The first thing I noticed on AnnArbor.com is, well, the first thing I was supposed to notice. The bare home page doesn’t even try to do the traditional newspaper editor’s job of defining which stories are the most important or pressing. It’s simply a time-sequenced river of news. Think of it as Times Wire, except without the choice to click back to The New York Times’ spiffy home page. This is the home page.

It might not be what readers expected when Tony Dearing, AnnArbor.com’s chief content officer, promised a site “different from anything you’ve ever seen,” but maybe it should have been. “Somehow, that has the connotation of this fantastic, super-futuristic, dancing-women, fireworks-going-off site,” Dearing told me. “And really, I meant it in the opposite way. It’s going to be very different, but in a simple, understated way that news sites traditionally have not gone.”

Indeed, AnnArbor.com — which launched the day after The Ann Arbor News shuttered — looks more like Digg and Twitter than it does the Detroit Free Press. At least right now, an investigative enterprise story is featured no more prominently than a 200-word blog post. Everything — design, content, even advertising — is different.

That’s the point. “At a lot of other newspaper Web sites, people come, stop by, check in and then glance off,” said Hassan Hodges, the site’s director of technology. “They check in maybe once a day for occasional use. We’re trying to encourage much more frequent and engaged usage.”

The river of news

That unique appeal starts with the unconventional home page, organized by time and not importance. For most stories, all readers see is the timestamp, headline, votes, comments, categorized topics and a photo, if there is one.

The main limitation of such a format are obvious: namely, that a big story can be washed away by a torrent of small ones. It’s a concern, but Dearing said that the quick push to launch has kept some layout features from being ready. Soon, the homepage will have the ability to become more flexible — more newspaper-like, in a way — if a story merits the attention.

Still, AnnArbor.com doesn’t aspire to be a mainstream media Web site. “In addition to covering news and being a journalistic source, our goal was to be a true community hub,” Dearing said. “Taking a very traditional, hierarchical, top-headlines-of-the-day approach did not feel like it was going to really give people that feel or the breadth of what the site seeks to do, which is reflect the entire community and not just the news. The river of news is the direction things are headed in. It’s clear people are getting more comfortable with that.”

Finding a voice

The site boasts 35 trained journalists, who cover everything from local government to University of Michigan football. The stories seem short for now, but that’s not a conscious editorial strategy. “I think we’re finding our voice,” Dearing said. “No reporter’s being told, ‘Don’t write more than 200 words,’ or anything like that. They write what they need to say to tell a story.”

The neighborhood-level reporting is currently focused on a few locations: downtown Ann Arbor, plus Burns Park and Old West . Coverage of other neighborhoods is provided by an Outside.in feed. (“Again, not a perfect solution, but a small start,” Dearing wrote in a blog post announcing the strategy.) He hopes the experiment produces a model for hyperlocal reporting that can be applied to other areas, starting in around six months.

But stories from reporters are interspersed with dispatches from local bloggers — who may not know AP style, but who are hopefully fluent in their niches of expertise. Their blog posts currently look the same as, say, a breaking news story, but there will soon be visual differentiation between staff-generated journalism and citizen journalism, Dearing said.

Advertisements already have a distinct visual appearance in the news feed. The ads are billed as “deals,” and they are sortable by category on a specific advertising page. Two advertisements pop up in the current nine-story river of news on the front page, with six more under a tab lower on the page. On individual article pages, the deals have prominent displays in sidebars.

The advertising is extremely local and, compared to newspapers, extremely cheap, said Dearing, who noted that it’s still too early to translate early enthusiasm from advertisers into quantifiable revenue.

Future in the community

Despite the highly-public nature of its launch, AnnArbor.com is not a finished product. It will look different in a month than it does now, in part because of the restraints of a forced launch date. And it will certainly look different in a year based on community feedback. Journalism observers have been quick to offer their two cents — Dearing sees insiders’ reactions split 50/50, based on utility and aesthetics — but Dearing said “most people who have come to the site haven’t reacted. They’ve just used it.”

