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Key links:
Primary website:
annarborchronicle.com
Primary Twitter:
@A2ChronHeads

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

The Ann Arbor Chronicle was a local news website covering Ann Arbor, Mich., that shut down in September 2014.

The Chronicle was launched in 2008 by the husband-and-wife team of Dave Askins and Mary Morgan and focused primarily on longer-form local government reporting. It was 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 and 38% at the time of its closing. It held events for subscribers as well. In 2012, the founders said it brought in $100,000 annually — where its revenue plateaued — and was growing at 16 percent per year. The site closed in 2014 because Askins and Morgan believed they could no longer put in the labor to keep the site running.

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Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
Aug. 12, 2014 / Joseph Lichterman
The Ann Arbor Chronicle, a quirky local news startup, is shutting down after six years — The post announcing the news was published late Thursday night: The Ann Arbor Chronicle, a local news site covering the home city of the University of Michigan, would cease publishing on Sept. 2, the sixth anniversary of...
Sept. 19, 2012 / Michael Andersen
Four years later, the Ann Arbor Chronicle is still weird and wonky — and it’s growing — Handed an opportunity by the closure of the Ann Arbor News, two married journalists have built a small business on the kind of civic-minded reporting that isn't supposed to work online....
June 13, 2012 / Adrienne LaFrance
Lessons from the Motor City: What New Orleans might expect when the printing presses slow — In 2009, The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News cut back to three days of home delivery a week. Three years later, their struggles continue....
Sept. 30, 2009 / Michael Andersen
The rise of single-serving libel insurance: If it’s good enough for bloggers, why not small newsrooms? — Sooner or later — as Diane Sawyer, Jeffrey Wigand or the National Enquirer could tell you — anyone who makes a living telling the truth is going to need a good lawyer. That’s why major metro newspapers ...
Sept. 11, 2009 / Michael Andersen
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. ...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: August 14, 2014.
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The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit news organization based in Washington, D.C., that produces investigative journalism on public-interest issues. The center was founded by Charles Lewis in 1989, who was its director until 2005. Its staff has fluctuated between 25 to more than 50 throughout the 2000s and 2010s; most recently, it laid…

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