June 2009 Archives

AnnArbor.com will have a foot in two worlds. We're an online media company, but we'll publish a newspaper in print twice a week.

Steve Pepple is an ideal guy to straddle both worlds, and that's why we've chosen him to oversee our print edition.

Pepple, 55, has been the metro editor at The Ann Arbor News since 2005. He's overseen local news coverage by the Metro, Business and Entertainment desks for both the print and online editions.

In his new role with us - his title will be Print Director - he'll be responsible for the newspaper that we put out every Thursday and Sunday.

There still seems to be some uncertainty in the community about what these newspapers will look like and what information they'll include. The Sunday newspaper will be a fairly traditional product in broadsheet with an A section that includes local news, an opinion page and obituaries. It also will have a Nation/World section, a Sports section and an Entertainment section. In addition, it will have Milestones, a classified section, comics and a TV book for those who request it.

The Thursday paper will have a local news section, a Sports section and a Home & Food section. We're also bringing back the Spotlight entertainment section.

Steve's job is to make sure we put out quality newspapers twice a week, and he's well-suited for the role. He has 30 years of experience in the newspaper industry. At the same time, he has strong digital skills and has been a leader in online news.

Steve joined The Ann Arbor News in 1997 as the city editor in the Ypsilanti bureau and later moved to the Ann Arbor office as an assistant metro editor.

Previously, Steve was the managing editor the Herald-Palladium in Benton Harbor-St. Joseph, Mich. He has worked as a reporter, copy editor-page designer and desk assignment editor. He also does work as a photographer and web designer.

Steve and his wife, Jan, have a daughter in college and live in Hamburg Township. A native of Livonia, he's a graduate of Eastern Michigan University. 

Musings on citizen journalism.

Is there a place for it? Yes. Especially alongside professional journalism.

Traditional newspaper readers have expressed worries about AnnArbor.com. They feared we weren't going to have "real reporters,'' and would turn the site over to amateurs. As we've hired experienced news people for our staff, that concern has begun to wane.

But make no mistake about it. Citizen journalism is going to co-exist with professional journalism on AnnArbor.com, and it's going to result in better reporting.

I want a title like Anil Dash's. He's chief evangelist for Six Apart, the firm whose Movable Type system powers this blog and will be the foundation of AnnArbor.com when we launch in July.

In the world of blogging and social media, Dash is a superstar. On Twitter, he's followed by 12,133 people, which is about the number of people who follow LeBron James.

So I felt fortunate to spend time with Dash and some of his Six Apart colleagues yesterday, talking about the development of AnnArbor.com, and particularly about our goal to get the community fully engaged in our site.

AnnArbor.com is looking for qualified candidates to run our Human Resources and Accounting operations.

What do we have to get right?

That's one of the questions we posed to some of the best minds in the local technology scene.

Among their answers -- moderate conversation diligently, reflect the diversity of Ann Arbor, offer self-serve advertising and, perhaps most important of all, be the "hub'' of Ann Arbor. As one person said: "There's a reason we have a newspaper and not 150,000 blogs.''

Sources as varied as Business Week, Best Life, and Outside magazine say Ann Arbor is a great place to raise a family.

If you're a parent in Ann Arbor, you probably don't need a magazine to tell you that.

Excellent schools, top-notch health care, abundant parks, diverse cultural activities and great social networks (see the 1,667-member ArborParents Yahoo group for example) combine to make our city welcoming to families.

The parenting section of AnnArbor.com will bring together these many facets of family life. We hope to have contributors write about such topics as work/life balance, school, family-friendly meals, daycare, craft ideas and relationship issues. We also plan to include human interest stories profiling local families and events in the community.

The tone will be a mix of information, resources, advice, inspiration and entertainment from working parents, stay-at-home parents, those with small children and those with teens. We hope the section provides a sense of relevancy, inclusiveness and community.

