Transcript of Dearing, Kraner addressing A2 News staff Monday afternoon

We're just full of content today.

Here's a transcript of new AnnArbor.com content director Tony Dearing and AnnArbor.com president Matt Kraner addressing the A2 News staff Monday afternoon at The Campus Inn. It was  provided by a friendly A2 News employee who taped it for personal use.

Please also see the first part of my three-part interview with Dearing below, which addresses some different issues. In addition, former Newsie Mary Morgan has a very heartfelt column on the situation at the AnnArborChronicle.

TONY DEARING, CONTENT DIRECTOR of ANNARBOR.COM

"I want to say hello to everybody. Somehow I envisioned this would be a more informal setting than it actually is, and I guess that was an unrealistic expectation.

"I just want you to know that this is just kind of the first step in the process of talking to you, of giving you a chance to learn more about what we're going to do, what your role might be in it, what opportunities are going to be. We'll have another session again tomorrow and we'll have conversations behind that. This is just kind of like an icebreaker or an attempt to reach out to you immediately and let you know what we think's gonna happen, what it's going to look like and where we're going to go.

"We're creating something new from the ground up. If I could point to something that exists right now that I could show you and say 'that's what it's going to be like,' I would. And I can't. This is going to be a completely new model. There is nothing out there that looks or is like what we're going to do with this project.

"I think there are probably a lot of people in this room that over the last 2 or 3 years have kind of begun to understand that this thing isn't working real well. You know, I mean, what we're doing is not working real well, and this is what we should be doing instead. I mean, everybody has an opinion on what we should be doing, and has tried to talk to Laurel, has tried to talk to other people and said, 'Why are we doing this? We should be doing that? Why aren't we responding to this? Why are we here?' and kind of feeling like we're operating in a strait jacket when, um, someone's just thrown you over the side of the boat.

"We're starting from scratch. We're starting from zero, and we're going to do what we should do. And those of you who have been saying we should be doing certain things we're not doing, now's the time to speak up, while we're developing and building this thing.

Because it doesn't exist, it's hard to explain what it is, or what's it going to be. I think everybody's grasping a little bit: 'OK, we know what you're not going to do, which is what we're doing right now. But what are you gonna do?' What I would just say right now is that, um, the first thing I want you to understand: we're still committed to news. There's still going to be a news gather and news reporting institution in Ann Arbor.

"And the whole goal of this is to make community journalism financially viable again, so we can have jobs and we can do this and we can serve the community. I mean, we all understand ... This is not a job for us. None of us got into this because it's a job. It's a calling. I mean, it's a passion, a social obligation, and we want to maintain that thing that we do. That thing that we do is not working in the model that we have done it successfully for a couple of hundred years. And now we're going to have to do it a different way, but what we actually do is still valuable.

"So, is there still gonna be news? Are you we gonna cover news? Are we gonna have a cops reporter? Are we going to have a high school student covering city hall?

No, I mean, we're going to have professional-trained journalists reporting the news of the community. So I do want you to understand that.

Beyond that, we're going to have to do more than that to be successful, because there are already newspaper Web sites out there, and those newspaper Web sites are not sustaining themselves. We gotta build a broader audience than that based on all the things that matter to people and (what) their concerned about and interested in.

It's gotta me more of a community platform. And maybe the best way I can express it to you is if you log on to nytimes.com or cnn.com, you have a certain experience. If you log into your Facebook page, you have a very different experience. And the nytimes.com, despite the credibility of the journalism, um, is not going to build an audience that we can build an business around and drive the journalism that we want to do.

People are gathering on the Internet around what interests them, around social purposes, around personal interest, and we've gotta serve those as well. We will link, we will aggregate, we will engage bloggers. It's kind of a hard thing to understand when you have worked in a competitive media environment.

But the future is not competition. I mean, it's all information. And out there online, there's an ecosystem of information. And you send your audience to people, and they send their audience to you, and you can both make money on that, much in the same way that car dealers wanna be across the street from each other. Because it creates a larger audience for both of them, and they both make money.

So we won't be out looking to try to identify who the potential competition is and crush them. I mean, we will be out looking to engage anybody and everybody that's creating content that people care about in this community, and bring it all together in a way that makes sense.

What I've tried to explain to people is, my fear of the future - kind of in my worst-case scenario - is that as newspapers go away because their economic model doesn't work and has collapsed underneath us, that what it's going to be replaced by is a thousand things and everyone community, none of which anybody can sustain or make any money on. And what we have to find a way to do is to reach to a lot of those thousand things and say: 'Let's all kind of do this together, and let's all help each other, and let's all ... share what we're doing there and kind of bring it all back together and be successful again.' So that's kind of the general concept.

