Новинари - рекетари

The just-announced plan to start a local news site in the Twin Cities is an admirable venture. Indeed, I'm surprised we haven't seen more efforts like this to create significant local news sites that tap into the growing pool of highly qualified victims of newsroom buyouts. The best-known of these, perhaps, is Voice of San Diego; there are others, and hopefully there will be additional challenges to sleepy existing local media around the country.

But while the plans for MinnPost, put together by former Minneapolis Star Tribune Editor ad Publisher Joel Kaplan, are being hailed by editorial types, they so far seem to have a gaping hole: Where's the revenue going to come from? What's the business model? How is MinnPost going to sustain itself when the initial $1.1 million in funding runs out? (Which, believe me, will happen very quickly, especially given the size of that staff.)

The list of 25 initial staffers consists entirely of editorial personnel; there's not an advertising, business or marketing pro in the bunch (besides Kaplan). The release says, "MinnPost is currently looking to hire a leader for the business side of the organization and a sponsorship/advertising director," but that almost sounds like an afterthought. The revenue side of this nascent business needs to have much higher priority when you're stacking editorial talent like cordwood. Editorial is a cost center; you've got to pay for it somehow.

As Paul Farhi wrote in American Journalism Review recently, the business model ifor hyperlocal efforts still is unproven, and virtually all journalist-driven startup local sites are labors of love that are far from breaking even (beware grandiose claims). As we learned the hard way at Backfence, it's a long, hard, expensive slog to build successful local news and information sites. I firmly believe that it can be done, but it's not easy, and you need to have sufficient cash reserves available to keep the lights on while you work for years to create enough revenue to break even.

I wish MinnPost well; they're doing important, groundbreaking work. But they need to put away the reporters' notebooks and pull out the spreadsheets to really understand what it's going to cost to make their new venture a self-sustaining financial success. Ken Doctor, in his otherwise excellentpost about MinnPost, says, "What does it take to do journalism going forward? First and easiest answer: It takes journalists." I respectfully disagree. It takes money to pay those journalists to do their jobs. So far, I fear, MinnPost isn't fully embracing that critical side of starting a news organization. MinnPost nobly claims to be "not for profit," but that may be an understatement.

Oh, and one more thing: MinnPost needs to more fully embrace the Web, and get truly serious about user-generated content, video and other key online advantages. Doctor's post is excellent on this point. And when I read that MinnPost "will publish Monday through Friday," my eyebrows go up. That's print thinking. Um, "publish"? What century are we in? Just like everywhere else, news and readers in the Twin Cities function 24/7. MinnPost will have to, as well.