In 2009, Ann Arbor became the first American city of any size to lose its only full-time daily newspaper.
In a radical re-invention of the paper that attracted nation attention, Advance Publications Inc., the News' parent company, shut the 174-year-old paper, fired the staff, abandoned the brand and invented a new, online publication, AnnArbor.com, which published a twice-weekly print edition, also called Annarbor.com.
Annarbor.com hired some of the fired employees at reduced wages.
Advance officials talked then about how Ann Arbor, being so wired and smart, was ready for a 21st-Century media experiment.
That experiment ended today.
Annarbor.com has ceased to exist, but the Ann Arbor News has been reborn, or "rebranded," as they say in corporate newspaper offices.
AnnArbor.com has merged with MLive.com, the online project of Mlive Media Group, the statewide publishing leviathan that owned Annarbor.com. But Annarbor.com content will live twice weekly in a print publication called the Ann Arbor News.
The changes were announced Sept. 4 by Dan Gaydou, left, president of MLive Media Group.
“Integrating Ann Arbor with its other media properties across the state enables MLive Media Group to leverage our unified strengths, ultimately offering readers a better news experience, both online and in print,” Gaydou said.
You almost need a scorecard to sort out the media landscape around Ann Arbor, but Caroline O’Donovan is here to help outsiders understand what she calls "the new new reality" in an article titled "The Ann Arbor News, or There and Back Again: Why the news world’s first print edition of a website is coming to a close."
Writing on the website of the Nieman Journalism Lab, a publication associated with Harvard University that covers the evolution of media, O'Donovan asks: "Readers in Ann Arbor followed the local daily’s staff from print to digital — can they weather another brand transition?"
She puts the Ann Arbor changes in the Advance Publications' perspective: "You can think of this as the latest iteration of Advance’s multi-state, multi-year efforts to manage a move away from seven-day print publication. Ann Arbor and its fellow Michigan papers were the first tests before its better known moves in New Orleans and, more recently, in Cleveland and Portland. In each of those cases, Advance promoted a parallel digital brand — NOLA.com in New Orleans, for instance — while scaling back print. What was different in Ann Arbor was abandoning the print brand entirely. Now that’s reversing.
"It’s as much an organizational issue as anything else. According to an email from Laurel Champion, general manager of southeast Michigan for MLive, nobody is going to lose their job and none of the content is going to change. AnnArbor.com had just been able to avoid the larger consolidation of Advance’s Michigan properties under MLive.com in 2011. About a year ago, some of AnnArbor.com’s sports coverage was moved to MLive; as of this Thursday, the rest moves, too."
Mlive and the Ann Arbor News are cousins, within the Advance Publications family, of such famous media properties as GQ, Glamour, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue. The human family that owns Advance is the Newhouse clan. David Carr, media columnist for The New York Times, wrote in May about Advance's controversial attempt to turn a print publication into a digital publication -- and back again -- in New Orleans. Click here to read it.
The editor of the Ann Arbor News writes in a column today: "Our latest transition builds upon the success of AnnArbor.com that is unmatched. We blazed a trail – we were one of the first metro dailies to switch to a primarily digital format."
