Twin Cities News Start-Up Breaks New Ground
Important Details: When long-time Star Tribune editor and publisher Joel Kramer exited the newspaper business in 1998, he hadn’t a glimmer of what he is now doing one decade later: launching an online news start-up. But the peculiar times journalism lives in has driven him in back into publishing, and not on newsprint.
“A lot of people think that current newspapers have given up on depth and perspective,” Kramer told Outsell. In the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul – the 14th largest metro area in the U.S. – the Avista-owned Star Tribune and the MediaNews-owned Pioneer Press dailies have bought out or laid off about 100 journalists over the last year or so. They’ve also cut back the amount of news coverage generally. Out of these cutbacks, Kramer sees opportunity. This week, he announced the later-in-the-year launch of MinnPost, a regional news website. MinnPost will draw on a couple of dozen of those former daily journalists – many of their bylines well known to readers – to create the following operation:
- A five-day-a-week news site. Using newspaper parlance, MinnPost will have “at least” two Page One news stories a day, and a minimum of six news-based posts by its contributors. In addition, it will have what Kramer calls “intelligent aggregation,” providing links to nation/world and regional round-ups, with useful summaries and pointers.
- MinnPost in Print: A lunch-hour, home- or office-printed daily edition that will also be given away at high-traffic locations around town.
- Multimedia, crowd-sourcing, reader interaction: While Kramer takes pains to anchor the start-up around hard news reporting, he’s clear that he wants to embrace what makes the web the web, as long as audio, video, reader comments, and submissions don’t distract from the very purpose of the site: reporting the news.
- Partners: MinnPost is in the talking stages with multiple partners for content cross-promotion, ad networking and more.
- Member-supported, ad-supported: MinnPost says it is aiming for 50% of its revenue to come from ads and 50% from members, borrowing an NPR-like model.
Kramer will serve as both CEO and editor of the new enterprise. After a good deal of debate, he’s fashioned it as a non-profit and collected a small war chest to tide the enterprise over in its early days. He’s raised $1.1 million in total. The funding comes from four local families, including his own, and from the Knight Foundation, which contributed $250,000 of it, and which said in a press release, “Communities need news every way they can get it.”
Implications: MinnPost is a small start-up, but it poses intriguing questions for traditional publishers. As ad revenues have declined, publishers have cut a significant number of newsroom positions. Many of these have been voluntary buy-outs, and disproportionately these have been veteran staffers, with names well-known to readers. In harvesting those bylines (and paying per piece rates of $600 for front-page stories and $200 a week for a couple of posts), MinnPost is taking advantage of all the branding built up over the years by the dailies. That creates a small crack in the door, but it’s one of which daily publishers should be aware. After all, MinnPost is going after what Outsell calls Power News Users (HotTopics: Targeting Power News Users – Who They Are, What They Read, And How They Use The News, April 5, 2007), heavy consumers of news and those who usually have advertiser-desirable demographics. Any audience MinnPost takes from the dailies further saps those dailies’ online growth rates, which are already slackening.
For MinnPost, the challenges are profound. It’s well and good to build on the byline foundation and the pedigree of its CEO. It’s another to build a fast-growing business, embracing increasingly complex advertising and news content technologies, and building and profiting from customer relationships. For a start-up, the blank slate works both ways. No legacy costs holding you back, but no business to build upon. MinnPost will get lots of attention as it launches in the fourth quarter. Outsell believes its successes and failures will be a great learning lab, both for other would-be start-ups and for traditional publishers wondering about the economics of a world that is mainly based in online – not print – publishing.