MinnPost.com launches

Online MinnPost Offers Local Coverage

MinnPost, led by a former Minneapolis Star Tribune publisher and editor, Joel Kramer, is aiming at the small audience they believe is thirsting for substantive local journalism. The site's staffers say that kind of work is on the decline, and they blame it on cost-cutting as the industry faces dwindling circulation and ad revenue.

"The important thing that's happening there is that people are stepping up to create new journalism ventures in a time when traditional news organizations are stepping back" as they trim staff, said Dan Gillmor, a former technology columnist and founder of the Center for Citizen Media, a venture of the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and Harvard Law School.

Kramer said there's no exact model for MinnPost. The site's aspirations call to mind Salon, an online general-interest magazine started by newspaper journalists who had left the San Francisco Examiner in 1995. But Salon, after a bright start, has steadily pruned back its ambitions after a series of financial setbacks and now features less work by its own staff.

Newspapers have struggled mightily to adapt to new technology, and offering readers more words on serious subjects might not seem like a winning formula. But Kramer thinks there's enough of an audience among people who believe that serious journalism is a civic good and an end in itself.

MinnPost's creators say they are not trying to replace traditional newspapers but to cultivate about 15 to 20 percent of the population: "news intense" readers who seek multiple sources of news every day and are willing to make yearly donations to the site, as people do for public radio.

http://www.minnpost.com/

Comment: Supports RSS feeds. Accepting donations. Needed competition for the Star Tribune.