A year ago, the Ann Arbor News stopped printing and AnnArbor.com took over. Ann Arbor, Michigan was the first American city to lose its only local daily, and at the time it was anticipated that it would be the first of many. A year later this does not seem to have been the case. Senior AnnArbor.com staff, Poynter and the Chicago Tribune took a look at AnnArbor.com's first year.

Going online only in Ann Arbor made sense to parent company Advance Publications because its residents have very high levels of broadband Internet access, as a university town. The site it launched was supposed to look different to other news sites, with a more 'social media' feel.
It has been adapted since launch, notably replacing a latest-news-first strategy with a selection of top stories leading the page, after "We heard clearly from some of our readers that this format made it hard to understand what the major stories were, or to find an important story as it moved down," said a letter to readers on AnnArbor.com.

The company did, however, reinstate a twice-weekly print edition of the paper, published on Thursdays and Sundays. According to Poynter, the site's chief content officer Tony Dearing said that the print editions contain some original stories along with some that have already been online. Circulation is 43,000 on Sundays and 34,000 on Thursdays, compared to 49,000 Sunday and 39,000 daily just before the News closed, Dearing told Poynter. Subscriptions cost $9 a month, compared to $12 for seven days of the paper before the shutdown.

AnnArbor.com hired about two dozen of the 274 former Ann Arbor News employees and now has a staff or 60 that includes 35 journalists, president and CEO Matt Kraner told the Chicago Tribune. The newsroom is about half the size of the old one, according to Poynter.

The newsroom has a 'Community Space' on the ground floor which is open to the public, offering coffee and free wi-fi to the public, and a variety of events are hosted there. This is part of a wider effort to connect more with the community, and the letter to readers specified that about 70 community contributors provide content in lifestyle areas, and that the public can post news tips, press releases and opinions on the 'Community Wall.'

Web traffic is steadily growing, Kraner told the Tribune, with 209,000 unique visitors per week, up from 115,000 in August shortly after the launch. (Dearing told Poynter 50,000 a day or 960,000 a month.) Poynter's Bill Mitchell noted, "that is an unusually high figure for a 100,000-person city and its environs," but might reflect a wider national interest in University of Michigan sports. But the Sunday print product is the single biggest revenue driver, he said, and the company will not reveal whether the online portion of the operation is profitable or not.

The letter to readers said that although the company was not releasing figures, "we can say that our advertising revenue - particularly online revenue - has been growing at a healthy pace and that we're encouraged by the progress we're making on that front."

AnnArbor.com seems to be succeeding, or at least surviving, does it offer an alternative that other struggling print papers could follow? The prediction that many other small US cities would be left without a daily print paper has not come true, and does not seem as if it will in the near future, at least until a fully sustainable online business model for news emerges. But as publishers experiment with paywalls, could that model be within reach?

Source: AnnArbor.com, Poynter, Chicago Tribune