Mary Morgan, Ann Arbor Chronicle publisher

Walking home in the drenching rain last week, soaked to the bone and feeling a little sorry for myself, I noted that at least I wasn’t cold – it finally felt like spring. And spring marks the third season of the year for The Ann Arbor Chronicle, another milestone as we check in with our eighth monthly update to readers.

This month we have a few things on the horizon, plus a reminder and some thank yous.

Talking the Talk

Ever since I fell into the orchestra pit during my high school’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” I’ve had no fear of public speaking – what could possibly be worse than that? (Well, once my leg fell asleep waiting to speak at a ceremony in college, and when I got out of my seat I toppled into the lap of the president of Indiana University – but that’s another story.)

Since launching The Chronicle last year, I’ve had the chance to speak to many community groups about the future of local news. Interest in the topic has heightened since mid-March, when the Ann Arbor News announced its plans to close, while its owners set out to start a new, primarily online business, AnnArbor.com.

In May I’ll participate in some additional public forums where I’ll do my best not to careen unintentionally into the audience. If you’re interested in these topics, I hope you’ll drop by – it’s always great to meet Chronicle readers in person.

On Wednesday, May 13, I’ll be speaking to LA2M (Lunch Ann Arbor Marketing), a group of local marketing professionals who meet each Wednesday from 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Conor O’Neill’s. I’ll draw from my experience of 12 years at The Ann Arbor News as well as our entrepreneurial journey with The Ann Arbor Chronicle to talk about the media landscape and what the future might hold for the coverage of local news. The event is open to anyone – there’s no charge, but you’ll need to pay for your own lunch.

Later that week, the Women’s Exchange of Washtenaw is holding a daylong forum on Friday, May 15. At 1:15 p.m. I’ll be moderating a panel discussion of local business leaders: Debi Scroggins, CEO of Bearclaw Coffee; Maria Thompson, president of the Government Solutions Group of A123Systems, Inc. (formerly T/J Technologies, Inc.); and  Kimberly Cumming, executive director of The Women’s Center of Southeastern Michigan. These women are sharp and savvy, and I expect we’ll have a provocative exchange about the challenges and bliss of starting and running a business or nonprofit. (The WXW website has details about other sessions, as well as cost.)

And at this month’s annual Ann Arbor Book Festival, I’ll be part of a panel discussion on the future of newspapers. I’m looking forward to hearing other panelists’ perspectives on that issue. The forum will be moderated by my former colleague Jim Knight, managing editor of The Ann Arbor News. Other panelists are John Beckett of OpinionArtillery.org, Drew Sharp of the Detroit Free Press and Niall Stanage, a reporter and author of Redemption Song: An Irish Reporter Inside the Obama Campaign. That event will be at the Michgian League’s Hussey Stage on Saturday, May 16, starting at noon.

Weekly Chronicle E-mail

If you aren’t able to keep up with a daily dose of The Chronicle, but you want to make sure that you don’t miss anything, you might want to sign up for our weekly e-mail, which provides brief descriptions of articles from the previous week and direct links to those articles. The update includes links to our popular Stopped.Watched section, as well as the week’s New Media Watch and Old Media Watch items and a link to our advertisers.

These e-mails go out each Saturday. If you’d like to sign up, just send an note to me (mary.morgan@annarborchronicle.com) or Dave Askins (dave.askins@annarborchronicle.com) and we’ll add you to our list.

Welcome to New Advertisers, and Thanks to Long-Timers

As always, we want to give a shout out to the local businesses and organizations that support us with their advertising dollars, as well as to readers who contribute their equivalent of a voluntary subscription via our Tip Jar. Since last month’s milestone message, we’ve had several new advertisers sign up – we welcome them, and urge you to consider them as you shop, look for entertainment, seek lodging for visitors, and decide where to allocate your philanthropic giving. New within the past month are:

• Ann Arbor Bed & Breakfast
• Ann Arbor Public Schools Educational Foundation
• Anna Daigle of Salon Vertigo
• Avalon Housing
• Good Scents Gardens
• Main Street Area Association Restaurant Week
• Matthaei Botanical Gardens
• Pioneer Theatre Guild
• Organic Bliss
• University of Michigan Press

As we welcome new advertisers, we also want to recognize and thank advertisers who’ve been with us before – some of them, like the Bank of Ann Arbor, Books by Chance, Ann Arbor Public Schools and Ypsilanti Public Schools, have been with us since nearly the beginning of our venture in September 2008. That’s huge. We could not continue to do what we do without that kind of long-term support. So  if you find value in our work, you have our advertisers to thank for making it possible. Check out our complete list of advertisers here. If  you’ve seen their ads on The Chronicle and it prompts you to patronize their business, please let them know that we played a role in that.

