by Rob Smith

ON AUGUST 8, 2014 the owners of the online site AnnArborChronicle.com announced that they will shutter their site on Sept. 2 after six years. The AnnArborChronicle.com is a self-described online newspaper that “focuses on civic affairs and local government coverage.” Articles will be archived, but no new content will be added after the Sept. 2 date. According to husband and wife team Mary Morgan and David Askins, they are ready to pursue other interests and activities.

Morgan was a former employee with The Ann Arbor News before it was folded and reimagined as AnnArbor.com (which was subsequently folded in 2013 and re-reimagined as The Ann Arbor News). She took a buy-out prior to the July 2008 closure of the former Ann Arbor News, and together with her husband, founded a digital news site.

It is funded primarily through advertising, though the for-profit site also took donations, which it called “subscriptions” and which accounted for 22 percent of its revenue in 2011. The site held events for subscribers as well.  In 2012, the founders said their site brought in $100,000 annually and was growing at 16 percent per year. In the article announcing the site’s closing, the owners said that money was not the reason they had decided to end their own experiment in digital journalism: “Could we continue to make the finances work out? Yes, The Chronicle paid its bills with enough left over for us to earn a livelihood. And financially speaking, I think our approach could have been sustained into the indefinite future.”

It’s unclear why the owners did not seek to find a buyer for the site who would have continued on with its coverage of local politics and meetings.

The owners indicated that the amount of time required to run the site was incredibly time-consuming:

“But even at that level of support, a sustained future would also continue to rely on two people committing not just 40, 60 or 80 hours a week, but virtually every waking moment to the enterprise. We’re hardly unique in that respect. It’s not unusual for a small, independent business owner to rely on an all-consuming personal effort to make the finances work.”

While AnnArbor.com was publishing, Mary Morgan and David Askins were fierce critics of the site. In September 2013, when AnnArbor.com was folded, Askins told a reporter from the Neiman Lab, “It’s just that AnnArbor.com is a magnificently dumb name to print on a masthead and to deliver to people’s doorsteps. And it took four years for that basic insight finally to sink in.”

In a June 2012 piece, Morgan wrote, “I realize there’s a certain etiquette I’m violating in calling out the leadership of another publication in this way. What I hear on a regular basis about the community’s perception of the quality of reporting and editorial oversight at AnnArbor.com ranges from idle snark to complete outrage.”

Morgan also took exception to a reporting award given to AnnArbor.com’s government reporter Ryan Stanton. In the same June 2012 piece she wrote, “It’s worth noting that Stanton’s article about fire safety won a first-place award from the Michigan Associated Press for investigative reporting. And yes, I spewed my coffee when I heard about that.”

When not criticizing AnnArbor.com for having “a superficial, false understanding of the community it serves,” and “misleading readers,” Askins and Morgan were producing detailed transcripts of local meetings, including City Council, Board of Education, County Commission and the like. Askins produced detailed previews of public meeting agendas and had recently began to produce digital audio recordings of candidate events, such as the various mayoral forums held prior to the August 5 primary election.

Askins posted live updates of City Council meetings which provided a rich source of detailed information, including information about Council members’ comments and votes.

In response to the announcement, over 100 people commented on the site. Ward 1 Council member Sabra Briere confessed to being “devastated” and wrote, “The Chronicle has been my north star since it began publishing. I have trusted that – even when I wasn’t in the room – the Chronicle was there, recording the facts and (sometimes) offering a valuable point of view. No media has watched local government do its messy thing with a clearer eye. No better record could exist.”

Ward 4 Council member Jack Eaton commented on the quality of the site’s discussions: “Your web site also raised the bar for civic discussion. A comparison of the comments by your kind and generous readers with the comment sections on other news sites is a testament to your ability to attract great folks and inspire insightful discussion.”

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