It seems lately that a lot of City Pages website content (that’s what we call it these day, content) is somehow about or related to MinnPost and its writers — which is probably a pretty good thing for MinnPost, no matter how you look at it. (I mean, it means they’re important, right?)
Recently, they referred to MinnPost as the Fox News of Minnesota (which we already discussed here on MNSpeak); now they question whether MinnPost can survive on diverse donors and oatmeal. Oatmeal? Is that what they’re serving up?
The truth is, the article, based on a new study from Harvard’s Neiman Foundation, does not necessarily put MinnPost in a bad light, but… it’s certainly far more skeptical than the Nieman Journalism Lab report. “Does it stand a chance of survival? In the case of MinnPost and other news sites like it, the answer is a qualified maybe,” writes City Pages.
But the Nieman Journalism Lab report reads, “there appeared to be some correlation between bigger budgets and greater diversity in revenues sources. This pattern suggested to me that there is a happy dynamic at work here — a virtuous cycle in which diversity of revenue helps create institutional heft that in turn attracts additional philanthropy in the form of major individual gifts and foundation grants… If this trend holds true, I think it would portend a relatively bright future for the nonprofit model as a major contributor in places like city halls and state capitals where newspaper bureaus have been emptied out.” A slightly more positive approach.
And City Pages closes with a few more jabs: “Whether or not these sites could actually attract and keep an ever-growing audience isn’t addressed by Barnett [who did the Nieman study]. That luxury of competing for handouts rather than audience share leave operations such as MinnPost free to openly chide commercial news operations for trafficking in stories that they deem to be beneath them — stories that commercial news organizations can tell their readers actually give a damn about because of traffic to their Web sites.”
Who are we jabbing here anyhow? MinnPost or commercial news organizations? I suppose it depends how you feel about journalistic arrogance and puff pieces — but then didn’t City Pages recently accuse MinnPost of doing puff pieces?
Oh well, overall the piece is certainly far less cutting than their March 02, 2009 piece: “The MinnPost Model: Is it sustainable? — Joel Kramer wants your money for his grand journalism experiment.” The tone of the title pretty much says it all.
…But then so many of us lovely journalists have fallen prey to needless hostility against our “competing” colleagues.
[On that note, what's up with the City Pages website? A basic search for "MinnPost" fails to turn up the majority of recent articles and threads about MinnPost. Oh, and this gets even better — you can't link to a pre-defined search page either. Ridiculous. And why a separate page to do a search anyhow? That's madness!]
3 Reader Comments
12:42 pm
Other than K-Hoff’s obvious man-crush on David Brauer,I don’t know what’s going on here. I can tell you that about one year ago, while I was doing a phone interview with a reporter in Peoria, IL, they asked were we were based. When I told them, they responded “Oh, that’s where MinnPost is from!”
True story.
2:31 pm
City Pages is a dessicated husk of its former self, no longer capable of doing hard-hitting journalism like it did throughout the ’90s, so all it’s got is sensationalist stories about media infighting, UFC smackdowns, porn-star wannabes and racist diatribes about homeless Native American guys who keep getting busted for public urination. Journalism in the public good? Not a concept Hoffman or his bosses seem interested in. With such a hollow core, no wonder their only plan of attack is to try to cut down other media outlets. The fixation makes one wonder if the Village Voice Media bosses are dictating the hit pieces just as they do the lowest-common-denominator content that’s supposed to bring them a wealth of web traffic.
4:47 pm
Ouch.