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

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

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

Skyclock is an application that displays daytime, nighttime and twilight on a clock face. I like to look at it in the 24-hour mode. It was developed by Ann Arbor local John Rosevear.

Two years ago, when I met Rosevear at the Northside Grill and made arrangements to include the Skyclock widget on The Chronicle’s website, I did not know that Rosevear was also the author of the 1960s classic “Pot: A Handbook of Marijuana.” That point was not impressed upon me until David Erik Nelson wrote a piece for The Chronicle last month on the regulation of medical marijuana – Nelson interviewed Rosevear for the column, and mentioned the Handbook. While I had known that Rosevear had an interest in medical marijuana, I did not realize he’d written a definitive work.

If The Chronicle’s institutional memory were longer than it is, then already two years ago we would have recognized Rosevear not just as a guy with twilight timekeeping talents, but also as a source of local expertise in marijuana matters. I’d hope the fact that we didn’t fully appreciate this point had little negative impact on our ability to complete The Chronicle’s mission.

Generally, I think that our institutional memory here at The Chronicle – which is much longer than the short two and a half years we’ve been in publication – is adequate to provide readers with relevant context for the rest of our reporting. That’s true in part because it’s not just our memories we draw upon. Our readers – including many who have lived and worked in this area for decades – provide additional layers of context.

It’s context that you wouldn’t get to read about unless somebody did remember. For example, at their Feb. 22, 2011 meeting, councilmembers lamented the city’s poor snow removal performance after a recent storm, and councilmember Sandi Smith floated the idea of invoking a snow emergency – which essentially would require people to park their cars somewhere else besides on the street. Here’s how we reported the mayor’s response:

Mayor John Hieftje, in subsequent comments, responded to Smith by saying that based on past experience, declaring a snow emergency would entail ticketing hundreds of vehicles, which doesn’t go over well, because many residents don’t have other options for places to park.

What was the mayor talking about? Even though I was barely paying attention to city government at the time, I did remember a controversy years ago about the city council waiving fines that had been assessed during a snow emergency. Searching the online city council minutes for “snow emergency” delivered the result I was looking for, and I was able to add to The Chronicle’s report of that meeting a specific example of the city’s past experience in declaring snow emergencies:

By way of background, on at least one occasion, the city council wound up waiving or reducing fines for tickets handed out during a snow emergency, due to complaints from the community. Related to the snow emergency declared on Dec. 25-26, 2002, the council voted on Jan. 6, 2003 to waive or reduce fines for tickets issued.

So even if institutional memory is faint, it can still be clear enough to tell you what to look for. That is, if you have some idea of what to look for and generally where to look for it, you have a decent shot at finding it. Typing a question into Google’s search box like “What’s the city of Ann Arbor’s experience been with declaring snow emergencies?” would likely not have done the trick.

I’d note in passing that based on The Chronicle’s search term logs – lists of terms that have led Internet users to The Chronicle’s website – some people do expect Google to deliver answers to those kinds of vague searches. Here’s an actual search that resulted in a recent visit to The Chronicle:

was there something going on at the university of michigan last tuesday

Whatever Chronicle page the visitor landed on, I’m pretty sure they were disappointed that their question was not answered.

We’re now in the season when the importance of The Chronicle’s institutional memory for snow-related history is waning. The way I can tell is that when I look at Skyclock, it tells me that daylight plus twilight hours make up way more than 50% of the day.

That means spring will be here soon. No, seriously, it will be.

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

The Chronicle's ad in the Burns Park Players program for "Annie Get Your Gun." It was the first-ever ad that we'd purchased, and gave us a thrill to see it when we attended the Feb. 7 show.

I generally brace myself when February rolls around – it doesn’t have a great track record of bringing the best of times, in my experience.

This year was different.

February treated The Chronicle okay. In spite of continued grim economic news, we’ve signed on new advertisers. In spite of the media’s general belief  that readers have super-short attention spans, we’ve gained new readers – and you might have noticed that we don’t always write short.

Yeah, this sounds pretty self-congratulatory. I can’t help it. Each business, nonprofit or professional who spends their advertising dollars with us or contributes via our Tip Jar, each person who spends some of their time reading The Chronicle – when they have a hundred other things calling out for their attention – is a precious thing to us, and we celebrate that unabashedly.

A lot happened in February, including several things we’re doing aimed at spreading the word about our publication. For our sixth monthly milestone message, here’s an update on what we’ve been up to.

“Er, uh…we’re on the radio!”

After being off the airwaves for more than a year, Lucy Ann Lance launched a new radio show in late January on WLBY, 1290-AM. The show runs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. each Saturday, totally focused on people and issues in the Ann Arbor area – she’s had some great interviews, including one that revealed exactly where she stashes her cellphone for handy access.

