by P.D. Lesko

If the down-sizing and attrition continue apace at AnnArbor.com, Laurel Champion, former publisher of the Ann Arbor News, will be left to head the organization as Executive Vice President in Charge of, Well, Everything. Steve Pepple (pictured below, right), former Print Director for AnnArbor.com, has decamped to the Detroit Free Press. You didn’t hear? That’s because unlike the fanfare that accompanied Pepple’s AnnArbor.com hiring, and unlike the departures of AnnArbor.com President Matt Kraner and then Kontent King Tony Dearing to NJ.com, Pepple’s departure went unreported—despite the fact that he gave the Ann Arbor community over 15 years of his life as a news editor. Since July 2009, when New York-based media company Advance Publications shuttered the money-losing Ann Arbor News and launched its self-proclaimed “successful experiment” in digital journalism, the news blog has slowly wasted away. The AnnArbor.com masthead now lists two editors, 12 reporters, three “news directors,” along with 10 advertising sales staff, and half a dozen other support staff (VP Champion has not one but two assistants). This head count is down from the approximately 272 staffers who produced the Ann Arbor News prior to the paper’s demise. The count is also significantly down from the 35 reporters and dozens of “community contributors” who produced content for AnnArbor.com when the site launched in 2009.

The question asked by news outlets from Michigan Radio to the Columbia Journalism Review is this: Is AnnArbor.com profitable after 40 months in business, or are Advance and MLive executives propping up the news blog, desperately hoping that revenue from digital advertising will grow enough to make the “experiment” successful? Advance Publications, the parent company that owns MLive which, in turn, oversees AnnArbor.com, has refused to provide information about whether AnnArbor.com is making money. Instead, MLive and Advance executives point to AnnArbor.com’s “market penetration” as evidence that their digital model is a smash hit, a better gauge of a newspaper’s success than audited circulation numbers. Sleuthing by A2Politico recently revealed, however, that the “market penetration” aka name recognition of AnnArbor.com fell slightly last year. Circulation of the company’s AnnArbor.com newspaper has fallen 40 percent since 2009.

In addition, A2Politico discovered statements made to various publications by AnnArbor.com, MLive and Advance executives between March 2011 and June 2012 revealed that unique visits to AnnArbor.com have plummeted by 75 percent. In short, the site went from hosting 2 million unique visitors per month in January 2011 to hosting just 557,000 unique visitors per month in June 2012—a shocker confirmed by MLive’s Dan Gaydou. In March 2011 Matt Kraner emailed Crain’s Detroit that he was: “quite pleased with our (year over year) traffic growth. Kraner claimed that average daily unique users had improved from 42,613 in January 2010 to 68,045 in January 2011, or that AnnArbor.com hosted over 2 million unique users each month. If Kraner was telling the truth, between March 2011 to June 2012—in the space of 15 months—AnnArbor.com lost a whopping 72 percent of its daily unique readers, down from 68,045 in March 2011 (Kraner’s claim) to 18,566 in June 2012 (Gaydou’s confession).

The debate over the quality of the journalism produced by AnnArbor.com has been decided—the reporting was most recently referred to in the pages of the American Journalism Review as “anemic.”

Two rounds of staff cuts, the loss of many key, experienced reporters to the Detroit Free Press, and now the departure of Steve Pepple, have given rise to a different theory about why Advance is exporting the AnnArbor.com model to its other newspapers. It has been suggested that by implementing the AnnArbor.com low-budget journalism model across the company’s newspaper division, Advance can stave off financial disaster at the two dozen or so newspapers it owns. Under the AnnArbor.com “model,” staff has been cut by 90 percent, pay rates by 30-40 percent, and frequency of printed papers was cut by 71 percent. In short, the “experiment in digital journalism” is little more than a draconian scheme to cut overhead dressed up as a new business model. The cuts are coupled with selling online advertising using over-stated (perhaps) and misunderstood (definitely) “market penetration” gobbledygook to unsophisticated, small town business advertisers. In other words, now the debate rages as to whether the expected export of the digital journalism model as practiced at AnnArbor.com is a last-ditch attempt to keep the privately held Advance Media’s newspaper division from going under.

Selling advertising to pay for “anemic reporting” is, obviously, what’s best for the family that owns Advance Publications. Anemic reporting offered up by AnnArbor.com, however, is detrimental to the Ann Arbor community. However, the Ann Arbor marketplace is a lucrative one, and it has been suggested that Advance will not give up on it, nor will Advance Publications executives allow their “experiment” in digital journalism to fail. If AnnArbor.com were allowed to go under, where would that leave the company’s digital journalism sites in other marketplaces? Such a failure would leave Advance vulnerable in every marketplace in which the AnnArbor.com “digital journalism” model had been exported, including in much larger cities such as New Orleans and Cleveland (where Advance recently announced it was moving the Cleveland Plain Dealer to a digital model, much to the horror of Cleveland residents).

A 1987 profile of the Newhouse family in Forbes makes for some juicy reading. At one point, the IRS accused the family of tax fraud and imposed a $305 million dollar penalty on a $658 million dollar tax bill. The profile ends, almost too perfectly:

“By all accounts, Steve (Newhouse) is quiet and introverted. Single, he has an apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, and another in Manhattan, where he spends most nights. A true son of his father, he takes the subway to work early in the morning. When he goes to Newark airport, he sometimes hits the subway again and then a bus. The dynastic drama in which these young men have prominent roles may not play out for a while. Their fathers are still relatively young and unlikely to step down soon. It may not even matter that much which members of the Newhouse family next rise to run the empire. When the business is itself the stronghold, the question of who heads it recedes somewhat in importance. Most other enterprises have a character that tends to thwart dynastic ambitions. In these, the founder can deed the enterprise to his heirs but cannot will them the companion essential: management ability. Retailing provides an apt illustration. As the world knows, you can derail a Montgomery Ward or a Sears or a Woolworth’s. Maybe you can even over time derail a Wal-Mart. But it is almost impossible to wreck big monopoly newspapers. About all they will let you do is get richer and richer.”

