The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

There’s an awful lot of talk about the news lately, but not, unfortunately, the sort of constructive conversation that promotes critical thinking and engages people with their neighborhoods, their country, or their world. No, what people are talking about is the media, or, more specifically, and more onerously, the business of media. The Star Tribune is losing readers, pages, and staff. (Did that venture-capital firm buy it just for its prime downtown real estate?) The Pioneer Press is facing the same challenges, and rumors have been circulating for over a year that it will cease to exist altogether. The corporate hijacking of local “alt weekly” City Pages seems finally to have succeeded, at least in a manner of speaking. (New Times indeed—just who the hell is this Hoffman character, anyway?) And it’s not just with these outlets. Almost everywhere you turn the quality of news is being questioned as resources and profits continue to dwindle. It’s just too expensive, it seems, to chase meaningful stories these days, and the competition has never been fiercer for advertising dollars.

Enter the internet, the longtime boogeyman and sworn enemy of print media everywhere. As it turns out, it just might be the best tool any news reporter, storyteller, or publisher ever dreamed of. With more than half the U.S. now online—and two-thirds of them getting their news online—the web is suddenly a sexy proposition for all sorts of formerly hidebound print junkies. The venture capitalists are intrigued as well—you’d have to suppose that in a recessive industry, not having to pay for ink, paper, press operators, and distribution would bode well for the bottom line.

And so, with (undoubtedly) noble thoughts and high aspirations, many Twin Cities newsies have been turning to the web as a panacea for a host of the ailments currently bedeviling the news media. Former Strib publisher and editor Joel Kramer got the attention of media insiders across the country when he launched MinnPost, his long-anticipated online news site, in November. At about the same time, erstwhile City Pages editor Steve Perry debuted his own site, The Daily Mole, which he mothballed last month after a frustrating three-month run; now he is taking the reins at the Minnesota Monitor. Perry’s new employer, like a number of other local sites (including Twin Cities Daily Planet, the Minnesota Monitor, Cursor, and MNSpeak), had been up and running on the web long before that pair of high-profile upstarts made their splash at the tail end of 2007.

It turns out that the web, with its atmosphere of almost unbridled democracy (a sort of anarchic egalitarian free-for-all, if such a thing is possible), has breathed new life into the moribund American Dream. Freedom of speech. Free exchange of ideas. Anybody can play. People with a little bit (or a lot) of hubris can barge their way online and plant their flags. Every citizen (or non-) can put his (or her) voice out there. And anyone can hit the jackpot, which is, of course, measured in mouse clicks. (You can be sure even the gal blogging about what she had for breakfast is watching her numbers.) In the online world, clicks mean dollars.

The trouble, of course, comes in setting up a new online economy. How many clicks for how many dollars? What’s the rate of exchange? In a world where Britney has been the top search term for six of the past seven years, and where information is expected to be free, how can anyone make news financially viable?


Making a play with traditional journalism

Determined to uphold professional distinction above all else (presumed translation: no Britney stories), Joel Kramer latched on to a stable of reporters cast off in the recent newsroom purges on both sides of the river and set out to create a quality local news source. With the exception of a few videos and slideshows, MinnPost’s editorial model is little more than traditional newspaper journalism distributed online (in fact, until a few weeks ago, Kramer insisted on distributing fifteen-hundred Xeroxed printouts for those committed to words on paper).

While web-based businesses across the globe save on rent by having staff work from home, Kramer resists this as well. He is proud of MinnPost’s old-school newsroom, which features open space to encourage dialogue, an office for the business staff, and conference rooms and workstations around the perimeter. Just as newspaper reporters rush to meet an evening deadline, MinnPost contributors—drawn from a pool of fifty-six freelancers—submit stories each morning so that web editor Corey Anderson can post them online at 11 a.m. This also runs counter to standard web protocol, where news is live twenty-four-hours and reporters bypass editors by posting their stories directly on the website. “Our goal is not to exploit the web,” explained Kramer, “but to provide quality journalism.”

Can MinnPost make profitable use of an online medium without fully engaging its resources? Nora Paul, Director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the U of M, says no. “[Kramer] hasn’t embraced what’s interesting about online,” she argued, “which is the ability to create packages with a shelf-life, and that will have utility for a long time.” According to Paul, online news organizations need to find new and compelling ways to tell stories, and develop creative ways to pull together data. While most local online news sources have not availed themselves of Paul’s expertise, newspapers across the country are turning to her for the winning formula. Last month, eleven top newspapers, including The New York Times and the Washington Post, met with Paul (and five graduate students) to formulate questions they want answered about offering news on the web. What’s the best way to display video? Do news crawlers attract more clicks than breaking news digests? What’s the most engaging way to tell a story?

