WordPress, Twitter, the Elks Club: 10 new routines at a news startup
This is what a profitable post-paper newsroom looks like:
And this is what it feels like: 15 hours a day, seven days a week, from the 7 a.m. check-in with your spouse-turned-business-partner to the midnight bookkeeping.
No kids, no vacations, no car. No office; your only away-from-home base is a former Main Street antique shop that sells shared-workspace memberships to freelance software developers and the like for $100 a month. No novels before bed; there’s no time. If it’s a Saturday and the Michigan team is playing, you can watch the game, but run back to your keyboard during the commercials, okay?
In the two months since Ann Arbor became the nation’s newest no-newspaper town, there’s been lots of talk about its status as ground zero for the new ecosystem of Web-native niche outlets. But I wanted to know: In a business that’s always been oiled by routine — midnight press runs, 6 a.m. broadcasts, 11 a.m. news meetings, 6:30 deadlines — how will tomorrow’s hyperlocal news professionals structure their day? So, a few weeks after the Ann Arbor News folded, I spent a morning with its most established successor, the one-year-old, online-only Ann Arbor Chronicle, to get a sense for the future of the newsroom routine.
I found a lot of new routines and emerging practices. But more than anything, I found a pair of journalists cheerfully working their minds and bodies raw to make their business an outlier, profit-wise.
Creating 10 heavily reported and edited posts a week, maintaining the site’s daily news digests and gossip feature, editing three regular columnists and selling the ads to support it all requires “literally every waking hour” the couple has, Chronicle editor Dave Askins said.
Askins, 44, “sometimes works through the night,” said publisher Mary Morgan, 48, who says she’s dropped 50 pounds since launching the business last year. “I can’t swing that.”
Could you? If so, here’s a 10-point glance at the daily and weekly routines and rules Morgan and Askins used to build one of the nation’s first sustainable, hyperlocal Web startups.
1. Weekly editorial meetings. The two hold a “publisher’s meeting” of one hour or more in Morgan’s home office every Sunday to set goals for the week, discuss how stories should be packaged and discuss long-term coverage.
2. Comparing schedules each morning. In the first of three or four check-ins with each other through the day, Morgan and Askins review their daily tasks and talk about when they plan to file stories.
3. Inbound links checked daily. The day before I visited, logs for the Chronicle’s WordPress site reported that it had drawn 277 visitors from a local sports blog, 28 from a local school blog and 23 from annarbor.com, the reincarnated Ann Arbor News.
4. Inbound tweets repackaged for the site. The Chronicle uses its Twitter account to encourage people to tweet in news snippets, which they check regularly and work into an around-the-town feed that publishes two to five items daily.
5. Google News Alerts every morning. Has any other service been adopted by every newsroom in the country with so little fanfare? The Chronicle is no exception; each morning, Morgan selects a handful of items from her 12 news alerts for phrases like “university of michigan” and “washtenaw county” for two news-from-out-of-town aggregators.
6. More than 20 public meetings a month. No, Mr. Simon, most local-news blogs don’t staff zoning hearings. But many do, and the Chronicle is one. When they launched, Morgan and Askins built their monthly schedule around a list of meetings the Ann Arbor News wasn’t covering. Today, exhaustive summaries of Ann Arbor’s Public Market Advisory Commission, Public Art Commission and Downtown Development Authority meetings are the Chronicle’s bread and butter, filling almost half its editorial time.
7. Two sets of eyes on every full story. A 5,000-word meeting story might take six hours to write and two to edit, Morgan said.
8. No deadlines. There’s no fixed publication schedule for full-length stories, said Morgan, a former business and opinion editor for the defunct News. Rushing to get the story first is outdated and doesn’t really matter to readers, she said. “The assumption is, well, we’re going to get it done as soon as we can given everything else we’ve got going,” she said.
9. Photos at every opportunity. Processing the shots takes a lot of time, Morgan said, but they’re the best way to cover an event. Even public meetings get captured by their Nikon D60.
