Online News Fights to Live on Its Merits
By DAVID CARR
NYT
It’s telling that one of the more promising experiments in the next version of regional news is located in an industrial park near the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The backdrop seems fitting.
Joel Kramer will tell you as much. The founder, chief executive and editor of MinnPost.com, Mr. Kramer has built the online regional news site using a hybrid formula of membership, ads, sponsorships, events and foundation support.
As a result, MinnPost is viable, with the equivalent of 18 full-time employees, about 2,000 paying members (donations start at $10 and average around $50) and an estimated $300,000 in annual advertising sales after three years.
But that’s not the kind of success that’s going to shift paradigms any time soon. Mr. Kramer is quick to point out that MinnPost and other nascent online news sites face what might be called the tyranny of small numbers.
“We knew it would be hard, but the most important lesson we learned was just how hard it is,” he said. “We had expected eventually to have an operational budget of $2 million now, and right now it’s actually more like $1.1 million. We launched into a recession and we are in the same space, businesswise, as the news business.”
(More here.)
NYT
It’s telling that one of the more promising experiments in the next version of regional news is located in an industrial park near the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The backdrop seems fitting.
Joel Kramer will tell you as much. The founder, chief executive and editor of MinnPost.com, Mr. Kramer has built the online regional news site using a hybrid formula of membership, ads, sponsorships, events and foundation support.
As a result, MinnPost is viable, with the equivalent of 18 full-time employees, about 2,000 paying members (donations start at $10 and average around $50) and an estimated $300,000 in annual advertising sales after three years.
But that’s not the kind of success that’s going to shift paradigms any time soon. Mr. Kramer is quick to point out that MinnPost and other nascent online news sites face what might be called the tyranny of small numbers.
“We knew it would be hard, but the most important lesson we learned was just how hard it is,” he said. “We had expected eventually to have an operational budget of $2 million now, and right now it’s actually more like $1.1 million. We launched into a recession and we are in the same space, businesswise, as the news business.”
(More here.)
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