It’s Steve Newhouse who now oversees the company’s “transition” to digital. In an August 2012 piece posted by Poynter.org, Newhouse writes: “The reason for AnnArbor.com’s strong readership is the high quality of its journalism…..The changes we have made in Michigan have strengthened our confidence that we can secure a vital future for our local journalism elsewhere. While we believe that our print revenue will decline further, we are hopeful that our increased focus on digital will allow digital revenue to become an even greater revenue growth engine, and, eventually, turn our local companies into growth businesses once more.”

Newhouse makes these claims about AnnArbor.com just two months after MLive’s President Dan Gaydou told the American Journalism Review that the news blog’s unique visitor count had plummeted to 557,000 from the 2 million unique readers per month claimed by AnnArbor.com President Matt Kraner in 2011 in his interview with Crain’s. One comment in response to Newhouse’s Poynter.org essay provides a more realistic interpretation: “You speak at great length of the maintaining a high quality of journalism throughout Michigan at the new sites. Every reader, every reporter and every former staff member, as noted above, knows this has not happened. The Michigan outlets are shells of their former selves. The communities they purport to serve hate them. And they serve up sensationalized, mostly-aggregated (stolen) content from other news sources. You’ve traded journalism for garbage content, but pretend to move forward as if nothing has changed. Shame on you.”

Meanwhile, at AnnArbor.com Print Director Steve Pepple is out of the Newhouse’s digital journalism petri dish and on to a job as the Assistant Metro Editor at the Freep.

by P.D. Lesko

The history of the telescope is fascinating. This piece is not about that. However, it is about The Ann magazine’s futile and ultimately disappointing attempt to give readers insight into AnnArbor.com using what amounts to a journalistic telescope. Don’t get me wrong. Writing about AnnArbor.com and getting the Big Brush Off from A. Matt Kraner (former AnnArbor.com CEO), B. Tony Dearing (former AnnArbor.com Kontent King) and/or C. Laurel Champion (AnnArbor.com VP in charge of Professional Conflicts of Interest) is a sport played by journalistic heavy-hitters across the nation who hoped to get the skinny on what the impact AnnArbor.com’s “churnalism” has had on the city’s news consumers. “Churnalism” is the clever description of AA.com’s content cooked up by AnnArborChronicle.com Publisher Mary Morgan. Every now and again, Publisher Morgan crosses the editorial barrier and pens a scathing indictment of AnnArbor.com. Morgan’s snarky tirades are always fun to read. She worked for the now defunct Ann Arbor News for a dozen years before taking a buy-out and launching a site where one can read “chronicles” of government meetings—among other content.

Despite cutting reporting staff, losing the majority of its Ann Arbor News holdovers to the Detroit Free Press, the departure of Matt Kraner and Tony Dearing (air-lifted out—no doubt—to save face and money) AnnArbor.com soldiers on, serving up pithy re-writes of press releases, and the occasional originally reported piece. Readers flock to the site to read crime stories, obits and stories about U of M sports—these posts often have the highest number of comments. The quality of the reporting drives the news blog’s readers, freelance writers (and national media analysts) to distraction and, often, readers dig into the stories themselves. Influential national media analyst Jim Romenesko has lambasted AnnArbor.com over business and reporting flubs multiple times. Most recently, Romenesko posted a piece titled: “COMMENTERS DISCOVER THAT MAGICIAN IN FEEL-GOOD FEATURE HAS LENGTHY CRIMINAL RECORD.” He reports:

AnnArbor.com posted a feel-good story over the weekend about magician Kip Barry setting up shop in space previously used by the Obama campaign. He tells freelancer Angela Smith that Kip Barry’s Magic and Performing Arts Center will be “a place to inspire creativity, imagination and the arts” — “a wonderful community-based combination magic studio/ performing arts center complete with a concession including cookies, cupcakes and soft drinks.”

That sounds really nice, but then AnnArbor.com commenters went to work and discovered that the magician (real name: Kristopher Paul Barry) has a lengthy criminal record, which includes telephone harassment, stalking, fraud, issuing a worthless check, and DUI. (He’s currently wanted for parole violation.)

So what does a news site do when “the rest of the story” is written in the comments section?

Get very red in the face, posits Romenesko.

The most recent issue of The Ann magazine has a piece titled “The New News.” Freelance writer Patrick Cliff, who fesses up to “four years of reporting” experience, penned a 2,500 word article that bobs and weaves, jabs and dances, and in the end eats up 6 perfectly good pages of the 38 page magazine and doesn’t include a word about AnnArbor.com’s print circulation (decimated), or a single quote from VP Laurel Champion.

“I tried unsuccessfully to get comments for this story from Laurel Champion,” writes Cliff.

To Cliff’s credit, he did dig up data from the 2012 Pew Internet & American Life Project study of “local news habits.” However, it would have been a much stronger piece had Cliff asked Champion the question: “So what does a news site do when ‘the rest of the story’ is written in the comments section?”

