Mary Morgan: The Ann Arbor Chronicle

Mary, I don't know whether you remember me ..you helped me re-write my letter to the ed. so it better worked in Other Vocies. I called you at AANews and found you gone and so went on line to find your new location. One question. Do you want letters etc still? Eastern Mich U. used to have Jeff Duncan, an English prof there write pantomimes. They were great. However, the dept. voted it down after two very successful years of actually making money. It is now being done in G.Rapids this weekend and I am going. Would you like a write up and pictures? I'd love to see some publicity in this area to let MSU know they dropped a great family entertainment event. My phone is 734-429-5032 (cell -734-709-8137) if you want to chat or email is here too. Most sincerely and thanks for all your help. Christine Crowner

Mary Morgan and her husband, David Askins, have started an online publication, which they have dubbed the Ann Arbor Chronicle. Morgan is knowledgeable in the field, as a former editor for The Ann Arbor News. This was an interesting interview to watch, because I was just listening to the radio yesterday, and I heard Mitch Albom discussing the Detroit newspapers' move to a predominantly online format. Apparently, starting next year, the Detroit Free Press will only be delivered in its paper form three days a week. This is intended to ease an eventual transition to an entirely online format, which is more cost-effective for the company. I think that Morgan will be successful in this venture. The section titled Stopped.Watched., in particular, is very innovative for a newspaper. She is essentially capitalizing on people's technology addiction, which provides her with free correspondents. She is wise in that she has the "correspondents" sign up with her first, and edits/censors the posts before they go online. There is a website, iReport, on which people are supposed to post their own news. The problem is that there are no checks and balances in iReport. As a result, when the stock market started to vacillate, someone posted on iReport that Apple's cofounder, Steve Jobs, had died. For two hours that morning, Apple stock plunged. I'm not sure if the "journalists" were ever prosecuted, but iReport was widely criticized for its vulnerability to that type of abuse. Ann Arbor is a great place to embark on this venture, because it is a very progressive city, which is presumably tech-savvy. There is a greater-than-average chance that this format will be embraced by the market. Many people already get their national and world news fix online, so this seems a natural step towards making local news available online as well.