Dearing interview, part I: It's going to be like nothing you've ever seen

It's late and I'm burned out and have plenty of law school work to do, so we're going to dispense with the formalities. Tony Dearing is the man in charge of taking the Ann Arbor News and turning it into a successful online publication. We talked for more than an hour Monday night, so we'll break the interview down into three parts, starting today. The format was conversational, and is recreated word-for-word below, with almost no editing.

Main topics? How it came to this point and the Dearing/Newhouse vision for where we're going.

If you see any typos or mistakes, e-mail me. This was a rush job. (Edited to add: Thanks RK)

CARTY: I guess I'll start out with this: The paper has always been extremely conservative about discussing itself with the news media, and you seem to be pursuing a much more open and different approach today. Why, and did much thought go into that?

DEARING: A lot of thought went into it, and it is a departure from the kind of culture we have had. We feel we're moving into the online world. The online world is a culture of transparency and responsiveness and openness, and we felt like we had to set a tone right from the beginning that we were going to be open and transparent.


CARTY: How would you describe your interactions with News staffers today? What was the hardest question asked by them, and the best question?

DEARING: It was just hard. Everybody's hurting. Everybody's shocked. This is so difficult for everybody. When Ed did his exit interview with the paper, he praised the professionalism of the staff in the way they've conducted themselves in the period of recent uncertainty. I saw exactly what he was talking about - just the dignity and the professionalism that that staff is conducting itself with, in the face of the worst news they've ever heard, that effects them so personally. I'm a little awed by it, I've gotta tell you. In terms of questions today, people were very pragmatic today. The questions were very pragmatic. What's the relationship with MLive going to be? What's the news structure going to be? I think the most important question people had was, is this going to be a journalistic organization? Are there going to be reporters and are we going to cover news, and are we going to be committed to news. I wanted to assure then that we are.

Maybe the toughest question was a question about people who just love the print product and say, listen, I know how to get on the Internet, but I love the print paper and it's being taken away from me. What can we offer that person? What do we tell a person who says, I get on the Internet, but I want that thing in my hands? To me, that's the toughest thing to respond to, because it's not going to be there.


CARTY: Why was this presented as "Ann Arbor News to close in July, instead of, perhaps, "Ann Arbor News segues to online-only publication?" It seems like there was a clear choice to go in a different direction branding-wise.

DEARING: Yeah, let me make sure I understand the question, why was it phrased that way, or why is the Ann Arbor News closing instead of reorganizing?


CARTY: Let me rephrase: It seems like it's very clear from the messages today that this is going to be a publication that is not AnnArborNews.com, a print publication transitioning to a non-print product. Obviously that's a choice. Why did you go in that direction instead of the Seattle PI, for instance, which changed to an online-only publication.

DEARING: Yes, and there are so many papers right now doing different things. Look at what we're doing in Michigan - there is a different strategy in Grand Rapids, in Flint, Detroit, Seattle, Denver - everybody's trying something different. We made a pretty conscious decision early on, that we were going to start completely new from the ground up.

Somewhere in this company, we had to start completely fresh, and say if you were going to start a media organization purely out of nothing, what would you do? What would it look like? How would you do that? The decision was made, once you started looking at it, that the place to do that was Ann Arbor - that it was the best market we had. Definitely the conscious decision was we're starting something completely new here - we're not transitioning, we're not reorganizing, we're going to start from the ground up and build a news organization for today.


CARTY: Did that evolve, or when you had your initial discussions about this, you knew that was the way you were going to go?

DEARING: We knew that was the way it was going to go. There was kind of a decision first that we needed to try this, and we need to try a lot of things, and we are going to try a lot of things. One thing we're going to try is a high-tech startup, a brand-new thing. That decision was made, and then some research was done into how and where, and Ann Arbor turned out to be the answer.

And as hard as this is to say, people need to understand this: The Ann Arbor News was failing as a business. The Ann Arbor News had gotten into a position financially where it could not be turned around. That's a tough message and you hate to say it that way, it's not a reflection on the people. Our business model is not serving us well in most places, and in Ann Arbor, it couldn't be turned around. It couldn't get out of that hole we were in. That's part of the reason for Ann Arbor (being picked, too).


