Tuesday, September 1st, 2009...2:41 pm
Community voices at AnnArbor.com
To me, one of the most interesting aspects of AnnArbor.com is its reliance on community bloggers for a large portion of the site’s content. It’s also the aspect most likely to give many journalists the heebie-jeebies.
AnnArbor.com launched when The Ann Arbor News closed in late July, ending the newspaper’s 174-year history. It was a sad day for journalism when the News closed, leading to the loss of more than 200 jobs. But it was also the beginning of real-life experiment in this evolving enterprise we call journalism. To me, it’s an experiment all in the world of journalism should be watching. Closely.
While the print daily died, a new Web site, Ann Arbor.com rose with a mission of some original reporting, along with much social networking and community involvement. It publishes a print edition twice a week. (Full disclosure, I spent 15 years working for a Syracuse, N.Y., newspaper owned by Advance Publications, which also owns The News and AnnArbor.com.)
The first thing you notice at AnnArbor.com, as has been noted before on this blog, is it looks nothing like a news site or what we expect a news site to look like.
Once you explore a bit, you’ll find an aspect of the site that you’ll either love or hate: It offers blogs from community members. Lots of them. About 70 people blog for the news site, in addition to its approximately 60 paid staffers, says Edward Vielmetti, blogging leader for the community team, which means he oversees the nonjournalists who blog for AnnArbor.com. You do the math: That’s more community folks than actual, bona fide journalists.
Read the rest of the post at the Nieman Journalism Lab.
I'm Gina Chen, a 20-year veteran newspaper journalist who is studying for a communications Ph.D. I want to see journalism survive. I believe news organizations need to embrace new media, change their thinking, improve their content and innovate. Read more about me 
2 Comments
September 3rd, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Come on, community voices? You can’t polish a rock and call it silver.
From what I’ve seen, those voices are writing about TV shows — really, do we need a local person’s recap of a nationally syndicated show? For instance, “Ultimate Cake Off on TCL” anyone? Are you kidding? That was listed on the home page — Labor Day recipies, and a couple of odds and ends.
Who cares? If I wanted to know how a local person did on a reality show, I can find a funnier, snarkier blog by googling.
This site promised to provide news by trained professionals. I don’t see it. The content is missing. Clunky writing. Thin reporting. Lots of rewritten press statements.
And by the way, 60 paid staffers? Have you counted? Just look up the staff directory on the site.
More like nine news and business reporters covering government, education and everything else in mid-sized city that’s home to the University of Michigan, a big hospital system, and hqs of Borders and Dominos.
What’s happening in Ann Arbor? I don’t know anymore.
September 4th, 2009 at 10:59 am
@Ugh –
Hmm … Guess we don’t agree, but I appreciate your sharing your viewpoints. Certainly, AnnArbor.com is a work in progress, but I do think there is potential there.
– Gina
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