Patrick Cliff joins Michigan Radio’s reporter Jennifer Guerra and the Columbia Journalism Review editor Ryan Chittum as members of the “AnnArbor.com Dissed Me Fan Club.” In 2009, six months after AnnArbor.com was launched, Michigan Radio sent Guerra to get the scoop on the news site. She came up empty-handed. Kraner, Dearing and Champion refused to talk to the Michigan Radio reporter. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Chittum, in October of 2012, was given the bum’s rush by MLive execs. who told him that he couldn’t talk to AnnArbor.com staffers, and was barred from visiting the AnnArbor.com newsroom. Nonetheless, Chittum came to Ann Arbor to interview AnnArbor.com staffers, as well as other local news producers (including A2Politico and Mary Morgan, among others).

Oddly, unlike other reporters who’ve been stiff-armed by AnnArbor.com, The Ann’s reporter forgot to Google AnnArbor.com. Had he done that, he would have unearthed a plethora of spin from the gang at AnnArbor.com. Had Cliff used AnnArbor.com’s own article archive he would have turned up two glowing anniversary missives from former Kontent King Tony Dearing—who was transferred to NJ.com before he had a chance to write a third advertorial boasting about AnnArbor.com’s “successes.”  In August 2012 Steve Newhouse, the Chairman of Advance.net—the company that owns MLive and AnnArbor.com—penned an opinion piece titled “Steve Newhouse explains Michigan transition, Times-Picayune future” for the Poynter Institute’s blog. Newhouse boasts:

Our efforts to deal with the changing media landscape began in 2009, when we announced the closing of The Ann Arbor News, a seven-day-a-week print newspaper, and replaced it with AnnArbor.com, a digital media company that also published print papers two days a week. Similar changes occurred at our papers in Bay City, Saginaw, and Flint.

We learned a lot in these initial Eastern Michigan markets. We learned, in concrete terms, about the power of digital distribution and the value of printed newspapers for consumers and advertisers on certain days of the week. AnnArbor.com scaled nicely; it exceeded our expectations for audience growth and performed well by increasing our digital revenue. The website has consistently ranked #1 in the United States for having the highest local market penetration (54.9 percent) among consumers of any local newspaper site in America, according to Media Audit.

The reason for AnnArbor.com’s strong readership is the high quality of its journalism.

Newhouse’s claim that AnnArbor.com has “strong” readership based on the site’s “market penetration” (aka name recognition) is questionable, at best.

Since the Ann Arbor News folded in July 2009, readership of the print AnnArbor.com newspaper has fallen from a high of 52,000 (Sunday) to 34,000 (Sunday) as of the company’s most recent information given out to advertisers. Newhouse and the fine folks who sell advertising at AnnArbor.com claim that the site has the “highest market penetration” of any newspaper in the county. Steve Newhouse writes, “The website has consistently ranked #1 in the United States for having the highest local market penetration (54.9 percent) among consumers of any local newspaper site in America, according to Media Audit.”

There’s a huge problem with this libretto.

In July of 2010, AnnArbor.com Kontent King Tony Dearing wrote his first anniversary missive: “Taken together, our readership online and in print means that we reach 69 percent of adults in Washtenaw County on a regular basis.” In actuality, AnnArbor.com’s total readership is falling. On the site’s advertising page, the most recent telephone survey of 200 or so county residents by Media Audit on behalf of AnnArbor.com concluded that readership online and in print reaches 67.5 percent of all adults in Washtenaw County. It’s a minor dip, yes, but there’s more.

The Ann, while relying on quotes about AnnArbor.com from political insiders such as Laura Rubin, who heads the Huron River Watershed Council and Josie Parker, Executive Director of the Ann Arbor District Library (one of The Ann’s regular advertisers), missed the September/October 2012 piece about AnnArbor.com published in the American Journalism Review titled, “The Ann Arbor Precedent.” In that piece, which A2Politico covered here, writer Lindsay Kaltar asks (and answers) the tough questions side-stepped by The Ann. Kaltar writes: “With just 13 reporters listed on its staff page, AnnArbor.com has a much smaller news team than the News did, and the journalists are working for far less pay. So what impact has the transition from Ann Arbor News to AnnArbor.com had on the city? How good is the journalism at the digital-first news outlet? Does the demise of local print newspapers have a fracturing effect on communities, as many in New Orleans fear?” While MLive head Dan Gaydou refused to (you guessed it) talk to Lindsay Kaltar, he did provide audience and readership information. Kaltar writes: “According to Gaydou, the print edition of AnnArbor.com has a Sunday circulation of 37,003 and a Thursday circulation of 30,422, compared with 49,000 on Sunday and 39,000 daily just before the News closed. In June the Web site had 557,000 unique visitors, Gaydou says. Print subscriptions are $9 a month, and were $12 for the News.”

These stats are, frankly, shocking.

In his July 2011 anniversary advertorial, Tony Dearing writes, “Back then, we told you that our site traffic had grown from an average of 115,000 unique visitors a week in August 2009 to a little more than 200,000 a week in July 2010. This past week, we saw close to 300,000 unique visitors.” Thus, in July 2011, AnnArbor.com was hosting 1.2 million unique visitors per month. Thirteen months later MLive’s Dan Gaydou emailed the American Journalism Review’s reporter that AnnArbor.com had hosted 557,000 unique visitors in the month of June 2012. That’s a drop of 643,000 unique visitors per month from Dearing’s July 2011 anniversary message to readers. This means AnnArbor.com lost 65 percent of the site’s unique monthly visitors over the course of 11 months. Did Dan Gaydou make a mistake when reporting unique monthly visitors to the reporter from the AJR? Did Tony Dearing fib about AnnArbor.com’s monthly unique readership gains in July 2011?