CARTY: I have to say that's the most stunning aspect of it to me. I look at this market, and it appears to me that we're the dominant advertising vehicle - hard to shed the "we" - and clearly we're the dominant news source, the place the most people by number get their news, the talker. I guess I underestimated the cost structure. I had ongoing discussions for months with people inside Booth who told me what you said, and I guess I just underestimated what that really meant, how grave it really was.

DEARING: Yeah. What people don't understand is that, yes, Ann Arbor is a dynamic, vital market. Economically, probably better off than a lot of places in Michigan, but it's bad everywhere in Michigan. It's just not as bad here. But there are a lot of things about Ann Arbor that make it harder to succeed as a print daily paper. Print papers do better with an older audience and Ann Arbor is a little younger. We do better where there's a high level of home ownership, and there's a lower level of home ownership. We do better where there's a higher level of long-time residents, Ann Arbor is much more transitory.


CARTY: That goes to a question I've been frankly puzzled by, how is Jackson in a position to continue publishing seven days a week? I drive through Jackson and it's not as affluent - and I mean no insult - it doesn't have the employment base, the anchor of two universities and a medical center. How does it maintain a seven-day publication schedule, while the Ann Arbor News is clearly struggling in your description?

DEARING: A daily newspaper is a very traditional product that does best in very traditional communities. Jackson, Saginaw, Flint and Bay Cities are VERY traditional communities. Ann Arbor is a very untraditional community, and it's just way harder to succeed with a print product here, because it's such a non-traditional community. Conversely, that same non-traditionalist, that same differentness, is what makes it by far the best place to try this (AnnArbor.com). The best chance to succeed by doing this ahead. That's the dichotomy of Ann Arbor.


CARTY: What is the top priority for this site? If you had to pick the thing that is most important to you?

DEARING: The top priority is to create a new business model that can sustain journalism in a community. That's the top priority. Now, to succeed at that, we have to draw a large audience and then we have to make money off that audience. So the second priority is to build a large audience for what we're doing, that includes the audience we already have, and more people. Ultimately, the goal is to create an organization online that makes enough money online to sustain itself online and to sustain journalism in the future.


CARTY: How important is this venture to Newhouse?

DEARING: It's clearly very important to Newhouse, and Newhouse is investing a significant amount of money to make sure we have the resources to do this properly so we succeed. It's very important to the company.


CARTY: Do you have a model you can point to, a model site, and say this is what we want to do? This is what we'd like to resemble?

DEARING: The problem is, we really don't. We're working with a web design firm that's done a lot of work in media, done a lot of work in revenue generation, that is WAY out there conceptually, way out ahead of the curve. What we're going to do is not going to look like anything out there. There is no model. We are creating a model that doesn't exist. There's nothing I can point to. Little slivers of things, but nothing you can look at and say, oh, that's it. The one thing I guarantee you, when this thing launches, and people look at it, they're not going to say, "Oh, it's just another newspaper website." I can assure you this is going to be different from anything you've ever seen, or can kind of conceptualize.


CARTY: I look at what you're talking about, and I think, you're right, it needs to look like nothing else, but then I ask, what does that mean to people who have been at the Ann Arbor News for 25 years? Would I hire those people? Would I hire me? It's an interesting thing. You're in a difficult position in terms of trying to mold, or being brave enough not to mold, the old and the new.

DEARING: The challenge for me is to find that balance. If I have a staff of new media people who don't know Ann Arbor, who don't have experience in Ann Arbor, who don't cover Ann Arbor, we're not going to succeed. If I have a staff who knows Ann Arbor, but who don't have new media skills, we're not going to succeed. Within the staff we create, we're going to have to balance those things, to find the right medium of people who know this community, have credibility, have experience, and either have shown - or can show - the ability to report in new ways and involve the digital tools available to them.

And then people who don't come in with all of the old ideas and notions and can do some cool new things that people are going to respond to.


CARTY: When your day begins, what are the first three Websites you read?