In the meantime, as more of Ann Arbor’s Internet-savvy demographic bookmarks AnnArbor.com, changes wait to be rolled out. There will be more photos, more video, a more evenly-distributed advertising model, and even a potential content-sharing partnership with the Michigan Daily. “This is very much defined by the community,” Dearing said. “We are going to be what the community wants us to be.”

If you’re a Colorado Rockies fan, you can follow your team in any number of ways. There are the obvious national outlets, the Associated Press, the hometown Denver Post, and — before this year’s spring training at least — the Rocky Mountain News, R.I.P. Then there are the television networks and radio stations, and, perhaps most significantly, a growing gauntlet of coverage from Major League Baseball itself from MLB.com. That seems like a pretty saturated market, and we haven’t even broached the many Rockies blogs, fan sites, and message boards, or the community and regional blogs that occasionally join the fray. There’s no shortage of information about the Rockies.

And yet, some of the reporters who know the Rockies better than anyone are working for still another news organization — one they created with that exact saturation in mind. Inside The Rockies — a reported blog launched two days after the Rocky’s closing by the newspaper’s beat writers, Tracy Ringolsby and Jack Etkin, and its assistant sports editor for interactive, Steve Foster — doesn’t aim to supplant the competition. Their goal is to guide the conversation around the Rockies.

Most of the site’s dispatches are short, some as brief as a sentence. The writers aggregate national and local news, and instead of filing traditional game stories, a typical game recap is more of a cross between summary, infographic and notebook. The writers’ contributions are meant, in part, to kickstart the give-and-take in the comments section, where all three are active participants. Keep reading »

When Ledger Live, The Star-Ledger’s webcast, debuted last July to critical raves, it was about as conventional as a daily video podcast from the newsroom could be. Host Brian Donohue spent most of his time behind his desk, in classic anchorman style, and the rundown of stories resembled a cable news show. Interaction between Donohue and his audience was limited.

A year later, though, the show has evolved into something almost entirely different. For starters, it’s no longer daily and (no matter what the name says) no longer live. Donohue is rarely immobile now, and the format hardly resembles your grandfather’s newscast. Audience numbers are way up, and Ledger Live has even attracted one of the most obvious markers of success: a sponsor’s ad for 15 seconds before every show. The show’s evolution shows the limits of borrowing from an established model when building something new. Just as early TV had to evolve its own formats and get past just being radio-plus-pictures, newspaper online video is evolving beyond the metaphors television has handed it.

“From a newscast, it got a lot more bloggy, which I like and have more fun doing — and I think it works better,” Donohue told me. “What we wanted to do was just go back to doing a video show the way reporters talk to each other. It’s more conversational. It’s snarkier. It’s a lot more fun. What you need for video to work on the web is more of a voice. For the web in general, you need a voice.”

Perhaps the best way to think of Ledger Live these days is as a state-centric video blog. Donohue and his team chase offbeat features and comment on the news in a casual, inviting manner. Instead of adhering to a rigid schedule, they tape shows when they have ample material, which averages out to about three or four per week. The webcast is light but not shallow, informed but not ominiscient, topical but still newsy. And by the numbers, it’s more successful than ever. Keep reading »

[Our series profiling winners of the 2009 Knight News Challenge continues with Ben Cohen writing about Aaron Presnall's data-visualization grant. —Josh]

Aaron Presnall is neither a journalist nor a developer. He’s a political economist who specializes in the role of participation and information in decision-making. His job makes him acutely aware of journalism’s impact on democracy, and he knows that sound data informs good decisions.

He also understands that only a handful of news outlets can afford to invest significant resources in the beautiful-yet-intelligible presentation of such data, which is why he plans to use his $243,600 Knight News Challenge award to build an open-source data visualization module targeting community newspapers, independent journalists and bloggers — really, anyone interested in publishing data visualizations. With a team of five coders and designers, Presnall hopes to launch a beta version by December; the initial sample visualizations will focus on alternative energy and eco-issues in Belgrade, where he has been stationed with the Jefferson Institute for seven years.

Tools to visualize data are nothing new, and the market has already produced several attempts to make them accessible to non-geeks. But Presnall believes his project can push the difficulty and cost of data visualization down further and encourage its use among those who wouldn’t have considered it before.

Keep reading »