10. Nonstop public speaking. During 10 years at the News, Morgan made it into a lot of local Rolodexes. When she launched the Chronicle, they started calling. Today, Morgan has a speaking engagement almost every week. When we spoke this month, Morgan was planning for a business association meeting, a local book festival and a senior center lecture. “Generally people want me to talk about our publication and the general media landscape in Ann Arbor,” explained Morgan. “It’s a way to get the word out.” She’s never yet solicited an appearance herself: “Groups, generally, are starved for speakers.”
Okay, last question: Are the routines exhausting? It’s a lot of work, Askins told me. But in the depths of a recession, it’s covering the couple’s mortgage, health insurance, living expenses, and maybe some retirement savings. (They didn’t give exact numbers.) And most of it, he said, is anything but routine.
“I wouldn’t trade this job for anything,” he said. “Mary and I were both reflecting the other day on the fact that if there were an opportunity to become an employee of another entity doing pretty much the same thing, there would be no way.”
“I’m not a very good cog,” Askins went on. “If we had to apply for jobs, I wouldn’t hire me. I would say, ‘That guy’s tasted what it feels like to be his own boss.’”
Great article. As one of the columnists whom they edit, I’ve come to admire not just Dave and Mary’s professionalism and dedication, but their willingness to take successful chances on content that traditional publications might eschew.
The Chronicle’s product speaks pretty well for itself, but this post sheds even more glowing light on the innovation of the Ann Arbor news-information industry. The flexibility of Morgan and Askins’ enterprise is the real morale of the story, I think. They have created an environment where fluctuations are good and expected…a good lesson to future news services.
Fascinating article, Michael. Thank you for the coverage. Best of luck to both Dave & Mary!
Sounds a lot like our life. Always heartening to hear you’re not alone. And as we grow increasingly able to pay freelancers for coverage, the editing time increases – so I empathize with what that tacks onto the schedule.
But is that a typo – ten items a WEEK published on their site? Total? We publish more than ten a day. Some are short, some long. But there’s a LOT of news to share, including what’s “happening now.” Sometimes a photo with three lines of text. Or maybe those types of things weren’t counted in the 10/week figure cited?
Also glad to hear they cover all the local meetings – we cover about that many too – including the neighborhood councils. They ALL are involved in important work that should have more light shone on it, routinely.
Anyway, way to go, Ann Arbor Chronicle! When we bump into the routine naysayers and I throw out examples of successful, profitable small independent news organizations like ours, I have to remember to include them on the list too! Off to retweet this article …
Tracy: I know! I was thinking about WestSeattleBlog as I wrote this. Basically, the gist of it seems to be that their posts are usually really, really long. Which is interesting. Let a thousand flowers bloom, eh?
I’m especially curious if you saw any surprises above, or if you have any suggestions for Mary and Dave. Whatever common threads your two ventures might share would be prime targets for all similar startups to emulate.
And thanks, Pat and Joel.
A thousand flowers – and five thousand words! Tracy, our sites are taking very different approaches, as Mike noted. Most of The Chronicle’s main articles provide a great level of detail, research and analysis. We do publish several other, much shorter items each day – including our Stopped.Watched and Media Watch features. But our focus is in providing as much depth and analysis as possible, and that’s what we’re known for. I think there’s an appetite for all flavors of coverage!
And kudos to you for being a pioneer in this crazy new world. West Seattle Blog is consistently cited as a model that’s working well. Congratulations for taking a risk and creating such a successful venture.
Keep up the great work. It will be worth it.
-kpaul
I share the pain…. and the satisfaction to do what we do. Yest I still wonder.. What’s Next: http://www.rjicollaboratory.org/profiles/blogs/what-next
Inspiring stuff. I feel like this sometimes when I’m running my hyper-local site – and I still work full-time. There’s not set schedule, just the never-ending deadline of needing to get it done so it’s online for the readers.
The Ann Arbor Chronicle looks like a great product, feels very professionally and thoughtfully put together, the language and style is friendly but considered.
The Stopped. Watched feed is a great example of hyperlocal content, tapping into life in the local community.
Indeed a beacon of light for the news industry. Congratulations to Askins, Morgan and their team.