Above all, the web offers flexibility. “Online, the walls should be much more porous,” explained Paul, “so that you have an evolving story-telling space.” In other words, there’s no excuse for anything static. Online news is more a process than a product; it’s created through interaction and various points of view, so stories build up almost organically, with varied perspectives, in varied forms, from varied arenas. Ideally, the end result is a much broader picture, and arguably a more compelling story than we’ve been reading on paper for centuries.


More bang for your buck: aggregation and context

When he embarked on his project, Steve Perry recognized the need—and the potential—to do more with less on the web. Using the Chi-Town Daily News as a model, and following the lead of Cursor—a well-established, locally produced non-profit website with national readership—he figured he could run The Daily Mole with a meager staff of four or five and a budget of just $300,000 to $400,000 a year (compared to more than $1 million at MinnPost). While Perry’s plan never came to fruition, and he was ultimately forced to do less with even less, The Daily Mole certainly highlighted the evolving role of the online journalist/editor: With the proliferation of choices on the web and so much information at our disposal, Perry didn’t aim to create still more information, but to capitalize instead on existing web stories—weeding out the important ones and offering context, commentary, and analysis.

While this may seem like a novel approach, Mike Tronnes and Rob Levine figured it out more than ten years ago when they founded Cursor. (Such is the nature of the web: Some things take a while to catch on, and the originators seldom get proper credit.) While Cursor puts the news into context, mostly on a national scale, and brings together an exceptional listing of links/sources, it has grown unwieldy; unfortunately, the lack of easy-to-scan headlines makes it cumbersome for the average (or even above-average) reader to process. Cursor’s backbone, however, certainly offers a viable point of departure.

“We don’t need journalists to cover minutiae, to spend so much time on things they don’t need to be doing, like sports scores, and press releases, and acting as a ‘middle man’ between a source and their audience,” Jane Singer, the chair in digital journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, observed in a 2007 article in the U.K.’s Press Gazette. “We need journalists to put information into context, to do it without fear and favour.”

Without fear and favor certainly sounds like a solid description of Perry’s attempted editorial mission at The Daily Mole. While Kramer borrowed the model for his content-with-gravity approach from traditional journalism, Perry tried to balance his substance with a liberal dose of style and attitude. Fighting a current of short attention spans, online information overload, the Britney-ization of mass media, and what he referred to as “a lack of common culture,” he hoped to foster community interaction and embrace irreverence. “I think that spawning a critical sensibility that is playful, with a sense of humor and satire, is what works now,” he said, just a couple of weeks before announcing that he was shelving (temporarily, at least) The Daily Mole.


Pushing the drug: community and engagement

MNSpeak has gone some way toward creating the community Perry aimed for. Dubbed a “community blog” by some and a forum for commentary on local media by others, MNSpeak was developed by Rex Sorgatz in April 2005 and is now owned by the Bartel family (publishers of The Rake). At its core, MNSpeak is an aggregator: a portal to an eclectic range of outside news sources and an easy way to weed through headlines and zero in on the most provocative, useful, or relevant stories. It adds value in the frequently lively discussions that take off in the wake of those stories it links to, some of which are chosen by the site’s moderator, and others by regular visitors. Those user-generated discussions are MNSpeak’s original content; regulars visit repeatedly each day to see what new comments their own have inspired. (Another universal perception the internet has only reinforced: There is little people love more than the sound of their own voices.)

“When it comes down to it, good media is actually pretty simple: It’s conversation,” said Sorgatz. “When it’s good, it means writing about stuff that people are talking about; when great, it means creating original things that people talk about.” But engaging people online isn’t simple at all. No one wants to be the first one out on an empty dance floor. As a news site, MNSpeak’s challenge is not only to get people talking, but to make them stay awhile, especially since its primary offering is links to other places.

 

SIDEBAR

Who’s Viewin’ Who?
We asked a bevy of local online media folks where they go on the web for news. The sites they named are ordered below roughly from most- to least-mentioned—or, if you will, from the usual suspects to some intriguing lesser-knowns.