Any way you slice the quotes from the MLive President and anniversary messages from AnnArbor.com management team in July 2010 and July 2011, it becomes clear that while AnnArbor.com executives sell the news blog’s name recognition and “market penetration,” the actual truth is this: While 67.5 percent of adults in Washtenaw County have heard about AnnArbor.com, fewer of them than ever subscribe to the newspaper and significantly fewer of them visit the company’s website than did in 2010. While Lindsay Kaltar, who did a very credible job of reporting on AnnArbor.com for the AJR, she missed connecting the dots between Dearing’s anniversary messages and Gaydou’s numbers given to her. Are MLive and its news site AnnArbor.com misleading local small business owners and non-profits by selling  ”reach” (name recognition) in order to hide the fact that the site has lost 643,000 unique visitors in 12 months, and AnnArbor.com newspaper Sunday circulation has fallen by 35 percent since July 2009?

In his opinion piece published in August 2012, Steve Newhouse concludes with this: “The changes we have made in Michigan have strengthened our confidence that we can secure a vital future for our local journalism elsewhere. While we believe that our print revenue will decline further, we are hopeful that our increased focus on digital will allow digital revenue to become an even greater revenue growth engine, and, eventually, turn our local companies into growth businesses once more, allowing them to continue to serve their communities with the quality of journalism that readers expect.”

In short, Newhouse hopes to milk more digital revenue from AnnArbor.com’s plummeting digital readership by, one realizes, hook or crook.

Charles R. Eisendrath directs the Knight-Wallace Fellows program in journalism at the University of Michigan. He’s a former Washington and foreign correspondent for Time magazine. Suffice it to say that Eisendrath has not shied away from opportunities to smack around Advance Publications and AnnArbor.com in the national media. First he told the New York Times in July 2012: “The quality of AnnArbor.com declined so much that I no longer subscribed and did not need to read the paper at work. Is AnnArbor.com discussed much in Ann Arbor? No. Is it an authority? No. I don’t trust anything that is done on the cheap.” Then the American Journalism Review piled on. That piece begins: “Three years before it announced it was taking a digital-first approach and cutting back on print publishing at papers in New Orleans and five other cities, Newhouse’s Advance Publications adopted a similar MO in Ann Arbor, Michigan. How has it worked out?”

How has it worked out? If you don’t have anything nice to say, just sit next to Charles R. Eisendrath (pictured right), the Dorothy Parker of local journo-crit. He told AJR: “The News was never the New York Times and had been on the decline for some time, it was an adequate, serviceable local daily. But AnnArbor.com, has proven to be an insufficient substitute and has had a terrible effect on the city.” Eisendrath, as it turns out, was only just warming up. He saved his knuckleball for the final pitch: ”If you pay people a third of what they were paid before, and you have a third as many of them, the results aren’t exactly rocket science. More specifically, the result has been anemic coverage. If this is the model for the future of traditional news organizations, they need to begin calling themselves something else. Not news organizations.”

There are, no doubt, people who would pay good money to see Eisendrath debate Laurel Champion, the AnnArbor.com VP in charge of rubbing elbows with potential advertisers, on the subject of whether AnnArbor.com is or is not a “news organization.”

Lindsay Kalter, a freelancer who wrote the piece about AnnArbor.com for the AJR, asked Dan Gaydou, president of Ann Arbor.com’s parent, MLive Media Group, if she could visit the AnnArbor.com newsroom and discuss the operation with him. Gaydou replied via email: “We’ve decided to decline your request to visit with our employees or release information about reporters, but I’m glad to give you current circulation and audience data.” This harkens back to former AnnArbor.com Kontent King Tony Dearing’s refusal to cooperate with the NPR show “Marketplace” in December 2009.

In 2009, A2Politico posted a piece about the stonewalling of Marketplace reporter Jennifer Guerra in which I wrote: “What does give me pause is that none of the Three Musketeers (Tony Dearing, Matt Kraner and Laurel Champion) in charge at AnnArbor.com would go on the record about how the site/newspaper replacement for the Ann Arbor News is faring. That’s too bad, because secrecy breeds speculation. It was a similar story when a writer from the Ann Arbor Observer did a piece about the plight of the Ann Arbor News, and then-publisher Laurel Champion refused to comment.”

It’s almost three years later, and  now Dan Gaydou is stonewalling Kalter. No access to any of AnnArbor.com’s 13 reporters?  Gayou did, however, gladly share information from the site’s media kit, filled with puffery and outlandish audience and reach numbers based on phone surveys of a couple of hundred county residents. It’s a shame Kalter didn’t simply pick up the phone and start dialing the extensions of the freelancers and reporters who whip up “churnalism” for the site. Those who have approached A2Politico for writing gigs have, uniformly, said they are  embarrassed to be writing for AnnArbor.com. Kalter also got the cold shoulder from Steve Newhouse, chairman of Advance.net, the digital division of Advance Publications, and Randy Siegel, president of local digital strategy at Advance. The boys, no doubt busy getting cut rate mani-pedis, did not return Kalter’s phone calls and e-mails.

Kalter writes:

In an August 3 column published on poynter.org, Newhouse depicted the Ann Arbor transition as a great success. “AnnArbor.com scaled nicely; it exceeded our expectations for audience growth and performed well by increasing our digital revenue,” he wrote. “The website has consistently ranked #1 in the United States for having the highest local market penetration (54.9 percent) among consumers of any local newspaper site in America, according to Media Audit.”

Newhouse bragged to Poynter.com: “The reason for AnnArbor.com’s strong readership is the high quality of its journalism. In the past two years, the site won 21 awards in the Michigan Associated Press Editorial Association’s news-writing contest, including first place awards in investigative reporting, breaking news and column writing, and second place in community service. Those 21 awards, in 2011 and 2010, represented the highest total of any newspaper in its circulation category.”

