The Demise of the Local Daily Print Paper vs. the Demise of Local Integrity
The publisher of the Ann Arbor Chronicle has written a long piece on how reporting is being fundamentally undermined at conglomerate-owned local papers as they shift "business models." It's worth your read.
The skinny: AnnArbor.com--the online "newspaper" for Ann Arbor, MI (home of the University of Michigan and its irascible footballing Wolverines; also my home)--won a 2011 Michigan Associate Press Award for an "investigative" piece on firetruck response times in Ann Arbor, the gist of which was "Whoa! These response times are *way too long!*" When that piece was published--long before anyone got nominated for anything--the folks at the Ann Arbor Chronicle took one look at these numbers, noticed that AnnArbor.com's reporter had *read them entirely wrong*, re-reported the mess, and demonstrated that the response times were just fine. They raised the issue with the AnnArbor.com reporter and the "newspapers" chief content officer (i.e., "editor")--a cat named Tony Dearing--only to discover that neither really gave a crap that they were completely wrong.
But Dearing’s accounting of AnnArbor.com’s errors is misleading and incomplete – in part because it fails to take responsibility for obvious reporting mistakes, blaming sources instead.
In that respect, Dearing’s column continues a pattern of disingenuous communication by AnnArbor.com with the community it purports to serve.
I realize there’s a certain etiquette I’m violating in calling out the leadership of another publication in this way. What I hear on a regular basis about the community’s perception of the quality of reporting and editorial oversight at AnnArbor.com ranges from idle snark to complete outrage. But our Midwestern culture exerts a firm pressure to make nice and get along. And for some community members, a certain fatigue has set in, along with a sense that it’s not worth the energy to rehash these things – it’s time to move on. To some extent I actually agree with that. It would be nice to move on.
But a polite culture and need to look forward do not justify turning away from some real problems with AnnArbor.com’s basic approach to community service. That’s especially true as the Newhouses roll out the Ann Arbor model in other markets.
What’s more, given the marketing resources of AnnArbor.com’s New York-based owners, there’s a risk that a funhouse-mirror version of reality will become accepted as accurate, and could inappropriately influence public policy in a way that causes long-term damage to this community. That’s unacceptable.
As an aside, this totally meshes with my experience of AnnArbor.com and Dearing. Soon after the site's launch (it replaced our 174-year-old local print daily, The Ann Arbor News in 2009) I raised some concerns with the paper over an article that was 1) under a misleading byline, because it was 2) more than 85 percent copy-pasted from an AP Wire story, and 3) the three paragraphs of actual local "reporting" each contained substantive errors that 4) I was able to personally clear up in five minutes. I ended up conversing over email with Dearing. He was really remarkably pleasant and disingenuous, and it was really clearly implied that that he did not give a crap about clarity or accuracy at his paper. As I spoke with former News and then-current AnnArbrp.com employees, my impression of the operation wasn't improved. The paper has basically devolved into a press-release reprinting service. The very best thing I can say about AnnArbor.com is that they are, as an organization, extraordinarily lazy.
(DISCLOSURE: I read and write for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. It's a long-winded paper, and the publication schedule isn't so frequent as AnnArbor.com, but they have a tremendous amount of integrity and pay a fair wage. If you want to know what the hell is going on in town on the regular--especially in local government--they are basically the only place to go.)
Anyway, why does this matter outside of Ann Arbor? Because AnnArbor.com is owned be the Newhouse family, who are now rolling out this "model" for running a newspaper nationwide, including at the previously sterling New Orleans Times-Picayune. The argument about the import of the transformation of local news has bizarrely centered around how old people get coupons--an obsession with the *format* itself, with the experience of a locally-written bundle of tree-pulp hitting your stoop every morning. But the delivery mechanism isn't the problem. Here in Ann Arbor we have a *super literate* population with an abnormally high rate of web access. Our kindergartners can read a local paper (not kidding; my kid is in kindergarten at what is basically a Title I public school; his class is reading and writing). This is why Newhouse tested out their new model here: It's a best-case scenario.
We didn't suffer because the news was no longer being delivered on paper; we suffered because the local paper of record entirely discarded any notion of integrity or responsibility to the community. They now produce a moderately crappy blog whose comment section is basically a platform for right-of-center hate-mongering. Meanwhile, the Chronicle--which has never been distributed on wood pulp--does an incredible job on a tight budget using the revolutionary technologies of looking things up, talking to people, and *writing shit down.* AnnArbor.com's problem isn't that they largely got rid of the paper, it's that they've largely gotten rid of the *reporters.*