We're looking for contributors who have expertise or special interest in parenting topics. So far, we've been in contact with several local parenting specialists and writers, including Pam Stout of Practical Parent Workshops and counselor Annie Zirkel of Practice How, and Betty Izumi, a mom and dietitian who chronicles her efforts to feed her family nutritious, local food at Caroline's Lunchbox.

If you or someone you know is interested in being a contributor to the parenting section - or if you have ideas about what you'd like to see us cover - please leave a comment or email me at JenEyer@AnnArbor.com.

We look forward to hearing from you.

AnnArbor.com is hiring web developers. Read more for a full description and qualifications.

AnnArbor.com is hiring for Advertising Operations Specialists. Read more for a full description and qualifications.

Food is a rich part of Ann Arbor's identity. So AnnArbor.com's Community Team hopes to make the Food & Drink section of our site dynamic and flush with relevant, interesting and useful content. We want to take the multifaceted food community that already exists in Ann Arbor and give it a good home on the Web.

One of the best examples of a successful online food community is the Serious Eats site. Started by food critic and writer Ed Levine, here's how Serious Eats describes itself:

Serious Eats is a website focused on celebrating and sharing food enthusiasm through blogs and online community. Our unique combination of community and content brings together the distinctive voices of food bloggers, compelling original and acquired food video, and spirited, inclusive, conversations about all things food- and drink-related.

We'd love to be able to describe the Food & Drink section of AnnArbor.com in a similar way. There's already so much great conversation happening every day about food in Ann Arbor in such places as Zingerman's Delicatessen to Kitchen Chick to the vendor tables at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market. We want to bring many of those conversations together in one spot.

For this section of AnnArbor.com, we're recruiting contributors who want to share their expertise and insight into recipes, cooking, restaurants and drinks, including wine and beer.

Already, several fantastic blogs are out there run by Ann Arbor folks about food, and we plan to link to them. Many will share a taste of their content on our site with a link to their existing blog. Other writers will contribute original stories and photos to our site. 

In addition, Community Assistant Julie Wiernik will run a "locavore" blog under the Food & Drink topic area. She's currently making contact with area farmers, food lovers, cooks, advocates and others who are devoted to local foods. While her locavore blog will focus at first on food, it will expand to other topics in the future.

So far, Julie has been in contact with such groups as Project Grow, the Agrarian Adventure, Locavorius and Think Local First of Washtenaw County. She'll also be highlighting people like Linda Diane Feldt, who posts updates at Twitter.com/Wildcrafting. This week, Linda found wild strawberries in the Arb - tiny but packed with flavor.

So if you're a foodie or a restaurant guru who wants to write about food, recipes, cooking, drinks or restaurants, email StefanieMurray@AnnArbor.com. If you've got locavore tips for Julie or are interested in being a contributor for that blog, email Julie.Michigan@gmail.com.

One of the best - and most unique - things about AnnArbor.com is the way we're going to engage residents to share their knowledge and passion about topics ranging from parenting to food.

When we launch, we'll have content from different factions of the community on our site. The Community Team for AnnArbor.com is now in the process of identifying local people who want to contribute. Over the next few days, I'll share information about some of the topics we're focusing on. 

Today, I'll tell you a little bit about our Neighborhoods section. 

Eventually, every neighborhood in Ann Arbor - and later, most neighborhoods in Washtenaw County - will have a special section on AnnArbor.com. Residents will be able to log onto AnnArbor.com, click on their neighborhood and find out about what's happening there. Our readers will be able add content, ask questions and talk with others. 

This part of our site will grow tremendously over the next few years as we add resources and features to it. We'll start simple, with a running blog featuring news from our own staffers, along with stories and contributions from residents and local groups, discussion threads and links. We want people to write and talk about issues affecting their neighborhoods, as well as share accolades and advice. That can include everything from a neighborhod garage sale to snow removal problems on a particular street to proud parents of a recent college graduate writing about where their son or daughter landed a job. Down the road, we hope to add event calendars and maps. 

This is what we mean by hyperlocal.

