If you're interested in saving local news, a good place to start is by saving local advertising.
A couple of big issues with that: most small businesses can't afford to spend much money on advertising -- and most news organizations can't afford the staff time to take care of those little guys anyway.
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MinnPost screengrab
Real-Time Ads |
Now comes
MinnPost, the ambitious Twin Cities local news start-up, with a scheme aimed at fixing both problems: "
Real-Time Ads." The system uses Twitter or RSS to automate the posting of local merchants' latest best offers on MinnPost for less than $100 a week.
(Monday morning update: See Devra First's Page One piece in this morning's
Boston Globe to see
how restaurants are marketing themselves with Twitter. That could either disintermediate efforts like MinnPost's or build a strong foundation for their usefulness.
Your bet?)
Joel Kramer, the former
Star Tribune editor and publisher who launched MinnPost two years ago, is hoping he's latched onto a trifecta that will work for users and advertisers as well as his own bottom line.
Among those with a big stake in the outcome of this experiment are local and regional newspapers. Gone are the days when papers like the
Star Tribune could rely on national or big local retailers for the bulk of their advertising.
Zachary M. Seward has a
video interview with Kramer at Nieman Journalism Lab, and Kramer
introduces the ads himself in his Inside MinnPost blog.
The goal, Kramer says, is "to create a fast-paced marketplace, full of advertisers' messages that are newly posted and thus up-to-date, so that readers will want to keep coming back to check out what's happening."
The idea looks great in concept -- simple technology, affordable prices, low overhead. Less clear is whether enough local users will be sufficiently enticed to click and buy enough stuff each week to make the advertiser's $100 investment pay off.
Whatever happens, Kramer's commitment to experimentation is impressive. A couple of months ago, I wrote about what I headlined
the "MinnPost-Harnisch High-Low Matched & Anonymous Contribution Model for News."
The idea was to generate small donations ($10 Lowbraus or $25 Highbraus) to support the work of David Brauer, who blogs about local media on MinnPost. Ruth Ann Harnisch, who is also a financial supporter of Poynter,
offered to match up to $10,000 from the Harnisch Foundation.
The campaign concluded earlier this month and the results are posted in the tile at the bottom right of
the BrauBlog: 221 Highbraus and 107 Lowbraus brought in $6,595 that was matched by Harnisch for a total take of $13,190.