DEARING: My first three are MLive.com/annarbor, my own iGoogle page, then through bloglines, I have a blog feed that probably includes about 20 sites, including your blog. They're fed in, and I just go down the list. My blog feed includes the AnnArborChronicle and a couple of things like that. PaidContent.org, beatblogging.org, cyberjournalist.net, a collection of what's happening online in our industry.


CARTY: I think one of the many criticisms of newspaper websites has been that they haven't had a lot of personality. Salon has a personality. Slate has a personality. The AnnArborChronicle has a personality. Have you thought at all about the personality you want this site to have, or even that you do want it to have one?

DEARING: It will have a personality. We're going to ask reporters to be themselves and blog according to who they are. To write according to who they are. To speak with their own voice. I think the future in journalism is you tell people who you are, you tell them what your biases are, you tell them where you come from, this is where I'm coming from and what I'm reporting, and you let other people pile in and bring their own views. Now, I don't want somebody who is mild-mannered to pretend they're obnoxious or anything.

I told people in Flint, really, think about the stories you write. Think about maybe if you sent an e-mail to a friend before you sat down and wrote your story, that e-mail you sent your friend is probably a way better expression of what's going on than the story you write. We water it down. We make it bland. I'd rather see somebody say what they really think.

I don't think John Stewart is all that wrong. If something's crap, you can kind of say, 'This doesn't make a lot of sense to me." People will understand what you're coming from and what you think. They ask, "How can they say that."


CARTY: That sounds like a lot more latitude for opinion than within a traditional newspaper. Is that a fair take?

DEARING: Yeah, I would say so. That's what I envision - more opinion, more attitude, more candor. We all have done stories where what we wrote and what we thought were two completely different things. We will try to write what we really think the story is, and not necessarily the traditional story form.


CARTY: How closely have you looked at the News, and what do you think it does well?

DEARING: I've always kind of followed it, because I lived here for 11 years and have a lot of friends here. The last two or three months, I've watched it very closely. Our site, that will be non-traditional in many ways, will still kind of generally have its content organized around news, sports, entertainment and community. Most of the things we plan to do fall into one of those categories.

You look at the sports section, it was just named one of the top 10 sports sections in America again. I'd say they do that pretty darn well. That's a franchise you want to have.

I've always loved and appreciated the entertainment coverage. I'm here a lot, while I lived here and since then, taking advantage of the cultural life. I do think there are kind of two cultural lives here - the kind I participate in, the symphony, the opera, Hill Auditorium, and then there's a whole kind of underground cultural life that the new site, and the new company, will tap into, that the Ann Arbor News, it hasn't been their thing. I think it will be our thing. A lot of that will be taken over by the people who are into it. Younger people, they don't need a lot from the journalists, they can take that over and do a better job then we'll ever do.

Traditional news? I admire Ed tremendously. The managers who have been there, Steve Pepple - I hired Steve Pepple into the Ann Arbor News. Lynn Monson, Cindy Heflin, I worked with those people side by side on things. I think they do a great job with news. I think they use their staff well.

I look at Mary Morgan and the AnnArborChronicle, and I think she's opened people's eyes to some other dimensions. Her passion and her commitment says that as good as the Ann Arbor News' reporting is, there are other things you can be doing as well. I like what she brings to the table as well, and I'd like to see some of both of those.


CARTY: Already moving in on her franchise (laughing)?

DEARING: Well, I talked to the staff about this today - online and the world we're going into, it's not traditional competition. It's an information ecostructure. If you look at why Google has been so successful while every other industry and every other company is struggling, it's because they understand that online it's about expanding that network out, not trying to control it, or bring it in. Everything that's already out there online, we want to reach out to. If there's a blogger out there, we want to work with that blogger. We want that blogger to be successful. We want to send our audience to that blogger, and have that blogger send his audience to us. We want to send advertising revenue to that blogger, and share that as well. If that blogger can sell advertising and make more money, we want to help. We want to be about creating a content ecosystem in Ann Arbor, and we'll be reaching out with everybody we can reach out to to partner with, although I think we - and maybe a few other sources like the Chronicle, will still be the sources for credible journalism, although there are a lot more (sites) than that that we want to work with.

COMING TOMORROW: Staffing, the MLive relationship and more.