Ann Arbor News, R.I.P.

The Ann Arbor News bites the dust. AnnArbor.com is born.

(Confession: I always read The Detroit Free Press during my short stints in Ann Arbor.)

You think G.M.'s got problems...

The Flint Journal — like many newspapers across the country — appears to be in a death spiral. And freefromeditors.com is continuing to do an excellent job chronicling its demise with insider info and analysis. In other words, he's doing the kind of reporting that used to be done at daily papers.

Blogging about the Flint Journal blogging about cats blogging about me

With revenues plummeting and readers flocking to all things online, newspapers are obsessed with harnessing new media — and blogs in particular — to somehow wring some profits out of the internet. As a result, newspaper reporters across the land have been saddled with blogging assignments by their cranky editors, who are being hassled by their surly corporate overlords to provide something the public appears to want. (Let's set aside the fact that nobody except pornographers and gossip-mongers have actually made any money online; desperate times call for desperate measures.)

This trend has led to some strange material appearing on daily newspaper websites. Case in point: I read a Flint Journal article about the lack of murders in Flint so far this year; I blogged about the story, comparing Flint to Iceland; The Flint Journal, in turn, blogged about me blogging about the Flint Journal article; and now, as you can see, I'm blogging about the Flint Journal blogging about me blogging about the Flint Journal article.

Stop the madness!

The only sure thing about all this crazy blogging is that no one is making any money off it, not me, the Flint Journal, the shivering people of Iceland, or the lucky citizens of Flint who have not been murdered (yet).

It's all beginning to resemble the Infinite Cat Project, but instead of cats looking at cats looking at cats...it's bloggers blogging about bloggers blogging about bloggers...