A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

Other papers are attempting to migrate customers in other ways.
When Advance Publications decided it could no longer afford to publish the Ann
Arbor News, it shut down the newspaper. The next day, it launched a Web site with half
the staff of the newspaper and nowhere near the same presence in the community. But it
did provide a new door for its customers to open at AnnArbor.com.
Three months after the paper locked its doors at the corner of Huron and Division
Streets, a group of activists, county employees, library workers, journalists and students
spent an evening adding up what’s been lost and what’s showing up in its place. 155
After listening for a while, AnnArbor.com editor Tony Dearing stood up and said
the site hopes to “help people develop tolerance for various profiles of getting news.”
During an interview the next morning in his office, which overlooks the colorful Google
sign atop the search giant’s Ann Arbor offices, Dearing said he hopes people show up in
person, too. The site is planning a storefront gathering spot on the first floor of its offices.
“We won’t sell any Skinny Vanilla Lattes, but we will set it up like a coffee shop
community and our community team will work down there,” he said.
Which are the experiments worth trying—and which should be avoided?
The Washington Post provided vivid examples of each in 2009, one involving a series
of events aimed at generating new revenue and two new partnerships with start‐ups
producing news, one focused on fiscal policy and the other on health care policy.
In its events project, The Post hoped to generate $250,000 or more with a series of
sponsored, off‐the‐record “salons” with Post journalists at the home of its publisher,
Katherine Weymouth. 156 Plans called for the first of these events to include a $25,000
sponsorship by the Kaiser Permanente health insurance company for an evening
devoted to discussion of health care reform issues. At first blush, the idea looked as if it
could add some significant revenue and a good fit with a tiny sliver of the audience—
the lobbyists paying the tab. But the impact on the vast majority of the Post’s other
constituents—readers and users who rely on the paper for independent analysis—was
disastrous. Not to mention the conflict with the values espoused by the newspaper in its
“Standards and Ethics” guidelines. Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander pointed out
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