What Newhouse didn’t mention was that one of those editorial awards was for a piece so riddled errors the owners of AnnArborChronicle.com asked the Michigan Associated Press to review a 2012 award given for the piece to AnnArbor.com writer Ryan J. Stanton. Then, AnnArborChronicle.com blasted Stanton and his boss in a juicy op-ed that had the AA.Chron Publisher “spewing coffee” when she discovers Stanton’s AP award, and questioning whether Stanton’s boss, Dearing, needs lessons in ethics.

The owners of the AA.Chron and Charles Eisendrath aren’t the only locals who find AnnArbor.com lacking. Micheline Maynard, is a former New York Times reporter who now makes her home in Ann Arbor. She penned a May 24, 2012 Forbes column titled “What New Orleans Can Expect When Its Newspaper Goes Away.” In that piece she writes that AnnArbor.com has “less gravitas than its predecessor. No offense to its staff, but AnnArbor.com, online at least, is a constantly updated blog, which gives equal play to impaled cyclists and rabid skunks as it does to politics and crime.”

So how’s that strategy working out?

Gaydou told Lindsay Kalter that the print edition of AnnArbor.com has a Sunday circulation of 37,003 and a Thursday circulation of 30,422. When the Ann Arbor News folded, the Sunday circulation was 54,207, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. This means that AnnArbor.com has lost, perhaps as much as $5 million dollars in subscriber revenues alone over the past three years, if one calculates the number of lost subscribers by the current $9 per month subscription cost. Multiply those same lost subscribers by the $12 per month cost of a subscription to the Ann Arbor News, and subscription revenue losses top $6.5 million dollars over the past 32 months. Have deep staff cuts and advertising revenue made up for the loss of subscribers and their money? That is, literally, the  million dollar question.

Analysts in the industry scoffed at Dearing’s claims that AnnArbor.com was doing just fine, thanks, and they’re rolling their eyes at Gaydou’s boasts of “quality journalism” and “strong readership.” Like the dilemma that haunts Facebook and Groupon, users that can’t be monetized are just so much surplus population. If Advance Publications were a publicly-traded company, Gaydou’s see-through platitudes about AnnArbor.com’s “reach” would be shredded by cranky market analysts who don’t care about the number of visitors to a site, but rather focus on the revenue each visitor/visit produces.

The bottom line? The Newhouse family is poised to do to the New Orleans news marketplace exactly what the company has done to Ann Arbor. Then, again, as Charles Eisendrath pointed out to the American Journalism Review, Ann Arbor has never enjoyed much accountability journalism from its local news providers. Even the sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued Professor Eisendrath is prone to a bit of the Gaydou blarney. Eisendrath tells Lindsay Kalter: “While residents are still warming to the idea of AnnArbor.com, other startups are reaping the benefits. Many in Ann Arbor are turning to…The Ann, a monthly magazine started in 2010 that sticks mostly to human interest features, with a tagline of “Inform, critique, amuse, inspire.”

What Eisendrath does not tell Kalter is that he serves as an advisor to The Ann, launched by a former Knight-Wallace fellow. The Ann’s business model, like that of the Ann Arbor Observer, and the AnnArborChronicle.com, is to distribute content to readers free of charge and pay the bills with ads—including ads from local government, county government and the school district. The Observer has taken in over $100K in ad revenue from the City of Ann Arbor in some years, and over half of AnnArborChronicle.com’s 2012 list of advertisers include local school district and government ads, as well as ads from companies owned by folks who routinely endorse local elected officials. It’s a business model that discourages investigative journalism and pointed questions about, well, most everything.

In that respect, it’s unfair to hammer AnnArbor.com as having had a “terrible effect on the city.” The company has had loads of help from other media outlets chasing a shrinking pool of advertising dollars by producing editorial content that won’t offend advertisers. In this respect, Ann Arbor was a news desert well before the Newhouse family began its march toward the systematic decimation of credible journalism in Michigan and Louisiana in order to keep Steve Newhouse and Dan Gaydou in their corner offices.

by P.D. Lesko

Over the past 24 months, AnnArbor.com has seen the departure of most of its experienced reporters to more prestigious and higher paying surroundings—such as the Detroit Free Press. There are media analysts, however, that expect the Freep to be closed by 2015, as Detroit is no longer able to support two daily newspapers. This is bad news for former AnnArbor.com reporters such as David Jesse (higher education) and Nathan Bomey (business), both of whom decamped to the Freep from AnnArbor.com.

What started as a “bold experiment” in the merging of print and digital media has devolved into a site which produces “churnalism,” or so sniffed the owners/writers at the AnnArborChronicle.com, launched around the same time the Ann Arbor News was shuttered. In June 2012, AAChronicle.com publisher Mary Morgan jumped into the editorial fray and posted a piece (again) lambasting AnnArbor.com for a variety of deadly sins, including sloth and pride. AnnArborChronicle.com’s owners suffer from a touch of envy, pride and lust while attempting to compete for ad dollars with a billion dollar conglomerate.

Advance Publications closed the Ann Arbor News because Publisher Laurel Champion couldn’t keep the paper profitable, and because someone in New York had a great idea for saving a buck by slapping content created by low-paid inexperienced journos and unpaid locals online. Then, the executives at Advance put Champion and two others (Tony Dearing and Matt Kraner), none of whom had experience in overseeing a digital news environment, in charge of AnnArbor.com. As you can imagine, there were promises aplenty; watching the “news product” sold to an unwitting Ann Arbor community was sad. It was nothing short of journalistic hucksterism. People in Ann Arbor wanted to believe that a news company with a handful of low-paid journalists could produce quality news. Keep in mind those journos would be only slightly better paid than the Journatic grunts who crank out “outsourced journalism” for major news outlets trying to save a buck on production costs.