For an example of what it may look like in the future, Chief Content Officer Tony Dearing points to Patch.com. Locally, I'd invite you to check out the site for the Soule-Eberwhite-Liberty-Madison Affiliation at selmaannarbor.org. It's a great site for a neighborhood that's near Ann Arbor's Old West Side. We'll also being using Outside.in for some hyperlocal content.

If you're interested, or your group is interested, in writing about your neighborhood - or sharing photos or videos or any other kind of content - email me at StefanieMurray@AnnArbor.com. We're looking for contributors in every corner of the city. It's important for us to identify leaders in each neighborhood, and the more people we can reach, the richer the content will be for each neighborhood.

If you run a neighborhood group, the Community Team would love to come to a meeting and talk to your organization about AnnArbor.com. Earlier this week, I enjoyed chatting with the Burns Park Players Group. Just let us know when you meet, and we'll be there.

Patrick Thornton thinks there's one place it ought to be hard to find a good journalist.

In the newsroom.

It's axiomatic in our industry that if you look out across the office and see all your reporters sitting at their desks, that's not a good sign. The best reporting has always been done out on the street.

Thornton, the editor of BeatBlogging.Org, argues that's never been more true than in the digital age.

Being in an office is a strategic disadvantage for most journalists. How much news actually happens in the newsroom (besides layoffs and buyouts of course)? Almost all news happens in the cities we live in, in schools, in court houses, at prep sporting events, at town hall meetings, etc.

In his latest blog post, he talks about some new tools that are particularly well-suited for mobile journalists.

The Verizon MiFi is a portable Wi-Fi hotspot that you can carry around in your pocket, and Thornton says it has a couple of clear advantages over an air card.

You don't have to plug it into your computer, so it won't drain your laptop battery. Better yet, it can be shared by up to five devices, so several reporters at the scene of a big story could all use it at the same time.

He's also a fan of the new iPhone 3G S, not just because it can shoot video, but because you can also edit and share that video on the go.

Just being able to shoot some video is not good enough, even if you can wirelessly upload it. Being able to edit raw footage down is an important part of any video editing, and being able to easily edit videos on a smartphone is a big deal that could make journalists much more efficient with breaking news video.

There are many compact digital cameras for under $200 that take good photos and surprisingly good video. 

If you read this blog, you know that media blogger Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine was an early adviser on this project.

In The Times, Damon Darlin goes after blogs for publishing rumors and unfinished stories, calling it a "truth-be-damned approach" and likening it to yellow journalism, the highest insult of the gray class.

Jarvis says blogging is a different process. Bloggers tell people what they know so far -- sometimes even if it's just a rumor -- and then continue to post updates as they gain more information. This is anathema to people who value traditional journalism, where the reporter fully researches and develops the story prior to publishing it. Jarvis laments the "tiresome, never-ending war'' between bloggers and journalists over this difference in their values and approach.

That same tension exist between different consumers of media. So far, there is no issue I've heard a greater divergence of opinion on than our intention to use bloggers and blog content on our site.

For people in Ann Arbor who embrace Web 2.0, the reaction is, "Of course you should link to bloggers. Why wouldn't you?'' But for traditional newspaper readers, the idea that we'd subject them to bloggers is the latest sign of the apocalypse.

What I've said, and continue to say, is that there's good, valuable blog content out there and we plan to link to it. In many cases, we'll invite bloggers to post their content on AnnArbor.com. And we intend to pay some bloggers.

That doesn't mean we'll link to just any blog content, or that all blog content is worthwhile. Plenty of it isn't. Even bloggers acknowledge that. The best bloggers are among the harshest critics of those who don't bring real value.

In his MGoBlog, Brian Cook says that ESPN's Big Ten "quasi-blogger'' Adam Rittenberg normally only links out to content from newspapers, not blogs.

But why has he broken this policy to link to an inane list of the "most overrated coaches" at Heisman Pundit? That content has literally zero value. It could have been farted out by a monkey.

