I’ve kvetched before about losing our local daily newspaper, the one I used to affectionately call The Ann Arbor Snooze. People will say stuff like, “Oh that was a crappy newspaper, yada yada.” Maybe. It was what it was. It had local news and Dear Abby and once a week there was a gossip section about births and marriages and things. For a while I used to even look at the sports section occasionally, back when my crazy purple buddy’s son played football at Pi-Hi. That was a loonnnng time ago. Oh, and it had obituaries!!!

Our snoozy little newspaper has been gone for over a year now. It has been “replaced” by the website annarbor.com, which publishes a printed paper Thursdays and Sundays. I miss the daily snoozepaper. I subscribe to the Thursday/Sunday paper. I look at annarbor.com approximately once a day, which is when I receive an email with several “top” news stories. I dunno. For a long time, I couldn’t get myself to switch over to on-line news. That probably sounds really stupid for an online banking designer, especially one who has been doing her own banking online since the late 1990s. Why not on-line news? I dunno.

Anyway. I am not really all that crazy about annarbor.com. It’s okay. It is what it is. It took *months* after I signed up [or so I thought] to receive that daily email. I don’t like that the reporters/moderators spend what seems to me to be an inordinate amount of time dealing with the nasty sorts of comments that online news sites seem to attract. Delete ’em, don’t delete ’em, or just disallow comments altogether. It’s a lot of work to read and judge each comment against the commenting guidelines and *then* post a comment about why you deleted somebody’s comment. I’m not sure this is the right direction for the online news world. But maybe I’m wrong. We are at a crossroads here and I do not have an idea about where the news industry will end up in the not-too-distant future. We do still need good reporters/writers/editors/proofreaders and I hope we are planning on paying them!

In any case, I seem to have moved on. Oh, I will probably still read stories on annarbor.com and subscribe to the Thursday/Sunday paper. It does print obituaries. But I have *finally* managed to put The Ann Arbor Chronicle onto my RSS feed. It reports non-sensationalized in-depth local news in a blog-type format. (Thank you, NPJane.) (If you click over there RIGHT NOW, and read the story about the library, eventually, you will encounter our friend Ken, who is the best and most honest financial director the library has ever had. IMNSHO) Now, if I can just keep up with the chronicle!

Aaaaannnnddd… On the iPhone. NYT. Huffpo. And a whole bunch of other sources I’ve found via my recent polly ticking explorations. Still evaluating those. Oh, and I am now limbering up my brain every morning with the NYT crossword puzzle. On my phone. Not sure why it took me so long to get around to downloading that app.

What do y’all do for news these days? Still keeping the paper boys in business? Or are you on-line? If you are, what are you reading?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.