Turns out your mother was right. You do get what you pay for. As it also turns out, clustering print newspapers into a porfolio and trying to turn on a profit on volume ad sales while leveraging often sub-standard editorial content across holdings and platforms is as failed a business model as there ever was. It’s not journalism that’s dying; it’s Big Box journalism and clustering that’s dying. Southeastern Michigan’s news market is controlled by three Big Box news companies (Advance, MediaNews Group and Heritage).

In the case of AnnArbor.com what the community has gotten, with a few exceptions, has been incurious reporting and an embarrassing reliance on press releases. In response to the May 2012 New York Times article that the T-P was slashing staff and cutting its print schedule (T-P employees were not notified before the news leaked), an AnnArbor.com reader posted this comment: “It is sad to see that journalism in another city is ending. Several years ago when the Ann Arbor News closed down, this city lost its main source of news. The company that runs AnnArbor.com has proven itself time and time again to sensationalize the most trivial issues, ignore facts and generally avoid printing anything that resembles fair, unbiased and accurate news.”

The quality of the Ann Arbor News under Laurel Champion was bad enough to prompt locals to refer to the paper as “The Snews.” Ann Arbor’s printed newspaper went from Snews to Coma. When Tony Dearing left, Paula Gardner (an Ann Arbor News hold-over) was moved up to oversee content. She supervises AnnArbor.com’s entire editorial staff. She’s got her hands full.

A2Politico has regularly fielded anonymous complaints from (I think) former Ann Arbor News reporters about the work of  Ryan Stanton. The first complaint accused Stanton of plagiarism. Sure enough, he’d lifted quotes from an Ann Arbor News article written earlier by another reporter and passed the quotes off as his own work—as if he’d spoken to the city staffer himself. In response to a question about the piece in which the pilfered materials appeared, Tony Dearing had emailed back that he’d “worked with Stanton every step of the way.” The anonymous complaints about Stanton’s propensity to “borrow” the work of other writers (including citing press releases without attribution) have never stopped.

This June 2012 story about the quality of the journalism produced by AnnArbor.com comes from Poor Mojo’s Media Wire, a site written by Ann Arbor locals:

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 AnnArbor.com employees, my impression of the operation wasn’t improved. The paper has since 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.

In a June 2012 piece about newspapers cutting publishing schedules, the New York Times interviewed Geoff Larcom (who refused to take a position with AnnArbor.com because his $60K per year Ann Arbor News salary would have been slashed to $45K). He told the newspaper: “The more noticeable changes have been in its content. While the Web site AnnArbor.com has improved, the Web site and paper lost columns, features and investigative pieces. The dot-com is a much more news-hit-directed entity. It wants to get news up that will direct traffic. You don’t get a broad feel for the town.”

Charles R. Eisendrath, director of the Knight Wallace Journalism Fellows at the University of Michigan, was more blunt. He told the New York Times that AnnArbor.com has become irrelevant to the community. “The quality of AnnArbor.com declined so much that I no longer subscribed and did not need to read the paper at work. Is AnnArbor.com discussed much in Ann Arbor? No. Is it an authority? No,” Mr. Eisendrath said. “I don’t trust anything that is done on the cheap.”

After Dearing decamped for NJ.com, AnnArbor.com got rid of its editorial board and stopped producing editorials. In three short years, AnnArbor.com has become a journalistic eunuch. The Ann Arbor News didn’t have particularly big cojones when it came to investigative reporting or editorial writing, but AnnArbor.com hasn’t got any balls at all.

Welcome to the “bold new experiment,” and please turn off the lights when you’re the last one out of the AnnArbor.com offices.

Advance Publications, the company that birthed AnnArbor.com as a “blended” news product, is trying to sell the idea to the fine folks in New Orleans, including the experienced reporters whom they want to hire at reduced salaries. In May 2012, Advance announced that the Pulitzer-winning New Orleans Times-Picayune, a 175-year-old daily newspaper, would follow in the footsteps of the Ann Arbor News. In Fall 2012 the T-P would morph into NOLA.com—AnnArbor.com with a southern accent. There, the paper would be printed thrice weekly and the rest of the time the thousands of poor and black people in NOLA without Internet access can go online and read the news (translation: go piss up a rope). In May 2012 The Lens reported that:

Post-Katrina, New Orleans officials planned for and began a municipal broadband effort to provide wide access, but that was dashed by harsh economic realities and then snakebit by political corruption. Statewide, a public effort to expand access in rural areas was canceled when Gov. Bobby Jindal refused to accept the terms of a federal grant for the work. Officials in Layfayette created their own municipal subscription network that’s been held up as a model effort, a service that was recently featured in USA Today.

Orleans Parish has 40 percent to 60 percent broadband subscription rates, which compares poorly with most metropolitan counties nationwide, which average in the 60 percent to 80 percent range. Louisiana is ranked 44th out of 50 states in terms of broadband subscription, with just 51 percent of residents subscribing, according to data compiled by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. The average state has 60 percent broadband subscription.

The New Orleans data show that wealthy, white Uptown New Orleans has subscription rates of between 80 and 100 percent, and suburban areas such as Metairie and Belle Chasse are similarly well served. Meanwhile poorer, more African American areas such as the Lower 9th Ward have broadband subscription rates of between 0 and 40 percent.

