Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The Ann Arbor News is back

Turritopsis nutricula, the immortal jellyfish, is unique among animals in that it can revert back to its clonal polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. In a similar process, The Com announced today that it would be reverting back to its previous state as the Ann Arbor News and reintegrating the MLive Media Group as part of MLive.com. It should be be noted The Com exists as a subsidiary of MLive.

The Com emerged in 2009 [ed: for those of you who enjoyed the jellyfish metaphor above, The Com, could be considered analogous to the T. nutricula's medusa, or sexually mature, phase] from the closure of The Ann Arbor News. To me, it always seemed stupid to switch from the Ann Arbor News to AnnArbor.com; the name of a newspaper with a 174 year print run has to have some intrinsic value. Also, the idea of a print edition of a website has always seemed, well dumb. So I'm glad to see the Ann Arbor News name coming back. That said, over the past four years, AnnArbor.com has also developed some value. And it appears as if the new AnnArbor.news Ann Arbor News [ed: polyp stage] will be dropping the site, AnnArbor.com, as it fully integrated with MLive.com. Personally, it seems a little short sighted to get rid of the AnnArbor.com domain. Why not just have AnnArbor.com contain the Ann Arbor News' content using MLive.com's servers and formatting?

The upswing of all this is that you will no longer be forced to watch in horror as unordered print editions of a website continue to pile up in your lawn. Yeah, I'm looking at you @trevorstaples. Instead, you can watch in delight as unordered newspapers pile up in your lawn. Newspapers, they are so olde timey and quaint--such a throwback to 2009.

UPDATE--12:00PM:

On The Com's Letter to Readers, lots of folks were posting comments that 1) predicted an impending downsizing of local reporting staff, 2) wishing the local reporters good luck and praising their accomplishments and 3) complaining that MLive.com looks terrible. These all seem to be valid points that add to the depth of the story. Unfortunately, commenting was disabled and the comments have now been lost to the aether. I guess MLive didn't want people saying bad things about it. Seems like they should have probably anticipated some negative comments. Deleting comments en masse that adhere to commenting guidelines seems pretty tacky.

UPDATE--1:00PM:

The comments are back.

1 comment:

  1. The comments are not back, but there are comments on another story with the same subject, once again showing aadc's complete lack of understanding and respect for the medium it operates in. This is a good time to subscribe to the chronicle, people.

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