The Biz Blog

The notion that the nonprofit/philanthropic sector could pick up some of the slack from shrinking newspaper newsrooms has been in the air for several years now. 

BY THE NUMBERS

MinnPost After Six Months 100,000-plus: average monthly unique visitors (as measured by Google Analytics) 400,000: pageviews per month. Six editors, two full-time reporters, 60 contributors: news staff. 12: average number of new articles per day. $1.45 million: start-up donated capital, $850,000 from four Minnesota families including Kramer's, $250,000 from the Knight Foundation, $350,000 from other donors. 840: number of member donors $23,500: advertising revenue for April, the first month that revenue has met the site's business plan.

MinnPost.com was first to the plate last Nov. 8 to test the proposition in practice with a five-day-a-week online news magazine. Founder Joel Kramer, who had retired as publisher of the Star Tribune eight years earlier, pulled together financing from various donations and assembled a mainly part-time staff, heavy with experienced professionals bought out or laid off by the two Twin Cities dailies.

I asked Kramer in this e-mail interview how the venture has matured in six months and what he has learned. (Disclosure: Kramer and I worked together on our college paper and have been friends for more than 40 years).

Overall, how is MinnPost doing six months on?

Kramer: Great. The public response has been very gratifying. Traffic is strong, membership revenue is growing, and after a slow start advertising has picked up substantially in the past month. Our original plan called for achieving break-even by 2011, and the results to date suggest that we can do it -- assuming we can raise the money we need to sustain us until then. 

What has surprised you most?

Kramer:  How hard it is to start a news organization from scratch. Until MinnPost, my journalism career was spent at newspapers that were founded before I was born.

Your contributors and full-time staff are mostly experienced professionals, many who took buyouts from the two Twin Cities papers. Is working part-time at freelance rates doable for the contributors, or are they drifting off to better paying full-time employment? 

Kramer: The freelance model appears to be working very well. Less than a handful of our original contributors have left us, and we have added many new ones, including younger ones, so we have more contributors today than when we launched. The freelance model enables us to feature a large number of talented people, with their different areas of expertise. We have, however, moved two reporters to full-time work, and we may do more of that in the future.

Your bio on the site discloses your political contributions, the liberal policy think tank you founded and your ill-fated run for lieutenant governor. But how are the contributors able to avoid conflicts of interest between what they write about and what else they do to earn a living?

Kramer: Very few of our contributors earn a living in ways that conflict with their reporting and writing for us. On a few occasions, our editors have worked out with writers that they should not cover certain subjects because of a conflict. Otherwise, we simply opt for transparency and disclosure.

What have been one or two of your biggest stories to date?

@@INSERT RESOURCE 96878 EMBED@@Kramer: Three pieces stand out. (1) Eric Black's scoop on the staff turmoil in the office of Minnesota's attorney general; (2) John Camp's series of pieces from Iraq on the daily life there of Minnesota National Guard troops; and (3) Doug Grow's profile of the state's Democratic superdelegates, the first piece of its kind in the market. One of the exciting things about MinnPost has been watching writers develop a style that merges serious reporting and analysis with a more informal Internet style. This recently posted piece by Eric Black is a really good example, in my view, of MinnPost at its best.

 

You said in the early going that you had no designs in knocking off the dailies. But by my reading MinnPost is competitive on some stories --- like Al Franken's recent tax troubles. How would you compare MinnPost now to the papers and their Web sites? Are you some people's first read?

Kramer: Our target audience is news-intense people who care about Minnesota. By definition, news-intense people go to multiple sources for news. We may be some people's first read, but our goal is to be read most days by most news-intense people interested in Minnesota, along with whatever else they read. We absolutely want to break stories, and we do –- there are many examples of stories where the metros have followed our lead. And we want to go deeper than the dailies on key stories that we didn't break, and we do. But we are not aiming to be as comprehensive as the dailies. We don't promise to cover every story; we do promise that whatever we do will be done well.

The site seems very conservative on user-generated content -- accepting "Community Voices" columns but little else. As social networking design has improved and outlets are extracting more than pet pictures and anonymous rants from readers, are you planning to build more interactivity? Or do you like where you are?

Kramer: Yes, we would like to add more interactivity, as long as we can do so consistent with our commitment to high quality. We're working on that.

You told me you need a second round of start-up donations, comparable to the first of $1.5 million, to get to sustainability. Assuming you are successful, is MinnPost unique to the state and the opportunity created by the travails of the dailies? Or do you think it would be a sustainable model elsewhere? 

Kramer: The travails of the dailies in the Twin Cities are far from unique. Every market is different, in terms of the news intensity of the audience, the range of competitors, the culture of philanthropy, the talent level of the bought-out journalists, and so on. But I do think that MinnPost could prove to be a model of how a metro area or state could sustain high-quality journalism as a community asset, as the for-profit model deteriorates.