Weekly Whopper: “The Community Wants us to Focus More Sharply on Local News Reporting.”
Sometimes, other people beat A2Politico to the punch, and that’s perfectly fine. In fact, sometimes it’s a bit of a relief. The Weekly Whopper this time around goes to AnnArbor.com Kontent King (Chief Content Officer) Tony Dearing for his incredible assertion that the news site gave the heave-ho to close to one-third of its newsroom staff, without notice to either the workers or the newspaper’s readership, because, “the community” made him do it.
Dearing posted his “explanation,” below, to the AnnArbor.com web site, buried deep in the site, in a comment thread on an article about upcoming layoffs at Border’s.
“While personnel issues are an internal matter and we don’t discuss them publicly, I can confirm that we reorganized our newsroom this week to put our focus more squarely on local news coverage. As a new organization, we have tried a lot of things. Now that we are well into our second year, the community has told us very resoundingly that what it wants most from us is hard news coverage, particularly in the areas of government, education, police, courts, health, the environment, University of Michigan sports, and business. These areas of coverage account for all but a tiny percentage of our readership and revenue. Meanwhile, we also have put a lot of effort toward other things — including lifestyle topics like Passions and Pursuits, The Deuce, Homes and some areas of Entertainment coverage — that our community has shown much less interest in, and we are scaling back in those areas.
“We have made tremendous progress since we launched, and we continue to be very happy with the growth we’re seeing in audience and revenue. But from the beginning, we said that we would be shaped by what the community wants, and the community wants us to focus more sharply on local news reporting. We have repositioned ourselves to throw our energy and resources into our local news coverage and that is how we will operate moving forward as we continue to grow.”
Just 15 minutes later, “Ruth Kraut” (perhaps this is the Ruth Kraut who is the spouse of Avalon Housing Executive Director Michael Appel?) posted this reply:
@Tony, if you were truly concerned with local news, you would have asked those reporters and staff to focus more on local news, and “moved” them from entertainment to–for example–higher education–which is, after all, the biggest “business” in Washtenaw County. Instead, you should tell the truth–you did this to cut costs, because your model isn’t working. It’s not working because you don’t have ENOUGH reporting.
Ouch.
A quarter of an hour after he posted, Ruth Kraut accused Tony Dearing of telling a whopper, and A2Politico agrees that his explanation is so patently absurd that it’s difficult to comprehend how someone in his position would think all those smarty-pants, highly-educated, braniac Ann Arbor readers would buy it. Mary Morgan, Publisher of AnnArborChronicle.com slaps Dearing around in her “column” that dissects the reality behind and meaning of the layoffs. Like Ruth Kraut, Morgan comes right out and questions Dearing’s veracity and, quite openly, his standards.
Double ouch. Publishers don’t normally smack around the competition this openly. In fact, it’s pretty much unprecedented for the publisher of a newspaper or magazine to stick a toe into the editorial side at all. Oh, well. Morgan’s round-house punch made for the some juicy reading.