360PR Blog

I have been meaning to post about an interesting article from TIME Magazine that ran a couple weeks back, but the end of summer is just now letting me breathe.  Operating under the mindset of “better late than never,” here we go.

TIME’s article, “Ann Arbor Kills Its Newspaper – To Save It,” describes an interesting move by Advance Publications, the owner of the recently-deceased Ann Arbor News. Using the Michigan newspaper as a litmus test, of sorts, Advance shut down the print edition of the newspaper and re-launched www.AnnArbor.com – - slashing staff by approximately 80%. The goal of this seems to be to see if there is money to be made in this new media climate by crossing traditional news reporting with social media in a larger media market (BEFORE the paper dies on its own).

Living in Boston, we have become accustomed to the threats of losing our largest traditional media outlet in the Boston Globe. As a regular visitor to Boston.com, I am on the fence about whether or now I would be OK with that becoming the ONLY way I can access the Globe. Part of me says “that’s how you primarily read it anyway,” while the rest likes the way that the newspaper feels in my hands on a lazy Sunday.

The jury is still out in Ann Arbor, as it will undoubtedly take some time for people to make their final decision whether to accept or reject the new format. And as the TIME article points out, “A lot of U.S. newspapers, and their readers, have a stake in whether the experiment in Ann Arbor succeeds.”

I wonder how closely the Globe and the New York Times Co. are tracking the success or failure AnnArbor.com.  Do you think this is a model that could work in Boston, or are we too attached to the traditional Boston Globe?

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