New look at news
The first lead story on MinnPost.com, a new daily news site, is a 1,400-word report on the Minnesota Democratic Party’s finances.
It’s not the kind of flashy tidbit guaranteed to goose online traffic. But flash isn’t the idea at MinnPost, a venture staffed mostly by recent casualties of newspaper downsizing.
MinnPost, led by a former Minneapolis Star Tribune publisher and editor, Joel Kramer, is aiming at the small audience they believe is thirsting for substantive local journalism. The site’s staffers say that kind of work is on the decline, and they blame it on cost-cutting as the industry faces dwindling circulation and ad revenue.
“The important thing that’s happening there is that people are stepping up to create new journalism ventures in a time when traditional news organizations are stepping back” as they trim staff, said Dan Gillmor, a former technology columnist and founder of the Center for Citizen Media, a venture of the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Newspapers have struggled to adapt to new technology, and offering readers more words on serious subjects might not seem like a winning formula. But Kramer thinks there’s enough of an audience among people who believe that serious journalism is a civic good.
MinnPost’s creators say they are not trying to replace traditional newspapers but to cultivate about 15 to 20 percent of the population — “news intense” readers who seek multiple sources of news every day and are willing to make yearly donations to the site, as people do for public radio.
Other regional news sites have popped up, including Voices on San Diego, Missoula, Mont.-based New West and Crosscut Seattle.
Crosscut, launched in April by David Brewster and several backers, has plans to be the primary online source for news coming out of Washington, Oregon and Idaho.
It has three full-time editors and managers, plus six regional contract writers, said Brewster, who founded Seattle Weekly in 1976 and left that publication in 1997. Its formula will be a mix of straight news and assorted stories on lifestyles and the arts.
“We will avoid taking sides,” said Brewster in an interview. “Where many online publications polarize people, Crosscut will add value and offer a considered, more courteous and open-minded range of options.”
It’s not making money yet. The goal, Brewster noted, is to try to reach profitability by the third year.
But Kramer said none of those sites boasts a similar number of experienced writers, or pitches its work so explicitly to a relatively narrow group of highbrow news consumers. Kramer said his target audience in the Twin Cities is regular readers of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.
“There’s so much out there about newspapers losing money, and will they survive, and in what form,” said Kay Harvey, a MinnPost writer who accepted a buyout last year after 26 years with the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “I think with this Web site, we’re trying to answer that question.”
MinnPost will be a nonprofit and offer all its content free. It will rely on advertising for revenue after an initial infusion of about $1 million from the Knight Foundation, members of prominent newspaper families, and his own pocket. Kramer said the site has signed up about 340 individual donors.
A paper version of MinnPost is being distributed free in select areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul, as Kramer said focus groups showed some older readers were more likely to read it on a printed page.
Kramer hopes the site will be self-sufficient by its fourth year.
Kramer got the idea for MinnPost last spring, after a particularly brutal year for Twin Cities media. New owners had taken over both the Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press and quickly moved to downsize the number of journalists at both. After several rounds of buyouts, close to 100 local journalists were looking for jobs, joining the hundreds of others nationwide who have been laid off in recent years.
The buyouts “really shook up a lot of people,” Kramer said. Not just those who felt little choice but to leave their jobs, he said, but community leaders and readers who worried that comprehensive coverage of local and state politics, serious writing about the arts and other traditional roles of the local newspapers would surely suffer. Kramer said the Twin Cities have a tradition of civic engagement and a highly educated population that will be attracted to writing under recognizable bylines. Those journalists saw an opportunity, too.
“Up until a few years ago, I never thought online would be the way that people would get their news,” said Doug Grow, a 29-year Star Tribune veteran who will write about government and politics for MinnPost.