On the content-side of AnnArbor.com:

- I'm not going to use all of the terms that we traditionally use. I mean, there's gonna be a newsroom, but it's not gonna be a newsroom. It's not gonna be what you think of as a newsroom, it's not going to look like a newsroom, it's not going to work like a newsroom. But there will be a newsroom.

- And our content will be basically organized into four areas: news, sports, entertainment and community.

- And everything we plan to do, we think we can do in those four areas.

- There will be a leader in each of those areas. They'll be kind of what you used to think of as a city editor, in sports they'll be what you used to think of as a sports editor. Same with entertainment and community.

- Those four leadership positions will report to me and work for me, and will be - along with me - the management structure on the content side. I do hope to fill those positions fairly soon, and then use those people to help me hire the rest of the staff.

- In terms of the positions overall, we hope to post specific job openings on AnnArbor.com the week of April 13. We'll give you more information as we get closer.

- In the meantime, if you're interested in a job in this company, I'd like to hear from you now. I'd like you to call me (XXXXXX), e-mail me, send me a resume, send me any information you want to tonydearing@annarbor.com

- I'm ready to talk to you now, and I would be glad to.

- Within the organization and beyond that, we're gonna have people that I'm kind of calling producer/copy editor, who will not lay out pages. We will not have a copy desk, and the page design functions will be done on a contractual basis with one of our sister papers. But these will be people who read copy, who post copy online, who link, who aggregate, who produce, present, distribute.

- We will have journalists. I'm not calling them reporters. I've tried to come up with a name, and every name I come up with is ripe for mocking in the blogosphere. So I'll let somebody else came up (sic) with the name for it.

- But basically digital journalists, who can bring credible reporting skills but also can do it in all the ways that take advantage of digital journalism, posting email alerts, being on Twitter, constant updates, video.

- I would envision every journalist who works for us carrying a flip camera and being competent, at least in shooting simple video clips that can be part of the post.

- People who understand search engine optimization, can write their own scl headlines and copy, people who create their own links, do their own research, who consider that part of their job. Those would be some of those skills.

- We'll have videographers, we'll have photographers, we'll have clerks, we'll have people who work, like, in areas like high school sport tool. Tremendous amounts of data that have to be gathered. We'll have people that do that kind of thing.

- I want to be very candid in saying we're definitely going to employee fewer people. The salaries and benefits are not going to be at the levels you've been accustomed to here. (President) Matt (Kraner) and I are very committed to setting goals for audience for finances and budgets for this company, and as we achieve those goals, we will share revenue and profits with the employees.

- I think what we would've thought of a reporter in the past is probably gonna make somewhere in the mid 30,000, high 30,000, low 40,000 is gonna be the salary range we're talking about.

- We'll have a fair number of part-time employees. I expect that to pay something in the range of about $15 an hour.


Matt Kraner, President of AnnArbor.com, to dozens of AA News employees Monday afternoon at Campus Inn on Huron Street:

"... We will be a company primarily focused on content creation, sales and marketing. Now, clearly we're going to have traditional newspaper functions that still need to be done, because we'll be publishing Thursday and Sunday - a newspaper. Most of those functions will either be outsourced to other Booth, Michigan newspapers and/or they're going to go with the production division, which also will be spun off into a new company that will not be associated with AnnArbor.com going forward.

So, we'll have AnnArbor.com, the new production company, and then we'll have significant elements of some functions that will be outsourced to other Booth, Michigan newspapers. Still working on a lot of that detail, so can't really share some of that with you today. But that's the game plan overall.

We will have an open interview process for AnnArbor.com, so we certainly invite and hope that everybody who is currently at the Ann Arbor News would love to come in and participate in the interview process. There are no job guarantees with regard to special treatment for Ann Arbor News employees. It will be an open process. But once again, we will be an organization primarily focused on content creation, sales, and marketing.

I'd like to add that the research we've done in regard with Ann Arbor, the oppportunities we see with regard to the Web is significant. When you look at the blogs today, whne you look at some of the news stories and how it's been covered, there's a concern about the viability of this type of Web-centered operation going forward, with regard to how we're going to create advertising revenue, with regard to how we're going to create audience.

And I think the research that we've done, the work we've done up to this point in time - there's been a significant about of resources that the company has set forth for this project, or put into this project, and it certainly shows that I think there is a significant opportunity for us to not only create new revenue streams, but most importantly, for us to, frankly, create new incremental audience in the marketplace.

I know I mentioned that a little bit earlier on, but I think that's so important for everybody here to realize, particularly to those folks here who have an interest in joining the new organization. That that is a realistic opportunity, particularly in a market like Ann Arbor, with the characteristics that (the city) has and the Web-saaviness that it has."