchers, and perhaps they’re right.

Almost everyone I talk with has stories of their own about visceral ties to their local newspaper. For me, I’ll miss the tactile, physicality of newsprint: its grime, its tempting outdoor smell that teases our cats to pounce, its transience. I’ll miss its clutter – how, spread across the floor, the newspaper evokes the messiness of the lives its reporters cover. I’ll miss the thunk it makes when our carrier pitches it onto our porch steps.

And perhaps above all, I will marvel at how I’ve become like my mother, whose stories about growing up with an outhouse and no running water seemed apocryphal to me, as newspapers will be to kids born today.

We can’t help but grieve. Yet it’s exhausting, and can’t be sustained at its most heightened level. I take comfort in that. So today I’m grieving, but tomorrow or the day after I’ll feel more hopeful. I will still miss what’s gone, but will remember why I loved it, and I’ll hold that part with me.

They’re boarding my plane. As I get ready to pack up my laptop and go, I feel as though I’m leaving something precious behind, and moving toward a future in which the landscape of my life has unalterably shifted. I don’t know what the future will be in this new place. But I don’t feel I’m alone.

Mary Morgan, publisher of The Ann Arbor Chronicle, was a 12-year veteran of The Ann Arbor News. Most recently she served as opinion editor there, and before that was editor of the News’ business section. She and Dave Askins, Chronicle editor, launched this online local news publication in September 2008.