(First, full disclosure: I consulted for Advance Publications on its project in Ann Arbor and worked for the company for a dozen years as president and creative director of its online arm, Advance.net.)
AnnArbor.com launched on Friday. I think it’s a bigger deal than it seems at first glance. Advance folded the Ann Arbor News the day before and closed that company. On the next day, it launched AnnArbor.com as a new service, based online and in the community, structured very differently from a newspaper: smaller and more collaborative. As folks have noticed on Twitter, the home page looks nothing like a newspaper site of yore. It’s a blog and it’s intensely local.
Note also that the advertising is different. Rather than banners and buttons, AnnArbor.com offers local deals that are interspersed in the content and also listed in a directory. It happens that these deals are published as blog posts and they read that way. We need to try new and more appropriate means of serving local marketers.
The new company will still print two days a week, and that’s probably why people don’t notice just how much of a change this represents. As I said below, there’s still money in distributing coupons and circulars and in some print advertising, so the company will continue to grab that, at least in the transition. But this company is focused online and in the community.
Ann Arbor is a unique place: highly interested in news, highly connected, with a great university, not to mention a Google office, in town. That’s why it was picked. From the moment this shift became public, the project’s editor, Tony Dearing, and business chief, Matt Kraner, were out in the community to build with the community. I said sometime ago that if this works, the community didn’t help them build AnnArbor.com; they helped the community build it (and their own sites in a new news ecosystem in town).
It’s just a beginning. I hope we’ll see the service become more collaborative, more of a network and less of a site. I know they will experiment with new advertising and sales models and methods. And I hope they will find the way to create a sustainable journalistic enterprise serving the town for many years to come. It’s a brave start and I think it’s worth watching, so that’s why I’m drawing it to your attention.
