GUD BLOG: SINGLE POST
Lazy Journalism
It seems pretty unlikely to me that anyone would mistake my drunk blog ramblings as “journalism,” but just in case, let’s be clear: I’m not a journalist, and I don’t know all the pressures that a journalist faces. And I don’t really know all the work that goes into making good journalism.
I do, however, know punk ass crap journalism when I see it.
Last week, annarbor.com – the electronic replacement for the old Ann Arbor News – ran a piece about how Tim Horton’s was going to replace Lab Cafe on Liberty Street. Internet chaos ensued, with hoards of Ann Arborites bemoaning the loss of some decent coffee and locally made pastry, ostensibly to be replaced by stale Timbits and shitty coffee in mammoth cups.
Except here’s the hilarious thing: IT’S NOT ACTUALLY HAPPENING.
It could someday, I suppose, but it’s not now. The intrepid drunk blogger that I am, I wandered down there on my coffee break last week to talk to the fine folks at Lab. Since it’s a regular source of coffee (not to mention DELICIOUS MACARONS), I needed to get the skinny. What they said (paraphrasing here) is basically that they were renegotiating their lease and that they were deciding whether to stay in that location or move down the street. Annarbor.com apparently called for a comment, and Lab balked, basically noting that they were in the middle of a business deal and it wasn’t the right time or place to be talking about this publicly.
Naturally, annarbor.com ran with the story anyhow. After the resulting chit chat online and all the confusion, Lab’s landlords cut off their very preliminary discussions with Tim Horton’s, who would have been a potential replacement if (and only if) Lab Cafe chose to move.
Is there a replacement story in annarbor.com? A retraction? A sticky comment on the original story? Not that I can see anywhere. The result of the story was that an indie coffee shop has panic among its customers and possible pressure placed on it to move with its lease prematurely, and the story itself was entirely bullshit.
It’s one thing to be wrong. It’s quite another to be so wrong and so irresponsible that you cause a business to have to explain itself to its customers because of someone else’s mistake. It’s a shame to see that kind of thing.
But on the plus side, according to the folks I’ve spoken with at Lab, the cafe isn’t going anywhere – at least, they’re not unless they want to. So we’ll see what happens, but it’s a safe bet that it won’t be what thousands of people read on annarbor.com.
2012.03.07 Evan Hansen at 8:10 am
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One Response to Lazy Journalism
I wondered the same thing. The other thing I’m wendoring about concerns who in Ann Arbor actually IS getting news strictly from the web or another source. Sure, the campus kids are surfing and getting news from all over the place, but what about older boomers and seniors? Many are on line, using email, etc., but how many are actually visiting newspaper sites and reading AnnArbor.com? How many are actually reading lenconnect.com? I still think the Ann Arbor market could support a daily; the newspaper companies need to change the business model and maybe they will need to suffer through less profits until they get it to work, like Ford, for example. Not great profits but changing its business model and responding to customers WITHOUT taking government bailout money. I think there still is a big demand for hard copy and I do not think a skeletal staff at the AAN is going to be able to keep up with all of the city business, local news, etc. that is out there. Many of the posts I read talked about the paper taking a liberal slant and cited that as a reason for reduced readership, but I think it’s much more than a perception of news being slanted left or right. I think it’s more about not responding to customer needs and demands. Maybe people in Ann Arbor would have liked to see more local coverage and it didn’t happen due to reductions in staffing that affects coverage. It is happening everywhere so perhaps there IS a lesson to be learned in making changes. Could the problem be businessmen running newspapers instead of journalists? I don’t know but I don’t think shuttering a 174-year-old business and going to the web is going to be a fix.