In that regard, Cook sounds like a lot of the traditional newspaper readers I'm hearing from. Except that they think all blogs are a form of farting, while Cook can tell the difference.

There's a ton of funny or interesting content that actually takes time and research being published in the blogosphere.

He points to a blog post on Smart Football about underdog strategies, and a post on When Carcajous Attack(!) that details the past offensive strategies of Rich Rodriguez. He also cites the interview on MVictors with Joel Maturi, the athletic director at the University of Minnesota, on whether Michigan and Minnesota talked about playing a non-conference football game in 2010 (they did, according to Maturi).

The very fact that Greg Dooley of MVictors got the interview with Maturi tells you a lot about the emerging importance and credibility of blogs. Would any Big Ten AD have returned the phone call of a blogger even two or three years ago? Probably not.

That interview was real content. It had value. Should AnnArbor.com link to blogs like that? Of course we will. Why wouldn't we?

How important are arts and entertainment in Ann Arbor?

Here's a clue.

We've been asking people what they most want covered by AnnArbor.com, and here's the tally so far:

1. Performing arts, 1,472 votes
2. Breaking news, 1,140 votes
3. Entertainment calendar, 1,122 votes
4. Politics/local government, 1,103 votes

Of course, that total changes daily. You can check to see the latest tally or to cast your own votes if you haven't already.

But you get the point. 

Arts/entertainment is a huge area of interest in this community.
So our Entertainment Director is another important hire for us, and we're lucky to have gotten a good one.

Bob Needham, 44, will join AnnArbor.com to head up our entertainment coverage. He starts his new duties June 22.

Bob, who currently serves as opinion editor at The Ann Arbor News, is well-known to people in the local entertainment community. He served as entertainment editor at The News from 2001-2008, and earned a lot of respect for the way he handled that demanding job.

Bob is one of those people I had the pleasure of working with at The News and I'm looking forward to working with him again. He is incredibly knowledgeable about the entertainment scene, and has deep contacts with arts organizations. He's ready to step into this job on day one.

People who work with Bob also know him as one of the most efficient and well-organized people you will ever meet. Those are invaluable qualities in the job he'll be doing.

Bob also is very comfortable with technology, and led The News through the launch of its current online entertainment calendar.

At AnnArbor.com, we're developing a new entertainment calendar that we think will rival any online calendar in the industry. Bob will be instrumental in helping to develop and launch this calendar, which is targeted to debut in October.

More about that later. In the meantime, Bob will be reaching out to local arts organizations to talk to them about our coverage plans and to let them know how they can send us information on their events.

In addition to having been opinion editor and entertainment editor at The News, Bob also has also been an assistant metro editor and copy editor at the paper.

Before coming to The News in 1996, he worked at the Observer & Eccentric chain in Livonia and at The Northville Record. A lifelong Michigan resident, he and his wife live in Ann Arbor.

Beginning Monday, he can be reached by e-mail here at AnnArbor.com.

Today we're pleased to unveil a key piece of what AnnArbor.com will look like online and in print: our logo.

We've chosen an acorn as the icon of AnnArbor.com. Oak trees are ubiquitous here in Ann Arbor. They permeate our landscape, our iconography and our history. The acorn icon symbolizes the best of that tradition while signaling a new beginning.

The acorn also signifies potential and change; AnnArbor.com will constantly grow and evolve with the contributions and participation of the community. 

The acorn embodies our vision for AnnArbor.com -- to provide journalism that is of, by and for the Ann Arbor community, but with a modern twist.

You will be seeing the acorn pop up around town more as we approach our website launch the week of July 20 and print launch on July 26. As always, we want to know what you think, so please share your thoughts.

AnnArbor.com is working with a variety of best-in-class service providers, many based in Ann Arbor and some with a national footprint. The logo was designed by New York-based SS+K, which has a longstanding partnership with our parent company, Advance Publications. Their work on the logo was informed by extensive consumer research in Ann Arbor, along with feedback from us and from people in the community.