Journalism News, JTM News

Joel Kramer: Lessons I’ve learned after a year running MinnPost

Submitted by Steve Hanson on Thu, 03/19/2009 – 6:22pm

Some interesting observations from Joel Kramer at MinnPost and the Nieman Labs.

Joel Kramer: Lessons I’ve learned after a year running MinnPost

[As we mentioned earlier, the next issue of Nieman Reports is almost ready to be unveiled. On Monday, we gave you a sneak peak at one of its articles, by St. Louis Beacon editor Margaret Wolf Freivogel.

We’ve got one more story to share before the rest of the issue goes online at Nieman Reports’ web site. This one comes from one of the brightest stars in the news-startup firmament: Joel Kramer, former editor and publisher of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, and now founder of MinnPost. Here, Joel reflects on what he’s learned in MinnPost’s first year-plus. —Ed.]

A lot of pixels are being spilled these days reflecting on the future of newspapers, news, journalists, and journalism. I spent my career in newspapers, first as a journalist and later as a publisher, and I left when the business was financially near its peak. With the for-profit model now shriveling, I’ve spent the past 16 months trying to build one example of what might be coming next—a not-for-profit enterprise providing high-quality regional journalism on the web.

Here are some reflections from that battlefield.

MinnPost is a certain kind of nonprofit journalism enterprise — one that aims to eventually break even on operating revenues, such as advertising, sponsorship, membership and perhaps other sources such as syndication.

This is different from a pure philanthropic endeavor, like ProPublica, which (at least in its current plan) depends for its success on the continuing generosity of foundations or very large individual donors.

Journalism News, JTM News

Online News Judged as Reliable as Newspapers

Submitted by Steve Hanson on Thu, 03/05/2009 – 11:11am

recent Rasmussen Reports Survey indicates that most people now believe that online news sources are at least as reliable as newspapers.  Notably, it also reports that only 30% of adults read a paper almost every day, and that among younger people the rate is half that.

Fifty-two percent (52%) of Americans say they go online and use the Internet every day or nearly every day, and most of those adults now find online reporting comparable to that in their local newspaper. Seventy-four percent (74%) of these daily Internet users say that reporting from web sources is at least somewhat reliable while 69% say the same about local newspaper reporting.

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COMMENTS

My Father

Submitted by sharkscott on Thu, 03/05/2009 – 11:54am.

My Father, a self professed “I don’t really use computers for anything” guy, is now going online to get the news when he is travelling or out of town, and it has caused him to actually put a computer on his desk at home now because he can get the news he wants faster and easier than sifting through the paper.

I asked him if he can see any difference in the quality, he didn’t understand what I meant..and there was my answer. To him, there is no difference.

He does understand that not every site is as good as every other, but to him that falls right in line with being choosy with what, who and where you get your news from. Which he does/did with regular media before going online.

When someone like my Dad switches over to reading the news online and either doesn’t care or doesn’t notice any difference quality, that says everything to me. My Father may not be technologically savvy, but he is one of the smartest people I have ever known and if he doesn’t see a difference, then there really must not be that big of one.

Scott

Journalism News, JTM News

Software as a Service? Know Who’s Servicing You!

Submitted by Steve Hanson on Fri, 02/20/2009 – 11:09am

As a group, we’re seeing a lot of interest in different platforms for news sites, and general issues about Software as a Service providers. Some recent developments are making it clear that a little caution in choosing a provider is in order, as many sub-par providers are having trouble dealing with their own success and providing sufficient infrastructure.

One example has been the SoapBlox platform. SoapBlox is a very nice turnkey platform, primarily used by progressive political web sites.  A short while back, one of the SoapBlox servers crashed, and the one-man-shop owner made a dramatic announcement that he was throwing in the toweland was going to drop his service.  This turned out to be a rash reaction to a long-term financial struggle for the service, but it threw the progressive blogging community into a tizzy over the possibility of losing a favored platform. A big fundraising effort took place, raising money to fund the company and to improve its infrastructure (backups, anyone??).

More recently, portable book mark provider ma.gnolia fell down and could not get up.  Again, it turns out that this was a very minimally built service, which seems to have kept no backups and had no disaster recovery plan. Attempts to recover the saved bookmarks have apparently failed, and the service is gone, along with all the data.

I’ll grant you that I am sensitive to these issues. Back in the days when I had a reasonable income, I worked largely as a backup and disaster recovery consultant.  And I find it hard to believe that so many companies are providing services that are giving next to no thought to robustness and disaster recovery. But this is undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg.

So – why am I ranting about this? The world is currently full of news entrepreneurs who are building platforms and services and many of the people reading this site are potential customers.  Please consider that behind the lovely features, graphics, and googly-woogly widgets these companies are providing, there is an underlying infrastructure, and you should care about that too.  Do they do backups?  Can they recover when a server falls on its face?  Do they provide uptime guarantees?  Do you trust and believe them? Ask questions now, before it’s too late.

Journalism News, JTM News

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel freezes wages, may furlough

Submitted by Steve Hanson on Thu, 02/19/2009 – 2:00pm

With the economy continuing to worsen and conditions eroding in the daily newspaper industry, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelis freezing employee wages and may institute a one-week unpaid employee furlough.

Journal Sentinel employees received a memo this week from president and publisher Betsy Brenner outlining the actions the daily newspaper’s management will take “to properly structure our business and weather this economic downturn.”

Brenner told employees the company hopes to keep further staff reductions to a minimum, but those decisions will depend on the impact of cost-savings efforts and the newspaper’s revenue performance for the balance of 2009. The newspaper cut about 10 percent of its staff in summer 2008 and 5 percent in fall 2007.

The wage freeze was implemented for the remainder of 2009 for all non-union employees. The company has begun meetings with its seven employee unions to discuss the wage freeze and other steps to reduce costs, Brenner said in the memo.

Greg Pearson, president of newsroom employees’ union Milwaukee Newspaper Guild Local 51, said Wednesday that the guild hopes to avert further layoffs and is open to discussing the issues Brenner has raised.

“To the company’s credit, they’re making efforts to avoid that step (layoffs),” Pearson said.

The guild’s contract expired at the end of 2008, and unionized newsroom employees have received no pay increase so far this year, Pearson said.

Brenner referenced a letter to employees last week from Journal Communications Inc. chairman and CEO Steve Smith about steps the parent company is taking to reduce costs across all the company’s businesses. In addition to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Journal Communications operates radio and television stations, publishes shopper publications and runs a printing business.

Smith told stock analysts Feb. 12 that the company cut its full-time work force by more than 12 percent during 2008. The company’s management also decided to suspend its matching contribution to the Journal 401(k) plan effective immediately, he said.

Journal Communications’ radio station group cut its work force 11.7 percent in 2008 and the television station group reduced employment 12.1 percent, president Doug Kiel told stock analysts.

The company’s fourth-quarter broadcast revenue was down 6.4 percent and publishing, which includes the Journal Sentinel, was down 10.4 percent.

“At our newspaper business we … have talked about the erosion of large portions of our print revenue,” Brenner said in her memo. “We’ve seen that deterioration accelerate in the first weeks of 2009.”

The Journal Sentinel “continues to publish a great newspaper” and grow its Web sites, but “our efforts may well fall short of hitting our revenue targets,” Brenner said.

Journal Communications (NYSE: JRN) owns the Journal Sentinel; 12 television stations including WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) in Milwaukee, and 35 radio stations, including WTMJ-AM (620) and WLWK-FM (94.5) in Milwaukee.

Bill Graffin

MMSD Public Information Manager

(414) 225-2077