On Jan. 31 Dave and I did an in-studio interview for the show, and since then I’ve been doing a regular segment with Lucy Ann sometime between 11:30 and noon each week. It’s great fun talking with her about what’s going on in the community and what we’re covering in The Chronicle, but I’ve got to say the downside is my discovery that I can’t speak more than a few words without injecting an “um,” “uh,” or “er.” Let’s just say those speech mannerisms get amplified when recorded, and my limited radio experience makes me admire Lucy Ann’s talents all the more. You can hear for yourself: Lucy Ann and her business partner Dean Erskine post digital recordings of each show on their website, or  tune in to listen live on Saturday.

Dave Askins and Lucy Ann Lance at the WLBY studio on Jan.31 following the Lucy Ann Lance Show, which airs each Saturday from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m.

What we’re doing on Facebook

When we went to the WLBY studios, we took our camera along and snapped a few shots to put on The Chronicle’s Facebook page. Bill Tozier kindly formed The Ann Arbor Chronicle group, which about 250 people have joined so far. Like any club, being a member should get you something. We’re just not sure what.

One thing we’re doing is posting some behind-the-scenes photos that don’t get posted on The Chronicle, like this one of Dave and Lucy Ann. (Why is one of the microphones green and the others brown? I have no idea – but I picked the green one.)

So if you’re on Facebook, check out The Ann Arbor Chronicle group and join us! And drop us a line with suggestions about what we can do with or for group members, aside from photos with goofy captions.

Skyclock

Decidedly ungoofy is a new feature that appeared on our site in early February: Skyclock. We think this clock is supercool, but even more so because an Ann Arbor inventor designed it. Though he’s been working on the concept since the 1960s, John Rosevear launched the Skyclock company in 1986, and contacted us late last year asking if we’d be interested in putting his clock on our site. That was a no-brainer. We are all about watches and clocks. (You’ll find Skyclock at the bottom of the righthand sidebar, and if you only read The Chronicle by RSS feedreader, you probably haven’t seen it yet. Keep reading by feedreader, but once in a while check out what you might be missing.)

There are several remarkable features in Skyclock, chief among them the fact that it indicates the periods of dawn and dusk each day. You can also set it to show as a 12- or 24-hour clock, and it has both an analog and digital readout. Nice.

So nice, in fact, that it’s also a piece of art. You can see for yourself at the University of Michigan’s Jean Paul Slusser Gallery, where the work is part of an exhibit called “Imagining the Universe,” which runs through March 5. (The gallery is located at UM’s School of Art & Design, 2000 Bonisteel Blvd. It’s open weekdays from 9 a.m.-5 p.m., and Saturday from noon to 7 p.m.) Tracy Davis of the Ann Arbor News did an article on John and Skyclock that was published over the weekend. We’re glad to see his work is getting the attention it deserves.

Our First Ad: Burns Park Players

We spend a lot of time thinking about advertising, and usually we’re not the ones placing the ad. But that’s exactly what we did in February, and our first-ever ad for The Chronicle appeared in the program for this year’s Burns Park Players show, “Annie Get Your Gun.” Since we’re all about community, this quintessential community effort seemed like just the right place for our first ad, and we had a lot of fun putting it together.

We also enjoyed reading through the program before the performance, initially for the cheap thrill of finding our own ad, then to check out the other businesses and individuals who also supported BPP. Most of them were professionals or small, local businesses like ours, who clearly value the “community” aspect of community theater. The Burns Park Players are just one of myriad examples in which people come together to create something unique and memorable in this small slice of the world. We’ll be looking for more promotional opportunities like this in the coming months.

New advertisers

Speaking of advertising, we’ve had several local businesses and individuals join our ranks of advertisers over the past month. As always, we encourage our readers to give all our advertisers a shout out and, if they sell products or services that you need, we hope you’ll throw your business their way. If you like what you read on The Chronicle, you have our advertisers to thank for keeping us in business. We certainly thank them, too.

Advertisers who joined us since our last monthly milestone message are: Acme Mercantile, Ann Arbor Biscuit Co., Ann Arbor SPARK, Ann Arbor State Bank, Arbor Teas, Blue Nile Restaurant, Community Farm Kitchen, attorney Robert Dawid, Fingerle Lumber, Four Directions, Grafaktri, the Main Street Area Association, attorney David Nacht (promoting his WLBY radio show), and therapist/life coach Nancy Quay.

Interested in being part of this venture too? Let us know.

Some final thoughts

It’s hard to believe it’s been six months since we started down this road. Since then, there hasn’t been a lot of good news about the economy in general, or the media industry in particular – in fact, a lot of the news has been downright depressing. Just last week, owners of the Rocky Mountain News decided to shut down the paper completely, and major metros like the San Francisco Chronicle are on the ropes. Closer to home, obviously, the Ann Arbor News and Detroit dailies are struggling as well, as we’ve noted here before.

And yet, despite the challenges in our industry and the certain difficulties to come in our economy at the local, state and national levels, I remain hopeful. I’m hopeful because so often I encounter people who aren’t being beaten down by bad news. They have a vision – like John Rosevear or Lucy Ann Lance – and are working every day to make cool things happen in our community.

We’re trying to do the same. I hope you’re enjoying the ride as much as we are.