2009
The Death of the Ann Arbor News
So, the Ann Arbor News is closing, to be replaced by AnnArbor.com. Good thing? Most definitely no. There will be less true reporting, and more opinion, more attitude, more candor, which is not a good thing.
I think this will negatively affect coverage of U of M sports. I’m not all that impressed by their coverage now, and there’s no way that they can compete against sites like mgoblog.com, mvictors.com, and umhoops.com.
I think this will negatively affect coverage of high sports. Who will be out covering the Huron girls’ soccer games, or the Pioneer swim meets, or Ypsi track meets? By reducing this coverage, and the lose of the “Ann Arbor News Player of the Year”, students will have less media coverage and less exposure to recruiters from colleges. Could some students not be able to afford coverage because the scholarship that they would have received with more coverage wasn’t available?
I think this will negatively affect coverage of religion. Right now, the AA News does an okay job of reporting about religion. By moving things online and relying on citizen journalists, there’s no incentive for people to report on things they don’t care about, and as I’ve written about before, Ann Arbor doesn’t care much about religion.
I think this will negatively affect people who don’t have access to technology. Do we really think that people will take a bus to the library to read AnnArbor.com on a public computer? There has already been a study examining the closing of the Cincinnati Post and they reported that
The shutdown of a newspaper has an immediate and measurable impact on local political engagement, according to a new study by economists at Princeton University.
Assessing the consequences of the closing of the Cincinnati Post at the end of 2007, the researchers found that fewer people voted in subsequent elections, fewer candidates ran in opposition to the incumbents and that, as a result, the incumbents had a better chance of being returned to office.
Does this mean that the only people who will be involved and truly in the know will be elite?
It’s a sad day when a newspaper closes. I like sitting down and reading a physical product, feeling the paper and getting dirty from the ink. It forces me to think local. When they ask people from where they get their news, they always say “TV” or “Internet”. No reporter ever follows up with “Where do you get your local news?” Very soon, the answer to that question will be “Nowhere”
