The Chronicle's state House of Representatives press pass. We hope this year's will be purple.

Back in early September, only a week or so after we launched The Ann Arbor Chronicle, I trekked up to Lansing to meet with our locally elected state legislators. Man, I had grand plans. I’ve never found a good resource for learning about what our state lawmakers are doing, and I thought The Chronicle could be that resource.

The women I met with could not have been more gracious. The three state representatives – Pam Byrnes, Alma Wheeler Smith and Rebekah Warren – work in adjacent offices in a building with spectacular views of the capitol across the street. I met some of their staff, and talked with each about their goals and priorities for the year. Liz Brater, the state senator who represents Ann Arbor, gave me a tour of the Senate chambers. And I wrapped up the day by joining Rebekah Warren and Alma Wheeler Smith while the House was in its afternoon session (their desks sit next to each other on the House floor, but not because Alma is Rebekah’s mother-in-law). I even acquired a press pass for the rest of the year, which involved filling out some forms and getting my picture taken.

So by now you might be thinking, “Hmmm. I don’t remember seeing any state coverage in The Chronicle – maybe I missed it.” No, you didn’t. It didn’t happen.

As we mark The Chronicle’s fourth monthly anniversary with this update to readers, it’s tempting to talk about our goals for 2009, given the time of year. Something like, “We resolve to cover our state legislators. Honest.” But resolutions – with the almost clichéd threat of being broken – seemed less interesting to me than looking at some of the challenges we expect to face as we head into the year, and how we hope to tackle them. And since I’ve already described how one of our goals for coverage hasn’t yet panned out, let’s start there.

Coverage

Nearly every reader, I suspect, could tell us at least one thing (and likely a laundry list of things) they’d like to see in The Chronicle. More public meetings. Fewer public meetings, and more crime alerts. Investigative pieces. High school sports. Arts and entertainment. Calendar listings. Event previews. Cute puppy stories. (OK, I’m kidding – no one has asked for that last one. Unless you count one of our staffers’ repeated pining for a dog, to be named Shep, who would be The Chronicle’s news hound. Gaahh.)

Our challenge is twofold: To keep our eye on what we can do best and to find ways to increase coverage where it makes sense for both us and our readership.

Why haven’t we reported on our Lansing legislators? In part, because our plates have been filled to overflowing with other, closer-to-home reporting, as well as with the decidedly unglamorous but vital minutia of operating a business. We’ve learned that it’s easy to overextend ourselves, and in some cases have elected to pull back from a more ambitious plan. That’s more difficult than it sounds.

As 2009 unfolds, we hope to reach the financial milestones that will allow us to expand our reporting resources. We’re also working on several partnerships that would bring other voices into The Chronicle, similar to the contributions we’ve already added: Joel Goldberg’s wine column, Alvey Jones’ Bezonki comic strip, and occasional columns by Del Dunbar, Stew Nelson and others. As we gain the ability to expand, we’ll continue listening to your input to help us shape our priorities.

Advertising

The businesses and institutions that advertise with The Chronicle provide our financial foundation. These aren’t entities based in New York or LA – in most cases, you could walk into their offices or stores and actually talk to the owner or president. That’s what local is all about.

These groups face their own challenges in 2009, with an economy that isn’t showing strong signs of recovery yet. We know how important it is for them to get value for each dollar they spend. We believe we provide that value, but it’s our challenge to prove it. One way you can help is to thank our advertisers for their support of The Chronicle – that kind of feedback is invaluable, to them and to us.

Expanding our advertising base is key to expanding our coverage, and that’s a challenge in this economic climate, as it is for all publications. So the first additional person we’re working on adding to The Chronicle staff will be a partnership that focuses on recruitment of advertisers. We’ll keep you posted in the coming months about that.

Marketing

During our first four months, we’ve grown readership mostly by word of mouth and the natural linkages inherent to the web. Both the Ann Arbor Observer and Concentrate have reported on our publication and I’ve spoken to several civic groups, but people more likely have heard about us from their colleagues, friends or acquaintances. That we like. Some of our readers, including some we don’t know yet personally, have become evangelists for The Chronicle. That we love.

Of course we want even more people to read The Chronicle, and our challenge for 2009 is to find ways to reach new readers. Given our budget constraints, we’ll be looking for ways to market our site creatively. We’ll continue our outreach to community groups: I’ll be one of the speakers at the Jan. 21 Morning Edition breakfast, for example. You’ll start to see our signs in the storefronts of local businesses – we thank the retailers and landlords who’ve agreed to promote our site in this way, and if you see one of our signs at a local business, we hope you’ll take a minute to thank them, too. (If you’d like to print off an 8.5 x 11 sheet and you have permission to slap it up somewhere prominent, here’s a 4MB .pdf of a Chronicle poster that should serve that purpose.)

Beyond that, we’ll be looking at other options: Beer coasters with our logo at local pubs? A booth at the farmers market this spring? We’ll keep you posted in these monthly updates about our efforts, and if you have any suggestions, please let us know.

Geographic reach

Aside from a few isolated instances, our publication has focused primarily on the city of Ann Arbor. In large part, that’s because it’s important to us to have a physical presence in our reporting, to actually go and observe, as opposed to making phone calls and reading press releases. Another factor: We live in Ann Arbor and are committed to getting from Point A to Point B by foot, bike, bus or scooter as much as possible. That makes getting to Saline or Chelsea a bit more challenging.

We certainly realize there are many intriguing, newsworthy people and events outside of the county’s core city. We also know that most people don’t confine their lives to the borders of a particular municipality. People who work in Ann Arbor might well live in Saline or Chelsea or one of the townships, and someone who lives in Ypsilanti likely shops or goes to restaurants or sporting events outside the city. These realities reflect why some are calling for an expanded, improved public transit system.

