Aaron Landry

MinnPost, a new local news site, launches tomorrow. While the idea of having a primarily online-only local news source with a plethora of experienced journalists sounds like a great idea, I’ve been less and less excited about them the more I learn over the last few months.

In my opinion, their biggest problem is that they simply don’t seem to “get it.” Essentially, you can’t simply just do what you’ve done before at a newspaper and just do the same thing online instead. They’ve written a lot about what they’re doing and the tone of almost every single entry, to me, sounds from “this Internet-thing is new to us, bear with us as we figure it out” to “we’re going to be online but we’re better than all you other guys online” to outright arrogant:

For example, at their best, blogs have created a new kind of conversation between professional reporters and their readers.

Really? Give me a break. For example, is Minnesota Monitor a news site or a blog? Some parts are opinion and most of it is original reporting. And some of it is very, very good reporting. Kind of like a newspaper, right? But it looks, talks, and acts like a blog. As well, what about The Daily Mole?

Internet junkies have known for a long time that that there really isn’t a real line between journalism and blogging anymore. Yes, there’s a lot of blogging that isn’t journalism, but there’s a lot of “journalism” that lacks journalistic standards too. There’s bloggers that are journalists and there’s journalists that are bloggers. They’re not independent things.

I think that more and more, blogging is beginning to refer more to the medium and not the content.

Although MinnPost won’t seem to admit it, some of what they’re going to do is flat out “blogging.” They just call it “Current Posts“:

Current Posts will be reported and written by professional journalists. They will report on politics, government, foreign affairs, science, education, health, the arts, business, sports and more. Many of these journalists have years of experience covering the fields and topics they’re reporting on.

At the same time, journalists writing Current Posts won’t be bound by all of the norms of newspaper reporting and writing. It’s a bit of an experiment. We hope to learn as we go, make adjustments as needed, get better over time.

But Current Posts will have a common quality: They will be based on original reporting. MinnPost’s journalists will strive to dig out fresh information and news with each of their Posts, uncovering, we hope, news overlooked by other news organizations. This information will be accurate and reliable, not rumor or ill-informed speculation.

Current Posts, however, will not be traditional news stories or in-depth articles – that important material will appear elsewhere on MinnPost.com and in MinnPost in Print.

Current Posts will be shorter pieces, with a conversational voice, but without the vitriol, cheap shots and insults that are all too common on the Web. And readers will be encouraged to contribute their own experiences or knowledge to the reporting process.

Posts will be open and honest – if some information is not known or if a key source hasn’t been contacted or if the writer is engaging in speculation, the writer will say so.

Our goal is that Current Posts will enlighten, interpret, explain. They won’t be op-ed articles – again, that material will be in MinnPost but appear elsewhere – but many will be highly analytical and written with a point of view.

Most of all, Current Posts will inform the reader — like that friend or colleague at work – and assess what’s going on and sort out the meaning and significance of events.

How is that not blogging?

It’s that MinnPost’s tone has been an “Us v. Them, holier than thou” approach to entering the online news instead of saying “We’re going to be more than fifty journalists reporting news, blogging about it and we’re going to embrace how people interact and consume news differently online” that really bugs me. They seem to have a bad taste in their mouth about blogging and don’t want to admit that blogging is part of what they’re doing. C’mon guys. Blogging is okay and not below you! It’s also okay to admit you’re going to aim to be of the highest quality, but there’s no reason to trash the medium you’re trying to be a part of.

So, I haven’t been very hopeful about MinnPost, but I do have some hopes for their launch tomorrow that would really turn my opinion around.

I hope that MinnPost:

• …has proper aggregation so news junkies can read MinnPost on their own time, online or off, in the format they choose and with the immediacy of using aggregation.
• …has easy-to-copy and simple URLs for stories so people can link to them easily with others via IM, email and blogs. Right now they do not have proper links to their posts.
• …keeps stories online indefinitely so links to them don’t break, search engines can index them and they can live on. The Pioneer Press and Star Tribune are stupid to remove their stories after a few weeks. I can’t believe they still do that. What an enormous waste of potential traffic for them.
• …allows registered users to comment without moderation. If you’re going to allow people to talk, MinnPost shouldn’t decide on an individual-comment-basis who gets heard and who doesn’t, like the City Pages. On a related note, I fully support their “real first and last name” policy and of course support deleting overly offensive, harassing and abusive comments.
• …feels comfortable participating on other media sites and blogs, especially when MinnPost is quoted, praised or critiqued on other sites.
• …embraces the idea that other people will copy portions of stories and other content from MinnPost and put them on other sites for any number of reasons. MinnPost should expect that those people will give attribution or a link back to MinnPost as well. It’s about the content, not the control of the content. It truly benefits everyone involved. See Prince on how not to approach this concept.
• …gives up the “we’re better than other internet sites” mantra and shows how they’re better by setting example.
• …has the high quality journalism that they’re promising they’ll have.
• …becomes a viable, influential, and trustworthy organization for local news that ends up making journalism work on the internet.

I’m honest here: I sincerely hope they succeed. I think they have all the elements to win when they show that they’re embracing and understanding the format they’re jumping into. Just my opinion.

UPDATE: Super-sleuth Ed Kohler gives us a MinnPost.com Sneak Preview. He found build.minnpost.com as it was pinging Technorati. Whoops!

UPDATE: Ed must have spoiled the fun and they’ve now password protected it. Wouldn’t want anyone to see it a few hours early!

UPDATE: Well, today they’ve launched. Their content is great. Their implementation is poor. More at MNspeak and The Daily Mole. What really sums it up are these two bits from today’s Star Tribune article on MinnPost which shows the fantastic contradiction:

MinnPost.com was started by Joel Kramer, former editor of the Star Tribune, who has said it’s time for journalists to adjust to the new way of journalism.

MinnPost is to publish at 11 a.m. Monday through Friday. It will have a PDF version and print about 2,000 copies in a dead-tree version that will be distributed around the metro area.

I shake my head.