Selling the “bold, new experiment” in New Orleans has been more challenging than it was to the rich, white, educated, Internet-savvy rubes in Ann Arbor. While southern folks may have a reputation as being more polite, the New Orleans community has been flaying Advance Publications alive. In June New Orleans civic and business leaders led a protest and pressed the publisher of the T-P to reverse the decision to move to a reduced print schedule or sell the paper to a group of investors. Advance officials refused. Daily print circulation of the Times-Picayune has fallen sharply in recent years, from more than a 260,000 in 2005 to 133,500 this March 2012, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. If AnnArbor.com’s “success” is any indication, the print circulation of the T-P will fall by a further 35-40 percent after the paper moves to its “blended news product” model. When the Ann Arbor News folded, the Sunday circulation was 54,207. AnnArbor.com has 34,943 Sunday readers, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The quality of the T-P reporting will suffer tremendously. There will be defections among the experienced reporters and editors as they find jobs at newspapers owned by companies that haven’t put a belts around their figurative necks, tightened them hard, and called the resulting strangulation “a bold, new experiment” in “blended media.” In 24 months after NOLA.com goes live, there will be layoffs and cuts. New Orleans, the Big Easy, will be stuck with a journalistic eunuch, while “blended news product” model moves like Ebola through the entire Advance portfolio of newspapers. There are rays of hope, however. New Orleans business owners are boycotting NOLA.com and withholding advertising dollars. The T-P recently lost a $1.2 million dollar ad contract. There’s a Facebook page for individuals interested in the boycott movement. A Baton Rouge, Louisiana publisher is hiring T-P reporters and preparing to launch a print newspaper to serve the New Orleans marketplace. Advance, interestingly, announced that NOLA.com would expand into Baton Rouge.

In July 2012 The Atlantic Wire reported:

Stephanie Grace, a former statewide columnist, declined a job as a reporter, and Bill Barrow, a longtime reporter who covered health care, is going to work for The Associated Press. Bob Marshall, a Pulitzer Prize winner and the newspaper’s outdoors editor, took a pass as well.

So how are those in power reacting to all this? According to New Orleans’ alternative paper, The Gambit:

The number of veteran personnel turning down the new company’s offer — particularly long-time metro reporters — is said to have taken those in the executive suite aback.

“Frankly, they’re shitting bricks,” said one person with knowledge of the meetings. A second person with knowledge of the talks told Gambit, “I’d say that’s accurate.”

Conglomerates such as Advance will cripple communities with on-the-cheap news coverage, that, as Charles Eisendrath says above, can’t be trusted. Company executives like Tony Dearing will declare the whole mess an unqualified success and writers like Ryan Stanton will describe Dearing’s loss thusly: “We’re losing a key member of our team, but we’ll march on with the values Tony instilled in us through his constant professionalism and journalistic integrity.” The AnnArbor.com/NOLA.com story is a cautionary tale in corporate greed. The boycott supported by the T-P’s most talented reporters and editors, as well as business owners and city residents is a lesson in organized protest. The goal of the boycott is simple: take down the Sometimes Picayune and NOLA.com, as if the “news product” imported from Ann Arbor were a rabid dog.

Can a community take out its own newspaper? Absolutely. Should it? NOLA.com’s own journos say “Hell, yes!” Ann Arbor business owners and residents should pay close attention to this, the latest Battle of New Orleans. It might just provide a road map for those interested in driving AnnArbor.com out of town and replacing it with, yes, a locally-owned daily newspaper.

by P.D. Lesko

I voted absentee for the first time. No lines. No waiting (well, maybe 5 minutes while the ballot was prepared). Overall, an excellent experience compared to voting at my local polling place with its cantankerous poll workers, God love ‘em.

For A2P newbies, you might be shocked, just shocked to learn that I ran for local office. I ran for mayor in 2010 and as write-in for Council (as a favor to several local politicos in Ward 1 who were horrified of the thought of what Sandi Smith would do if elected—they were right) in 2008. Running in 2010 was hard work, and I assumed that telling the truth about my vision and skills would be the best strategy. “Bzzzzzt. Wrong answer, Hans” (for extra credit name the film from which that line comes). I underestimated how dirty the local Dems play, and how unethical and inept the local print media would be. AnnArbor.com political repeater Ryan Stanton sent me an email in which he asked me what he should write about my opponent. Shortly thereafter, I was approached by Council member Sabra Briere’s husband with an offer to fix interview questions (Stanton had emailed him and asked what should be asked of candidates in interviews). I was stunned, and forwarded both emails to Stanton’s boss Tony Dearing, who defended the utterly sleazy and unprofessional behavior.

A few weeks later, I woke up on a Sunday morning in 2010 to read a piece of garbage about how I was “misleading” voters. I should have expected it. Maybe Stanton’s bosses at AnnArbor.com took my stance that Ann Arbor taxpayers should stop funding Ann Arbor SPARK the wrong way. AnnArbor.com VP Laurel Champion sits on the SPARK Executive Committee (which I had suggested was a serious conflict of interest). I still think SPARK CEO Paul Krutko can get his $250,000 salary somewhere other than from money that should go to the Ann Arbor Public Schools. An art teacher at an AAPS elementary school might have a $500 budget for supplies for the year. Krutko has a $30,000 car allowance.

In 2010 my views about public policy, city spending and fiscal responsibility caused a ruckus that still hasn’t died down. My support of funding public safety earned me the strong endorsements and support of the police and firefighters, as well as the support of hundreds of residents all over the city. Ward 5 Council member Mike Anglin walked with me as I went door-to-door, as did firefighters, concerned that John Hieftje had gutted the city’s emergency services.

