The back corner of Ann Arbor City Council and other meetings in the city will soon be missing a familiar face. That's because after a six year run providing the most in-depth online coverage of local government the Ann Arbor Chronicle will be shutting down.
In a column posted Thursday Editor Dave Askins says September 2nd marks the anniversary of the launch, and that night's Ann Arbor City Council meeting will be the last regularly published new report. Askins has frequently compared the long hours spent on the Chronicle to marathoning and thinks this decision lines up with distance running as well. He says, "Then you remember that, hey there's other things I want to do in life than just keep running down this road and so eventually you end up picking an arbitrary landmark in the distance some where down the road and you run to that spot and then you stop running."
Askins doesn't believe the Chronicle relied on journalism superpowers, instead they simply attended meetings, wrote down what was said, and organized it in a logical way. He believes most people in the community with the time and willingness to do the work could, since the Chronicle relied almost exclusively on public information.
Event listings at the Ann Arbor Chronicle will remain live and are expected to be maintained into the future.
Like 89.1 WEMU on Facebook and follow us on Twitter— Andrew Cluley is the Ann Arbor beat reporter, and anchor for 89.1 WEMU News. Contact him at 734.487.3363 or email him acluley@emich.edu.