Finally, I’d like to thank every reader who has offered up a word of encouragement, a suggestion, a correction or clarification, a comment, a joke, a poke – either in person, on our site, via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook.

It’s springtime at The Chronicle, and you’ve helped us get this far.

Thanks also to those who’ve helped us give Chronicle readers something interesting to read – by writing columns or by filing Stopped. Watched. items.

Also, thanks to everyone who’s added to the quality of The Chronicle by leaving a comment on an article that complements, clarifies, or corrects information in that piece. Thanks also to everyone who’s sent along proofing corrections by email or phone. We do care about executing with precision on the difference between “complement” and “compliment.”

Thanks also to everyone who’s sent along suggestions for stories to cover. Getting a press release is one thing – receiving an email from a reader saying, “I hope you go to the tour of the Labadie Collection exhibit,” is quite another.

Thanks as well to everyone who’s sent along suggestions of a more general nature. We’d ask that you believe us when we say that we’ve listened hard, even if an instant change did not appear in The Chronicle. One example is the creation of The Tip Jar. More on that in a bit.

First, here’s a couple of other changes that were driven by reader feedback and our recognition that readers were right. At the outset, we imagined that it would be a rare Chronicle article that would have an open comment thread. It was an approach to which we had given a lot of thought – a lot of thought that I will spare readers, who are now just glad that most articles now have open comment threads. Most articles, that is, on which we did the original reporting. There’s whole categories of items for which we still systematically keep comments closed – New/Old Media Watch items. Generally, if there’s an original source other than The Chronicle, then we think it’s more appropriate that readers contribute their comments directly to that source.

A related issue is the reliability of those sources. Some readers would prefer that The Chronicle not link to sources in New/Old Media Watch items unless we’ve actually vetted the information. From our point of view, Media Watch items are offered as something of possible interest to Chronicle readers, not as a particular endorsement of the information or opinions presented by the source. We think of these items as an entirely different category from the stories we write and report on ourselves.

But we’ve relied somewhat heavily on the website layout to enforce a relegation of those items to their appropriate status – they appear in the left sidebar, not in the main column, which is reserved primarily for those articles on which The Chronicle has a claim to originality. But for readers who use a feedreader, all these items have the same status. (For readers who don’t know or care what a feed reader is, what follows isn’t important and can be safely ignored.) The RSS feed just loads them one after the other as the same kind of object.

As a partial response to this issue, here’s a way for readers to cook up their own RSS feeds to exclude and include exactly the Chronicle categories they want to read. Each category (section) has a number. [Key: 3=Business, 4=Education, 5=Entertainment, 6=Environment, 7=Government, 8=Missed Ticks, 9=Neighborhoods, 10=New Media Watch, 11=Old Media Watch, 12=Police, 24=Stopped. Watched.] The syntax for creating a custom feed, where x, y, z, w, correspond to category numbers, is this:

http://annarborchronicle.com/feed/?cat=x,y,z,w

For example, readers who want everything except for New Media Watch and Old Media Watch could use this feed: http://annarborchronicle.com/feed/?cat=3,4,5,6,7,8,9,12,24

Readers who just want to know when we blow it could use this Missed Ticks feed: http://annarborchronicle.com/feed/?cat=8 Mmm, that feed full of mistakes tastes good, huh?

Here’s a request, though, for readers who read Chronicle content with a feed reader: every once in a while, change up your diet and visit the actual website. Why? Because Laura Fisher did an incredible enough job on the configuration and design that the number one comment I’ve heard back from readers is: “It looks amazing!” Number two is: “How did you get WordPress to do that?” She’s not hard to find online and can be told directly how amazing her work is.

Finally, we’ve heard from any number of people who have nothing to advertise (which is the revenue model The Chronicle uses), but who would nevertheless like to support The Chronicle financially. Otherwise put, they’d like to feed us, and we’d like to accept their generosity. Here’s a way for people to do that: The Tip Jar. As noted on that page, there are some conditions on donations to The Chronicle – which we’d like to stress are not tax deductible. We’re placing a limit of $500 per calendar year per person on donations. Further, any donation should made with the understanding that the donor’s name plus the month and year of the donation will be published here at The Chronicle as a part of a list. We want our financial interests to be as transparent as possible so that readers can judge for themselves whether our published material meets their standards for objectivity and the separation of content and financial support. Advertisements are already transparent in this way.

By dating the contributions, we’re recognizing that some donors might at sometime in the future – even the near future – come to regret their association with our publication. We’d hope this would never be the case, but we don’t take for granted that we’ll continue to enjoy everyone’s continued support no matter what we do. A long-ago contribution, we think, would be assessed in a more accurate light by readers, than an undated amalgam of everyone who has ever contributed anything.

Thanks in advance for tips, both financial and news-wise. Thanks in advance for continued commenting and correcting. And finally, thanks in advance for reading.