StarTribune
Pioneer Press
The Rake
Minnesota Monitor
Daily Planet
City Pages
MinnPost
Cursor
MNSpeak
The Daily Mole
Politics in Minnesota
Talking Points Memo
Gizmodo
Informed Comment
Blogumentary
Eyeteeth
Walker Blogs
Mediation
Downtown Journal
WCCO
Southwest Journal
Minnesota Lawyer
MN Blue
The Sky Blue Waters Report
Powerline
Pharyngula
Polinaut
Truth v. The Machine
Kool-Aid Report
Nihilist in Golf Pants
Residual Forces
MNPact
Liberal Media Elite
Norwegianity
Across the Great Divide
Metroblogging Minneapolis  
The Deets

Make them work for you: citizen journalism

With lack of resources and manpower as oft-cited handicaps in the struggle to make online news viable, news organizations across the globe have been seeking to benefit from the citizens who patronize them—and doing so with growing success.

“The old idea of reporters covering a beat might well be replaced by an online reporter/editor who oversees a subject area driven by the entire community,” wrote Mark Bowdon in the Philadelphia Inquirer last year, in an article on journalism and “global dialogue.”

In South Korea, the whimsically named OhmyNews was the first website to take this approach and adopt an “open-source” citizen-journalism model. Its fifty-five-member staff produces twenty percent of the content; ordinary people contribute the remaining eighty percent. So great has been its influence and success that OhmyNews International and OhmyNews Japan have since emerged. And in the United States, ThemeParkInsider became the first online publication—seven years ago—to win the Online Journalism Award (presented by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Online News Association) for a feature created entirely by its readers.



Locally, the Twin Cities Daily Planet aims to harness the journalistic talent of average folks and offer “grassroots neighborhood, ethnic, and community media,” said Jeremy Iggers, executive director of the Twin Cities Media Alliance, which runs the Daily Planet (Iggers is also a food writer for The Rake). At its core, the Daily Planet is a community newswire and syndication service: It displays the latest headlines from neighborhood and community press, highlighting the best and most relevant stories, while also serving as a venue for independent reporters and citizen journalists who don’t see themselves reflected in mainstream media. The Media Alliance even offers classes, such as Intro to Citizen Journalism (every Wednesday from March 5 to March 26) and Facebook for Geezers. “The age of one-way journalism is over,” Iggers said. “The digital revolution has put powerful communication tools in the hands of everyone. Journalism that ignores this is stuck.”

That’s not an easy philosophy for traditional journalists to stomach. Opening up interaction means less control over content, something that MinnPost’s Joel Kramer is not willing to surrender—citing, once again, a quality issue. But in 2008, whose definition of quality holds sway? Should we still gauge quality using the same parameters we used fifty, or even twenty years ago?

 

A whole new world

Historically, journalism has always been dependent on and shaped by whatever technology was available for gathering and disseminating information. During the Civil War, newspapers were finally able to send correspondents out into the battlefield. Why? Because of the telegraph. But this new tool didn’t come cheap. The economics of that technology triggered the terse style of newspaper prose that is still familiar today.

Now, of course, it’s the internet that is changing journalism—it’s simply part of the evolutionary process. Gone are the days of the newsroom wire service. Breaking news is no longer reserved for a professional elite to digest, interpret, and disseminate for public consumption. If journalism is about gathering and disseminating information, the internet is an invaluable tool—it’s a live wire service, with open access to the latest news, as long as someone is there to report it. And in an age of ubiquitous cell phones and laptops, someone is always there to report it.

Still, having better stories, and better models for creating stories, doesn’t necessarily mean success on the internet. Despite everyone’s quest for answers (and a host of people professing to have them, for a price), this realm remains unpredictable, enigmatic, and financially risky. Just as easily as a “right” website can tank, “wrong” ones can become hugely popular. The Daily Mole is dead (or at least on indefinite hiatus), and Kramer was quick to point out that, despite its traditional approach, after only eleven weeks, MinnPost has an audience larger than those of the other local news sites mentioned here (a claim corroborated by the rankings in the information below).

On a local level, the trick seems to be in picking a niche. To a large extent, these exclusively online local news sources seem to be targeting, if not yet reaching, the same audience—which probably includes you, if you’re still here: an educated reader who looks to multiple sources for news. Almost all the people behind these websites realize that their operation is not going to be your primary news source, but rather a supplemental one (and probably one of many). They’re jockeying to earn your loyalty with some small yet very important detail that distinguishes them from their ostensible competitors: While MinnPost tries to revive a more traditional—and increasingly discarded—philosophy of high-quality journalism, MNSpeak aims to foster dialogue, and the Daily Planet to give voice to marginalized communities. Minnesota Monitor focuses its efforts on policy, politics, and the media; Cursor aggregates content with national appeal; and for its part, while it was active, The Daily Mole tried to deliver the news with irreverence—and a call for engagement.


