Former Ann Arbor News building for sale for $9M

Here's the link: www.annarbor.com/business-review/ann-arbor-news-building-listed-for-9-million/


As a former Newsie, I've got mixed feelings. It's in a primo location in downtown Ann Arbor and could sell quickly, but &*$# Advance for what it did.

The old presses are still in the building, and the story says that it'll take about $30,000 to get them out of there. I think that estimate is very, very low. Yes, I call bullshit.

It's a beautiful building, but I wonder if it might be worth it for the buyer to knock it down and rebuild. There's a lack of on-site parking (the lot across the street is small, too, and the city wants to buy it as part of the City Hall renovations). Plus, with the presses still in the building and a car-repair shop across the street, that land has to be contaminated. The buyer could get a brownfield grant.

It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.

 

Moddy - AnnArbor.com is renting space in a high-rise about two blocks from The News building. Also, I forgot to mention that the presses in The News building have been inactive for about five years. The News had built a printing plant a couple miles south of town that remains active. The News had been printing the Jackson Citizen Patriot (a sister Booth paper) and the Michigan edition of The New York Times.

And, Ann Arbor has weathered the recession far better than the rest of the state. The only decent-sized hit it took is when Pfizer left town and took a few thousand jobs with it. With all the construction in town, you'd hardly think that the state's economy was in the dumper.

 

The Pfizer campus was bought by U-M and Google moved to town. I suppose that helped.

I think the building is too nice to tear down. Someone will want it.

 

Mustang - Yes, U-M moved onto the Pfizer campus, which promptly took that property off the tax rolls. But, hey, jobs are jobs.

What's cool is that Google's renting space in a high-rise kitty-corner from The News' building.

 

Financially, it made sense for Newhouse to put annarbor.com staff in the Ann Arbor News building, along with the Mlive people and entire Booth computer staff.

But, you know, that would further muddy public's perception of how the two entities relate to each other, annarbor.com and Mlive, and Newhouse probably wanted to separate them as much as possible, and separate from the Ann Arbor News brand that they said they were going to incorporate into the Web venture, which you had to know was PR bullshit.

 

Not sure how separate Mlive and aa.com appear to be. You go to Mlive and can find links to almost every aa.com article every day.

 

I think the plan is to slowly transfer the AA stuff from Mlive, to AA.com.

 

If you ask people at Mlive and annarbor.com, and they could not give you a specific answer about their relationship. That is what a person told me working at one of the operations told me.

 

An Mlive staffer told me the relationship is "strange" right now, but the plan is to move the MLIVE stuff to AA.com. No timetable given.

 

The Ann Arbor stuff is already on aa.com, with links to it on the ann arbor part of the mlive site.

Are you saying the AA stuff is going to slowly go away from mlive?

 

I'm saying their relationship is up in the air, and separation is a possibility.