Innovating at the speed of death
Detroit has two fascinating media experiments going on at once:
- The Ann Arbor News published its final daily paper on Tuesday, June 21. The Newhouse-owned paper is blazing a path that other media are watching closely: a new company is rising out of the ashes from the News shutdown. AnnArbor.com will publish daily to its site and print twice per week. They’ll staff it with “pros” and a network of “joes,” aka community bloggers.
- A different version on a similar theme is the Birmingham Eccentric, which is in a fight for its life. Birmingham’s oldest business has only about 6,000 subscribers (not so bad, though, considering Birmingham has only 19,000 citizens, roughly 9,000 families) but its Gannett owners said they couldn’t make much sense of the small paper and were due to close it this summer. The city rallied, led by active local citizen David Bloom (which included a valiant trip to Gannett’s headquarters) and Gannett gave in: if Birmingham could get 3,000 more subscribers, the paper could continue, they said. Although the Eccentric now has only about 2000 more subscribers since that fateful meeting, Gannett has given the Eccentric a temporary pardon. It’s still publishing, although it’s not clear how long that will last. Residents wear buttons promoting the Eccentric at the Sunday farmer’s market and there’s still a feeling of forthcoming loss in the air.
Detroit might not seem like the bleeding edge—particularly when it comes to the media business—but the reality is the region’s slide has produced an inordinate amount of change at a pace much faster than the rest of the country. It is the true “necessity is the mother of invention” moment for Detroit’s media business — almost like a big startup running in reverse, a region of people trying to save what they can and quickly build a raft out of their jacket as the water rises to their waists.
In all of the various media transformation stories happening around the country, one of the great unknowns appears to a proper match of a platform to an audience’s needs. It’s clear that general loss of local newspapers is not welcome, but what exactly is it about that medium that was so useful to that particular community? On the other side of the coin, what is it about its platform that makes a website a suitable (and improved) replacement for a newspaper? Having a common set of beliefs would be really useful as these transformations reshape American journalism at the local level.