It’s two years later, and my run for mayor is still a topic of discussion on AnnArbor.com and in the Ann Arbor Observer. During this election season, I’ve gotten more mentions in AnnArbor.com than John Hieftje. People ask me if I am going to run again because, well, I actually was telling the truth. Damn right I was. Ryan Stanton and his boss Tony Dearing, who defended Stanton’s libelous hack reporting, did the heavy-lifting for Heiftje. The Ann Arbor Observer, which got about $100,000 in advertising revenue from the city in 2010-2011, sent Ann Arbor’s own Rita Skeeter to cover the 2010 race—Jim Leonard is ridiculed among candidates because of his inability to gets the facts straight.

In a piece about the 2012 race, among other mistakes, he messed up which candidates were running in which Wards. Seriously? Leonard mentions me in that piece. He managed to spell my name correctly. In a 2010 piece about my candidacy, among other mistakes, he quotes a woman named Adrienne Neff, who claimed to have served on a board with me. She never did. Leonard dug up a local Man Baby named David Hammermesh who whined that I’d used profanity when coaching a sports team we played on together almost 20 years earlier. Oh, and I yelled. Can you believe it? The guy was an arrogant, pouty, know-it-all who criticized everyone else. (Sounds like how the Ann Arbor News described Hieftje in an editorial endorsing Jane Lumm against him, come to think of it.) I yelled. Mother Teresa would have smacked Hammermesh and called it a religious service to the team.

It’s two years later, and Dearing has been airlifted from the ship he helped sink, all the while claiming to the public in his yearly anniversary editorials that AnnArbor.com was doing just peachy. His sketchy professional ethics were questioned in 2011 by mainstream media analysts. Ryan Stanton, whose reporting now routinely earns him the ridicule and even ire of his own readers in the site’s comment section, is clutching an AP reporting award for a piece he wrote that another local news site revealed was full of mistakes—a piece Dearing did everything but retract. If there were ever any question about whether the Ann Arbor Observer is biased in its political coverage, Leonard’s one-sided propaganda on behalf of city officials and Hieftje was the meat of Hieftje-supported Ward 1 candidate Eric Sturgis’s campaign web site.

At the end of the 2010 race, one of Hieftje’s Council cronies bragged that I’d been “swift-boated” with the help of the gullible and cooperative local print media. It was in that moment I decided I would not only continue A2Politico but grow it. In 2011, A2Politico helped shape the debate around Ward 2 DINO Council member Stephen Rapundalo’s support of Republican candidates. In 2012, in response to A2Politico’s digging into Council member Tony Derezinski’s campaign finances, we have Derezinski hopping around, waving his arms and telling voters he’s a “lifelong Democrat.” Right. A lifelong Democrat who has been financed by big name Republicans, and whose donations to a local PAC have helped finance big name Republicans who are anti-choice and anti-gay.

A little digging into Eric Sturgis’s claims about his academic cred, and his campaign imploded. Among other whoppers, he’s telling Ward 1 voters I am running his opponent’s campaign. Um, no. That would be Kathy Griswold, a local pedestrian safety advocate and community volunteer. Not only did Sturgis lie about attending Eastern Michigan University, he defrauded voters by running for precinct delegate in two counties at the same time. Ryan Stanton wrote that I called out Sturgis. Actually, I called the National Student Clearinghouse, where academic credentials are verified. After that, a little chat with the Registrar at Eastern Michigan University, and it became clear Sturgis was misleading voters (and Stanton) about his academic qualifications. That kind of thing has cost CEOs their jobs. Jim Leonard, too busy misquoting the candidates and screwing up the facts in the August 2012 Ann Arbor Observer, didn’t have time to report Sturgis’s bogus claims about attending EMU. Ryan Stanton never bothered to do his own homework, even after looking at my paper and complaining about the right answers.

It was A2Politico that reported an Ann Arbor voter had filed a complaint with the Michigan Elections Bureau against Sturgis for running in two counties at the same time.

Neither the Ann Arbor Observer nor AnnArbor.com has the last word in political reporting anymore. Neither publication is consistently objective or even accurate. It’s a tragedy for our community that the bulk of local mainstream media political coverage is produced by the Fox News Brothers, Stanton and Leonard.

Meanwhile, I’m delighted to see content and links from A2Politico posted elsewhere, including in the national and state media. Evidently, the local journos who copy off A2P’s paper never read the site, or so claimed David Askins, Editor of the AnnArborChronicle.com, in a comment on his own site after he wrote about Eric Sturgis’s election fraud caper after A2P covered it, and neglected to credit A2P for breaking the story. Just as I never thought two years later, the local media would still be talking about my race for office, I never imagined A2Politico would have tens of thousands of readers every month. My appellations for local politicos have entered the vernacular: The Council Majority (comprised of Hieftje and his cronies) is routinely referred to as the “Hive Mind” and the “Hive Mind Collective” in comments on AnnArbor.com and elsewhere.

A2Politico continues to be a fun ride. Another year has passed. Thanks for reading. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for calling. Thanks for your emails and tips. My time working on A2Politico is limited (in my day job I am the Publisher of a higher education publishing group). I have a list as long as my arm of topics to cover, including a look at the use of credit cards by AAPS employees, AAPS officials who have not pursued millions in state funds due the District, DTE Smart Meter installation locally, the loss of the AAPD officers who served the public schools, several interviews with state and national politicos running for re-election, and after August 7th, many of the writers who have been contributing to A2P will return. I wanted to focus the site on the local elections, and that has been a worthwhile effort.

Remember to vote August 7th. A2Politico endorses no candidates, but rather urges readers to educate themselves about the local City Council, county and judicial candidates. Then, vote for the ones you think best represent your viewpoints. Click here to see how I voted in the 2012 primary election.