Dearing interview, Part III: He welcomes the skepticism

We continue with Part 3 of my Monday interview with new AnnArbor.com content director Tony Dearing (first and second parts, if you're interested, and a transcript of Dearing's address to Ann Arbor News staff).

To begin the final part of my interview with Dearing, I read him excerpts from two Michigan blogs reacting to Monday's announcements. Here are the excerpts, first from "Bring out your Dead" from Brian Cook at MGoBlog:

Ah but not so fast: the "web based company" will be run by the same people, hire some of the same people, and put out print editions twice a week plus print a "total market coverage" thing, whatever that means, once a week. This is basically a rehash of the Free Press/News changes with some extra frippery I assume is a way of avoiding Booth Newspaper's longstanding no-layoffs pledge. Or something else that has to do with financial wizardry.

And, second, "Dark Day in Tree Town" from Ann Arborite and MichWine.com editor Joel Goldberg:

Sometimes it's hard not to be cynical. I might swallow some of this if the new operation planned to import a few web-savvy journalists and business types. But instead, its leadership team recycles a trio of newspaper execs whose prior actions did little to postpone the decline of the News and sister Booth Newspapers around Michigan.

CARTY: There's a fair amount of skepticism there to the fact the three main people in charge of this venture are clearly newspaper people. How do you respond to that?

DEARING: Listen, I understand that those of us who have been in leadership positions in print newspapers are going to have a finger pointed at us for what's happened up to this point. I accept that. What I would say is all of us, the people at the Ann Arbor News as well, all worked pretty hard to be successful in a model that couldn't be successful any more, and now we're going to try again.

I welcome the skepticism. Ultimately, the proof will be in what we launch. We're going to come out in July, and I'm saying that we're going to launch something that really is going to be unlike anything you've ever seen - that's going to be completely new and completely different and a pretty dynamic site. Until then, we're going to say that, and people are going to be skeptical. Then we're going to bring it to the market and people are going to decide.

CARTY: You're certainly not downplaying expectations. That's a high bar you're setting.

DEARING: Yeah. I read some real interesting stuff on the Las Vegas Sun, which Rob Curley is involved in. They're trying to do something that sounded very interesting, and that I found very interesting, and then I went to the site and my initial reaction is, it's just another newspaper website. That's not going to win the day. The newspaper websites are already out there and they're not sustaining themselves. If that's what we're going to do, don't do it.

I know who we're working with. I know what we're doing. I know we're going to be out there. I don't have trouble telling people that and creating that expectation, and knowing if we don't meet that expectation, we won't succeed. I believe we will succeed.


CARTY: How much emphasis are you placing on user-generated content?

DEARING: I think a fair amount at first, and more over time. User-generated content gets a bad rap, because people think it means some yahoo down the street is going to cover city council for us. No, a trained journalist is going to cover city council for us. But if there's something that's going on in your neighborhood, that's an issue to you - involving a street or a park or a problem with garbage, that is never going to rise to the level of a story in a traditional print newspaper, and people in your neighborhood are talking about, "What can we do?" and they're mad about this, that's user generated content. And there's some value in that.

My life, a lot, when I was in Ann Arbor revolved around the youth sports my son participated in, and adult recreation activities, which are a huge part of people's lives. Traditional newspapers can't do youth sports the way people want it done. We're going to have to do those things, because people care about those things. But those are going to be done by users - parents taking pictures of their own kids, filling in stats and reporting on their own kids' little league games. That's not a bad thing. That's not a threat to journalism or to the jobs of credible journalists, they're going to be sitting in a court room covering a trial. It's going to happen with or without us. People are already online having those conversations. It's just a question of are we going to recognize that and incorporate that, and that be part of our mission, or are we just going to be irrelevant to them on those things? We're not. We can't be irrelevant to them on the things that are happening in their lives, the things that go beyond broad journalistic topics.


CARTY: Why would you think you're the guy to run this, as opposed to some 25-year-old kid who essentially grew up on Twitter?

DEARING: You know, that's a great question. I think we have two jobs - there is a franchise here, and it's a very valuable and important franchise. The first thing we have to do is take that franchise and bring it successfully to a new business model, and we have to do that right away, because if we lose it right away, we'll never get it back. Once we have done that, beyond that franchise - which is a large audience - there is a vast audience in Ann Arbor that was never going to read the Ann Arbor News, and never will, who are our potential broader future audience. And, yeagh, I feel with my journalism background, with my background in Ann Arbor, with my connections to the company, I feel I can help bring the continuity to bring what we have now to a new business model, but I'm definitely going to have to bring people in who represent that younger model who live online, and is our future audience.

We'll turn a lot over to them, and just let them go after that audience and make it their own. A lot of that is just going to be what they do. They live there, and I can't do that, and I won't try to. My job is more immediate and a little more traditional - to get that existing audience that we've got to start with and bring them with us to a new company that has to succeed. But there will be a lot of kids wearing baseball caps backwards and tennis shoes, to reach an audience that I am not tuned into or capable of reaching.


