There have been some rumblings that all is not well at AnnArbor.com. This was posted on Sports Journalists. Apparently entertainment, sports and other areas of AnnArbor.com are being effected.
Feel free to contact me at jlsmediaservices(at)gmail(dot)com with further info. Anonymous is fine, but please try to give me some indication of credibility or how you know so I can double check.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
12 comments:
Ed Vielmetti (lead blogger, and the only one who seemed to know much about the web); Lon Horwedel (photographer); and at least a couple of people in Entertainment I believe. Also, right now annarbor.com has nobody covering higher education (the higher education reporter just went to the Free Press), despite the fact that UM and EMU are in its back yard.
Thanks Ruth. Ed Vielmetti had been a respectful commenter even on my blog. He did seem the one hire for management that made sense.
I could find no word of the layoffs on Mlive.com or on AnnArbor.com, which is not surprising.
Ed's columns are still up on AnnArbor.com, the last one posted was Thursday, March 10, so when, and if at this point, there have been layoffs they were likely pretty recent.
Here's a link:
http://annarbor.com/vielmetti
Layoffs happened late Thursday, 14 people overall. Those who lost their jobs included members of the "community" team, two from entertainment, blogger Ed Vielmetti, photog Lon Horwedel food and drink writer Jessica Webster, Community Team Director Jen Eyer and reporter James Dickson. I am not aware of who the others are or the rationale behind the cuts. On top of the three key people who left recently for the Freep (Stefanie Murray, Amalie Nash and David Jesse) this does not bode well for the .com.
http://news.michiganradio.org/post/annarborcom-lays-14-employees
You can independently confirm what happened by looking at
http://annarbor.com/staff
which has a current staff listing. The story on a2politico
http://www.a2politico.com/?p=6402
links to that staff listing, plus a cached Google version of it, to document the changes.
Michigan Radio has a story:
http://news.michiganradio.org/post/annarborcom-lays-14-employees
I'm still writing here
http://vielmetti.typepad.com
and, of course, figuring out what to do next.
It was a fascinating job inside an interesting organization, and I'm sorry that this is what happened.
Dear Ed:
You are a class act and I have enjoyed following you. If it is any comfort Booth does not lay off based on competence or relevance. The fact that you, among all, probably had more chance of making that project work simply confirms that.
If there is a problem at AA.com it is the top management which is simply retreads from previous failures. But as I said, that is the way Booth works.
If someone wanted to illustrate the Peter Principle they would need to look no further than Booth/Advance to have a portrait.
The people who should be gone will be there to the bitter end. Those who would have a chance of saving the venture will always be the first to go.
Just a fact.
Best of luck in your pursuit of new ventures.
Jim
The anonymous comment at
11 March, 2011 23:45
has several material facts incorrect, which can be independently verified by looking at
http://annarbor.com/staff
As you all know (and I don't have to repeat myself, because I've said it before enough times), unverified anonymous comments are toxic.
Tony Dearing is paid to be a spinmeister, of course. However, AnnArbor.com's three executives in laying off Ed V. and other content producers acted more like owners who have skin the game, as opposed to people hired to make sure the venture succeeds. It's way too top heavy, and they have way too many ad sales people for the volume of ad sales the company does. In short, in many respects AA.com took the stultified "model" of the Ann Arbor News, slashed pay of employees, and called it "digital." Thanks for the link.
From Tony Dearing, 3/12/11 via a comment at annarbor.com:
(LOL, he said hard news....like Tony Dearing would recognize hard news if it dropped on his funky, chic, expensively trimmed head)
"While personnel issues are an internal matter and we don't discuss them publicly, I can confirm that we reorganized our newsroom this week to put our focus more squarely on local news coverage. As a new organization, we have tried a lot of things. Now that we are well into our second year, the community has told us very resoundingly that what it wants most from us is hard news coverage, particularly in the areas of government, education, police, courts, health, the environment, University of Michigan sports, and business. These areas of coverage account for all but a tiny percentage of our readership and revenue. Meanwhile, we also have put a lot of effort toward other things -- including lifestyle topics like Passions and Pursuits, The Deuce, Homes and some areas of Entertainment coverage -- that our community has shown much less interest in, and we are scaling back in those areas.
We have made tremendous progress since we launched, and we continue to be very happy with the growth we're seeing in audience and revenue. But from the beginning, we said that we would be shaped by what the community wants, and the community wants us to focus more sharply on local news reporting. We have repositioned ourselves to throw our energy and resources into our local news coverage and that is how we will operate moving forward as we continue to grow.
Interesting that AnnArbor.com doesn't discuss it's "internal" doings, but did cover pretty extensively the layoffs at Border's, etc.
What's good for the goose.....
just a fyi: Dearing's comments from annarbor.com on the layoffs have been eliminated.
Looks like the old Booth habits die hard.
Post a Comment