Don’t get me wrong, I love newspapers. I grew up in a house where they were a part of the landscape and it’s remained that way for me. I can’t wake up unless I have my cup of tea and my newspaper in the morning and can’t digest my dinner unless similarly equipped at night, so naturally, like many people, I experienced extreme anxiety at the thought that there wouldn’t be any more Ann Arbor News. True, you can’t by any stretch of the imagination call it a good paper, but amongst all the cut and paste wire service stuff there is enough local color to make it worth a look, especially my personal favorite, the amazingly petty and strange local crime report. And, yeah, the News, especially after the Ypsilanti paper went down, seemed pretty complacent, even lazy when it came to finding local news. To me, the typical News photo was a picture of a lady with an umbrella captioned "A Rainy Day in Ann Arbor," which, if examined closely, would prove to have been shot out of the window of the News building, the intrepid photographer having been unwilling to even leave the building in inclement weather. Similarly, there was that trendy girl reporter who seemed to get all her material from the clique seated around the table at the bar she frequented in Ypsilanti, writing first about a local blogger, then his wife, with further dispatches to come about his child and pet no doubt.
But, still, I would have mourned the passing of our local newspaper, would have, that is, until I realized that there were three things about it that boost my blood pressure so much that I’ve finally realized that I’m going to be better off without it.
The first insoluble problem with the News is that it’s a conservative paper in a city that, although not as radical as the rest of the country believes, is at least comfortably liberal. After endorsing Bush twice (and didn’t that turn out well) they declined to endorse ANYONE in the last election. Not making a choice between such obviously different candidates was simply an act of cowardice. I wouldn’t have agreed had they gone with McCain/Palin (PALIN!), which was obviously where their heart was, but to not choose anyone was pathetic. But even that isn’t what really bugs me – it’s the editorial cartoons from other papers they choose to run. Editorial cartoons do not have to abide by even the lax logical and factual standards of an editorial, and the ones run by the News take full advantage of this to present crude conservative propaganda, unsullied by wit or sense. My favorite was the one they featured a few years ago of a handsome, grinning cowboy hero Bush riding a sharply rising graph of economic indicators while taunting the obtuse liberal press for refusing to admit that he was doing a fantastic job with the economy. Wow, Nostradamus had nothing on that pundit! Nowadays there are crude jabs at Obama and a nostalgia for those fabulous days of torture and fiscal laxity under Bush. It’s not just that they’re distortions of fact, it’s that they’re simply not clever. And badly drawn too!
The second reason is more personal. The News has always played favorites, selectively covering some events and boosting favored businesses while basically dissing the rest, including my own. It used to be Borders that was always covered, but now it’s the local snob bookshop. There was even an editorial saying that, yes, there are some other independent bookstores in town, but that this one is better than the others, and deserved to stay in business even though it wasn’t turning a profit, while those other guys could basically go to hell as far as the News was concerned. The snob store’s owner was portrayed as combination of Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer and his idea to become a nonprofit just about as brilliant as the Marshall plan. Rather than, say, cutting a large staff, no longer having the owner feel free to jet off to Nicaragua and China to dispense his wisdom or moving to a location where the rent wasn’t exorbitant, the News called for private donors to subsidize this private business until such time as the taxpayers could be called on to do so. Due to the fact that my business actually makes money, I’m not an expert on being non-profit, but perhaps it’s not that the government is pointlessly foot dragging but that it frowns on a business suddenly becoming nonprofit because it can’t support itself, regardless of how politically correct it is. In the meantime all their events, many of them, let’s face it, mind numbingly boringly academic, are promoted in the paper as a best bet for family entertainment while many, many much more interesting events (including, I admit, my own) featuring internationally known authors of merit might as well be taking place in an Ypsilanti Strip joint for all the notice they get in the pages of the News.
There was another editorial about year ago about what a great even The Ann Arbor Book Festival was, how it deserved to prosper and how great a fit it was for our community. Of course this begs the question why the editorial was necessary if it really was such a great fit. I’ve got nothing against the Festival, but The Kerrytown BookFest is another book event, started at the same time, which the News refuses to cover in any substantive way. The usual drumbeat began this year with two articles in the Sunday paper, one hailing the amazing growth of the Festival, which had blossomed from "a simple street fair" into a city wide event of astounding proportions. A few pages later was another article that went into similar rhapsodies about the perfectly brilliant plan the Festival was using to downsize in these difficult times. Regardless of the truth of either of these claims, it would seem to this simple mind that they are contradictory – you can’t expand and contract at the same time, can you? There was more throughout the week along these lines, some of it penned objectively enough by the Festival’s director, mostly arguing that it was the duty of all good Ann Arborites to grit their teeth and attend the thing, even if it didn’t sound like that much fun, because, damn it, it’s good for you. The Kerrytown BookFest, with many more exhibitors, authors and attendees at its street fair only recently has received a few grudging mentions in the News. Last year’s extremely successful event got a few paragraphs in the body of the paper while a bike race on the same day, which was so popular that they’re probably never going to have it again, got the front page. They were hard pressed to get any spectators in the photo, and I, along with maybe half a dozen others, witnessed the start. The BookFest was packed all day.
The Book Festival got some of the same medicine the Sunday after their event. Rather than the customary front page rave they were relegated to page three in favor of a car show. But to me, the most astounding thing was the glimmer of truth in the recap. Geoff Larcom is a good writer (he was a panel moderator at the Kerrytown Fest last year), and in the article, amidst the human interest fluff and the reporting of the appearance the literary luminary Peter Yarrow, was slipped in this astonishing sentence "…among hundreds of people who enjoyed various facets during the sixth annual Ann Arbor Book Festival on Saturday." Wait a minute – did he say hundreds? Last year’s attendance was reported (by the festival director) as in the high thousands, and every year the News has provided similarly large figures, always stressing the crowded popularity of an even that, I’m sorry, but I’ve been there, never seemed to me to be that well attended. By my calculation, given their large budget, it would seem that the Festival is spending over fifty dollars a head to induce attendance, which might be better spent in simply paying people to come. (I know I’d do it for twenty-five.) By contrast, The Kerrytown BookFest, with a much, much smaller budget and a completely volunteer organization drew a crowd that was conservatively and objectively estimated at 4,000 people for a one day event last year. To read the Ann Arbor News you’d think it was a couple of kids reading comic books in a tree house, which, come to think of, would probably get more coverage from them.
One thing I’ve learned is that being involved with an actual news event and then reading about it in the paper makes you very cynical about all the other stuff in there. So, good-bye Ann Arbor News. You’ve driven me to distraction for the last time. I’ve got a new friend to drink my tea with, and it’s much classier – The New York Times.