CARTY: Along those lines, and it's a very blunt question, what qualifies Ann Arbor News publisher Laurel Champion to run part of this operation? She's someone who comes from the most traditional of newspaper backgrounds. What qualifies her to run a cutting edge, never-been-seen-before website?

DEARING: I think Laurel is going to be very important at helping us transition our existing business, our existing advertisers, our existing relationships. You know, Matt Kraner, I've got a lot of confidence in his ability to run the business side of this thing. He's the president and his background suggests a lot of innovation, a lot of ability to do this kind of thing. I've got some connection to Ann Arbor - I lived here for 11 years, I've been gone for 10 years. We've got to have one person who is part of the management team who can help us, you know, in the market with the continuity, with what we're trying to do here.


CARTY: Was there any ever discussion of having someone in leadership with a Web background? Someone who's not a newspaper person?

DEARING: We actually, we have a fourth person named Hassan Hodges, who is exactly what you're talking about. Hassan is not here on the ground right now, for a lot of reasons. He is neck deep in working with the development of the site, although he's with us every step of the way. Hassan, I would describe as way out there - WAY out there.


CARTY: What will his title be?

DEARING: I should know his title. We're pretty loose on titles. I may have to get that and send you it. Right now, we have a four person team - Matt, Laurel, Hassan and me. He's the technical guy, the innovation guy, the digital guy. You're not seeing him here, but he's very involved with this project and providing all the leadership on the new media, young audience. We just need him where he is right now, doing what he's doing. His role is not external, not to go out and shake hands in the community. His role is to make this thing way out there.


CARTY: What's his background?

DEARING: He's also an Advance person. He started out as a graphic designer, and then became one of several people on that team at the New Jersey Star-Ledger. He left the Star-Ledger to join, basically the New York Times online team, and then this opportunity came up and he decided to join us instead.


CARTY: Is there anyone besides that team of four, anyone from the Ann Arbor News, who is essentially already hired at the site? Is there an editor or an advertising manager who knows they are going to be a part of this.

DEARING: No, we haven't begun that process at all. I don't have, I don't think any of us has people we've already picked out, or have already talked to. I really need to talk to people - see how their interests are, see what their skills are, and see how those skills fit into some roles that are going to be different from traditional roles. But, no, right now there's not anybody who kinda already knows they're going to join us. It really is an open hiring process, and we'll talk to a lot of people and put together the best team we can.


CARTY: Is there anybody in management who knows that if you don't hire them, they have a place somewhere else in Newhouse?

DEARING: Not that I can think of right now. Those kinds of decisions are made above me. I can't tell you anything intelligent about that.


CARTY: Do you expect to be profitable coming out of the gate?

DEARING: I think we expect to be profitable pretty quickly. I'm actually quite optimistic about our ability to succeed at this. We'll basically have half a year in 2009 - I don't know if we'll be profitable then. I think we have a very good chance to be profitable in 2010.

But overall, we're going to be judged by our ability to be profitable online. The online revenue we make is greater than the cost of doing business, and that we won't do immediately. It's going to take a while to build that part of the business, but I wouldn't be surprised if we were there by the end of 2010.

CARTY: Is there any chance of the Ann Arbor News as a brand coming back?

DEARING: Yeah, there is. We've been asked, and we have not decided yet, what will the name of the newspaper be. We own AnnArbor.com and we own AnnArborNews.com. We may call the paper, the print version, AnnArborNews.com. There is certainly a conscious decision to keep the Ann Arbor News name alive, for instance to differentiate our staff reporting from other types of content on the site. For instance, a blogger may host a blog on the site, and that blogger may be identified as being from The Ann Arbor News, and then someone will know, oh, this is a member of their staff, this is a journalist. Not to say that another blogger doesn't have valuable content, but it will be kind of stamp of journalistic credibility. It is our intention to continue to use the Ann Arbor News brand to signify news we're creating and covering. I think that is a name that still means a lot in this community and that we will still use.

We're talking about an online community that is broader than news, and AnnArbor.com makes sense for the total operation, but Ann Arbor News is a brand that means a lot to people in that community, and it will not go away.

CARTY: What's a success? What does success look to you if you try and look out, say 24 months?

DEARING: What we have struggled, in the industry, to figure out, is what can we offer people other than a paper that just gets skinnier and skinnier and skinnier. One of the solutions is someplace, maybe instead of offering people that's skinnier and skinnier, we offer them a big, fat Website, and see if maybe that can work instead. A couple of years from now, that's where we want to be. We want to look back on it and have people say, this is a great site that meets my needs, and I'm glad I can still read the paper on Sunday, and that Thursday paper is OK too. You know what? I haven't lost something here, I've gained something - I'm getting more.

We're back where we're giving people more, and we're doing it in a way that we can fun more journalists, hire more reporters, pay them more. All of that. That's when, when the business is growing and expanding and healthy again, and then we're reinvesting in journalism and giving people more again, that's success.

Coming tomorrow: Some opinionated thoughts.