So our challenge this year is to find ways to expand our geographic reach without compromising our approach to covering news and features. One small way to do this is via our Stopped.Watched. items, which appear in what’s become one of The Chronicle’s most popular sections. Over three dozen people have signed up as Stopped.Watched. correspondents. They submit brief observations of things they see as they go about their daily lives, from an egg-splattering interstate crash, to store closings, to people putting candles on the street to mark the winter solstice. In aggregate, these items provide a rich image of our community at any given point in time, and the more items that are posted, the richer that image becomes. We hope to increase not just volume but geographic range as well. If you’d like to add your own observations to our Stopped.Watched. feature, let us know. There are a variety of ways to submit items. Or if you’ve signed up but haven’t filed one recently, please keep that on your radar for 2009.

A few recent changes

In addition to looking ahead, we want to update you on some changes we’ve made over the past month.

• Comments. After last month’s milestone column, some readers told us they wanted the option of commenting on our Stopped.Watched. items, so we’ve added that capability. We have open comment threads on all the articles and columns that are written by The Chronicle and our contributors. The only items for which comment threads are not opened as a matter of policy are Media Watch items. Generally, those items are pulled from websites where readers can comment in the original venue. The principle we stand on in that choice is phrased this way by Bill Tozier: “Because if you like something, you’re supposed to reward the creator. Directly, if possible, and in kind.” [Source] The reward – in the form of comments – for posting a photograph online, writing an interesting opinion, or reporting original news, should go to the authors, in their original venue if possible. Keeping Chronicle comments closed on those items is our way of encouraging Chronicle readers to reward the authors.

• Meeting Watch Section. When we launched The Chronicle, our headlines for public meeting coverage consisted of a formula with the name of the public body plus the date (e.g. Meeting Watch: County Board 3 Dec 08). This approach failed to capture the content or flavor of the articles like an ordinary headline is supposed to do. You’ll actually find a lot of miscellaneous local news in these reports, and a lot of personality as well, because they include the interactions and commentary of public officials and community members. So the headlines of meeting coverage articles will now reflect the content of those meetings. We’ve also created a Meeting Watch section as a first step in developing a more meaningful set of Chronicle sections. The link to that section appears in the footer to every page as well as at the end of all articles that are categorized in that section. Archived Meeting Watch articles have been assigned to the section with no revision to their headlines.
• Calendar. When an event is mentioned in a Chronicle piece, from this point forward, we’ll include a link [confirm date] to an embedded GoogleCalendar, where we will update any changes to the event. For example, if a meeting we’re covering includes discussion of a future public hearing or other event, we’ll list that in our calendar. If that meeting time or location changes, we’ll revise the calendar item to reflect the changes. It’s also a handy way to get an overview of the events that have been mentioned in The Chronicle. It will take a while for the calendar to accumulate a substantial number of entries.
• Facebook etc. Bill Tozier has created a Facebook Group for The Ann Arbor Chronicle. Join us! Thoughts are welcome on how to integrate that group into the service of reporting news and features for The Chronicle, or for other positive work. There is also a Chronicle Twitter account you might want to follow if you’d like a bit more “inside” perspective on what’s going on at The Chronicle. That account was the original prototype for Stopped.Watched. items.

We’ve made a couple of minor changes to the layout. The left sidebar is now a bit cleaner, partly because we’ve consolidated some material into the top shaded box.

In response to reader suggestions, we’ve also made the the link to the Tip Jar as prominent as we know how. It’s sitting in the masthead where the news stand price is typically displayed for a printed publication (upper right).

Also based partly on reader input, the frame for the advertisements now contains a link (at the bottom) to a listing of all advertisers. For readers who would like to know who’s supporting The Chronicle financially, this is somewhat more efficient (if less entertaining) than repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a web browser and watching the ads cycle through on their random rotation.

Apropos of advertising, we’ve got a ways to go before advertising revenue will be sufficient to start growing resources so that we can include broader coverage. But we’re emboldened enough by the response so far among readers and advertisers that we’re beginning to contemplate growth in more specific terms.

Broader coverage will mean different things to different people. We could approach it (i) academically: what else should a local paper include? (ii) with focus-groups: what else do people want to read? (iii) by writer interest: what do contributers want to write about?

Any sensible approach to expanded coverage will likely include aspects of all three. But a starting point is to make clear to ourselves what it is we’re doing with our current resources. The disappearance of the section headings from the left sidebar wasn’t just part of a clear-out-the-clutter campaign. (They’re in the footer for readers who did enjoy navigating with them.) We downplayed that taxonomy, because it was apparent to us – and to readers – that those sections don’t reflect very well what we’re doing.

To regular readers, it will be apparent that part of what we do is attend public meetings and report out from them in a fair amount of detail. In that light it would probably make sense to declare Meeting Watch as a section, with subsections for each of the various bodies whose meetings we report: city council, county commission, DDA board, etc.

For one thing, that would free us up to write more interesting headlines than “Meeting Watch: City Council.” Because frankly, these public meetings deserve more interesting headlines than that and probably greater reader interest as well. We don’t report on them just because they’re important, but rather because they’re a window onto our community that is much broader than just the people at the meeting.

But the idea of a Meeting Watch section is just one thought, pretty much off the top of my louse-free head. And what we do already is way more than just attend public meetings. In thinking about expanded coverage, it’s surely a useful tool to think about the section taxonomy. But I also think it’s a more complex issue than: What should the names of the sections really be?

As always, we take readers’ thoughts seriously and would welcome your thoughts on this or other topics, either in the comments section or via private communication.

Thanks for reading.