The business of online news

Though advertising dollars are shifting from print to digital media, the numbers still do not translate into profit. It’s true that the growth of online news is greater than in traditional media (including TV and radio), but that’s mostly because new ground is being explored—and by large numbers of people. Moreover, the numbers indicate that this growth is already starting to slow. The entrepreneurs in online media continue to argue that advertising just hasn’t caught up yet, but they’re failing to acknowledge a sea change both in profit margins and in online advertising across the board: Call it the Google factor.

First, look at those profit margins on media companies. They are back down in the three-to-five percent range of the 1950s, as opposed to the twenty-five percent they reached at the height of the ’90s tech bubble. This means investors aren’t so easily seduced by the news industry. “I had no idea how long it would take to play the money connections,” Perry confessed.

Then there’s the shift in how online advertising works. Print media, reluctant to let go of its once-successful mass-scale advertising model, missed the opportunity to shift to small-scale ways of doing business. “Newspapers still threw their lot in with big advertisers who had been the only ones who could afford their mass products,” wrote ubiquitous media columnist Jeff Jarvis on his current blog, BuzzMachine. “They didn’t see the mass of potential spending in a new population of small, local advertisers who never could afford to advertise in newspapers but who could afford to buy targeted, efficient, inexpensive ads online.”

Who did see—and seize upon—that potential? Google. It won over all of the little guys with its model for affordable, targeted, pay-per-click advertising. According to TechCrunch, the latest figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau show that Google accounts for forty percent of all online advertising in this country—a number that allows them to offer unbeatably low prices and thereby entirely skew the playing field.

How do you compete with that? That’s the big question in making local online news sustainable, if not profitable. MinnPost, Minnesota Monitor, and the Daily Planet have all settled on a similar public-radio model to stay in business: a combination of foundation grants, online advertisements, and donations. “It was clear that success depended in part on obtaining revenue from readers,” Kramer said, “The clear experience of the internet is that readers aren’t paying for news.” MinnPost, he said, has successfully taken its first steps in a four-year journey toward self-sufficiency. With more than seven hundred and fifty donors, 3,188 Daily Alerts subscribers, and a pool of almost five hundred registered commentators, so far the business has surpassed the modest benchmarks Kramer set.

Still, it’s probably too early to tell how this model will fare; we have yet to see, for instance, how a single-platform website like MinnPost holds up against the actual public-radio, multi-platform model it’s inspired by. That model typically gives more bang for the buck: A donation to Minnesota Public Radio supports not only quality twenty-four-hour news radio, but two other demographically tailored music stations, web stories in a variety of formats (audio, video, text, images, and many combinations thereof), discussion groups, a citizen journalism initiative—and even a print magazine (Minnesota Monthly) to boot. That’s a pretty tough act to follow.

Meanwhile, the folks running some of those other local news sites are hoping that there are enough other potential donations out there to fund the expanding market. Somehow MinnPost’s survival seems intrinsically linked to how much accountability we’re willing to take on as readers (and invest, in the form of donations) and how much faith we’re willing to place in the kind of top-down, one-way journalism that has been letting us down for years. If the public-radio model is to work for online news, news consumers and media mavens alike will have to begin to view journalism as a consumer asset rather than as a consumer good.

A whole new world—same as the old one

While many see the web as a Wild West frontier where there’s money to be had with little investment, in truth—just as in the traditional media—a handful of giant corporations control most of what’s on the web, including the news. And the fast-growth newbies (like YouTube) keep getting bought out by the biggest players, only exacerbating the situation.

For example, the web’s No. 1 news site—drawing eleven million monthly users—is Yahoo News, which offers no original content and aggregates material from other news organizations, including Reuters and the New York Times. And in early February, Microsoft made a record-setting $44.6 billion bid to acquire Yahoo, a deal that would consolidate its MSN network with Yahoo. We might be on the verge of witnessing the largest merger yet among the internet’s fat cats, a deal that will skew the playing field once again. As of press time, Yahoo had rejected the bid, but the fight is far from over.

With Google and Yahoo (and/or a Yahoo/MSN hybrid) controlling online news, local news media will have to find a way to weather the storm on the web. That could mean joining forces against the web behemoths, aggregating their own content, and consolidating their models for creating and providing online news—in short, building dikes against a rising sea of troubles. In the world of online news media, it’s shaping up to be the same old capitalist battle pitting the underdogs against the fat cats. If local online news providers are going to survive, they’d better find out who their friends are in a hurry—and make some more while they’re at it—lest they join legions of their print brethren in the litter box.