The death of The Ann Arbor News and the birth of AnnArbor.com were supposed to be watershed moments in local journalism. One national pundit examines the events one year later and doesn't see it shaping up that way.
Excerpt:
A year ago Friday I was in southeastern Michigan to wring my hands in distress as the final editions of the Ann Arbor News rolled off the presses.
Ann Arbor, a town of 114,000 was becoming the first American city of any size to lose its only local daily. The passage was melancholy for me — I delivered the paper as a kid; my parents had subscribed for nearly 50 years — and ominous for the industry in which I work.
The Rocky Mountain News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Tucson Citizen had folded since February and many papers, including the two biggest Chicago dailies, were in bankruptcy. The decision of Advance Publications Inc., Ann Arbor News' parent company, to close the struggling paper and replace it with the leaner, bloggier AnnArbor.com looked like a sharp turn on a rocky road to an all-digital future for print news.
Twelve months later, though, it looks more like a small fork.
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