Reincarnation could be described as the ultimate reinvention: in death you leave behind one body and your soul goes on to another life in a new body.
Not everyone believes in reincarnation, but it would appear the Newhouse family does, at least in business. Their company, Advance, announced this week that the 174-year-old daily newspaper The Ann Arbor News would close in July. In its place, annarbor.com will launch to serve the news needs of the community.
The announcement came Monday and it’s taken me ’til now to blog about it. That’s in part because John had an art opening Tuesday so I didn’t have a lot of spare time to write. But it’s also because I needed some time to process the shock.
I was business editor at the Ann Arbor News from 1997-2000. I still know several hard-working, talented journalists there. This isn’t a distant happening in the news industry. It’s killing the daily newspaper in a city I love, one that in many ways felt like home more than New York does.
Of course I know the newspaper industry is struggling. I’ve written about that before. But I assumed, wrongly, that the publicly held newspaper companies, companies like Tribune with huge debt or papers in cities still lucky enough to have newspaper competition were the ones to watch for closures. Ann Arbor News fits none of those and with a highly educated, literate population, it never occurred to me the News was in danger. It was like learning that a relative you thought controlled diabetes with insulin and diet was dying of kidney failure. 

Tony Dearing, who you can see in a video intro on annabor.com, will head content on annarbor.com. We worked together at the News and we share an alma mater, Central Michigan, so we’ve been Facebook friends for a while. When I noticed him mentioning trips to New York on his profile, I sent him a message saying I’d like to catch up on one of his visits.
We went to dinner and he told me he was working on an experimental online project to push the envelope of what newspapers are doing. We had an enjoyable conversation about the challenges newspapers face, the downsides of many newspaper Web sites (especially Advance’s MLive) and how bloggers might play a role in a pro-am online community.
The next day News editor Ed Petykiewicz announced his retirement after about two decades and I marveled that Tony hadn’t even hinted at it. (Here’s the storyabout Ed on MLive, which I couldn’t get to using MLive’s search engine but had to find using Google) But then early the next week came the news that the News would stop publishing, and annarbor.com would take its place along with a twice-a-week print publication. And that was just the start: Bay City, Saginaw and Flint would no longer have seven-day newspapers, and remaining employees would take pay cuts.
Since either Tony is an exceptionally good actor or I’ve lost my edge as a reporter, we got together for brunch this weekend to talk about the project he was sworn to secrecy on last time we dined.
We talked both about the reinvention of the Ann Arbor News and about Tony’s personal reinvention. He’s a newlywed, married on New Year’s Eve, who’s spent his career in newspapers and who’s taken some heat for being a middle-aged print guy leading this Web innovation.
He’s excited about the opportunity. “I am surprised I feel this confident,” Tony said. “I feel that Ann Arbor is such a perfect  market for something like this.”
And as for the risk to his own career? “I’d rather walk into the teeth of it, than just be swept wherever it sweeps me,” he said. “The opportunity to try to save this thing we do was something I couldn’t pass up.”
Tony says that although he doesn’t fit the mold of the young online entrepreneur, he knows his role in the operation. He knows staffing and budgeting, and he says figuring out the finances of the operation is as important as cutting edge tech.
“Our challenge is to create an online community that’s profitable,” Tony said. “We’re creating a business model here.
“I don’t want anybody to think it’s about the Web site or the Web site design. What’s the design of craigslist?” he said. Instead it’s important to create an online community with good professional reporting, an engaged conversation from readers and find a way to make enough money to support it. He wants to appeal both to existing readers of the News and to a broader audience who would never subscribe to a paper.
“This isn’t going to be easy. There isn’t a model,” he said.
He admires elements of http://www.baristanet.com/ and http://www.brownstoner.com/ along with http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ but is wary of talking too much about specifics because he doesn’t want people to infer what annarbor.com will be. He and his team are still figuring that out, and they want it to respond to what residents say at community meetings, not mimicking something already done.
Why is he so confident they can achieve the media holy grail of making a Web site self supporting? He says his team, which includes lead Web guy Hassan Hodges, is sophisticated and energetic, and they’re working with vendors with great ideas. “We have the expertise and the resources to make it work.”
I hope he’s right. I believe deeply in the role a newspaper plays in an informed democracy and in stitching together a community, so maybe my old company can lead the vanguard of doing that without smearing newsprint on your hands or having to fish a wet paper out of the bushes.
* Editor and Publisher story on Advance’s announcement of changes in Ann Arbor, throughout Michigan and companywide.
* A Crain’s Detroit Business article on annarbor.com’s chances of success.
* Jim Carty writes a three-part interview with Tony and his own assessment of the chances of annarbor.com’s success on his blog Paper Tiger No More.
* Mary Morgan writes a poignant column on the death of her mother and the Ann Arbor News announcement, which happened within 12 hours, on her Ann Arbor Chronicle.