Secrets of the City

Yesterday was Give to the Max day, and all your donations to Minnesota nonprofits — up to $500,000 —  were matched by GiveMN.org through funds from the Saint Paul Foundation, the Minneapolis Foundation, and the Bush Foundation. What did this mean for non-profit media? MinnPost received 158 online donations, totaling $18,000. But they — in particular, David Brauer — seem far more concerned with the $5 million donation that MPR received. Evidently somebody gave $5 million anonymously to fund news coverage at MPR. Is such a large donation from an anonymous source a good idea? If the source is not identified, how will we know if coverage has been influenced? Presumably MPR knows who it is; should we?

MinnPost’s David Brauer will be on hand tonight to answer some difficult questions from yours truly, perhaps the toughest interviewer in the Twin Cities, as you might expect from somebody who people call Bunny.  The subject will be the future of journalism in the digital age, which is the subject of every discussion journalists are having nowadays, but Brauer, who moved to online media from a long career in dead-tree journalism, is uniquely qualified to answer such questions. Also, I will be asking him about David Carr, and whether or not Brauer is the “David” referenced in the more harrowing passages in Night of the Gun, so that should be fun. The event is at Sen Yai Sen Lek, begins at 6pm, costs $25, and there is a small possibility I might forget about it and accidentally go to Star Trek again, which we would typical, just typical.

No, it’s not that he noticed I called him a weather terrorist; it’s that MinnPost has the former WCCO weatherman.

Joel Kramer looks back on MinnPost after a year: “From the outset, I assumed that advertising could not by itself sustain high-quality regional journalism, for two main reasons: Serious public-affairs subjects and local orientation are both bad routes to maximizing traffic, and the staggering number of publishers online depresses ad rates, so that without high traffic it’s not possible to generate big revenues. Before MinnPost launched, I estimated that the eventual breakeven would be based on 70 percent from advertising, 30 percent from membership. With a year of experience, I now believe it will be more like 50-50. Membership is challenging, but advertising is more so.”

Your thoughts?

MinnPost (or, at least, David Brauer) is reporting that one story on their site has given them their single biggest traffic day yet (”Six figures worth of hits in 24 hours“). That story? Eric Black reported that at the University of Minnesota, during one of their “Great Conversations” events, reporter Seymour Hersh dropped the news that the CIA had an executive assassination ring that operated without Congressional oversight: “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”

MinnPost steps into the breach of local arts coverage, debuting Arts Arena, featuring arts coverage by some of the better-known names in local arts criticism, including Jim Walsh, Rob Nelson,  and Secrets of the City’s own Britt Robson. Come to think of it, MinnPost has succeeded in rounding up some of the longtime defining voices of City Pages before they left en masse in the past year or so.

This morning’s NY Times front page mentions MinnPost and other sites like it around the country like VoiceofSanDiego and the St. Louis Beacon.  Citing MinnPost’s old-media publisher and its relatively large $1.3M annual budget, the Times said, “Most of this new breed of news sites have a whiff of scruffy insurgency, but MinnPost, based in Minneapolis, resembles the middle-age establishment.”