Nieman Journalism Lab |
MinnPost reaches five years of fundraising with MinnRoast Posted: 24 Apr 2012 01:50 PM PDT The secret to having a successful nonprofit journalism site? Comedy. Also, a CEO who’s willing to dance. This Friday MinnPost is holding MinnRoast, an event that mixes fundraiser and summer camp talent show. It’s the fifth straight year for the Minnesota nonprofit news site’s version of the Gridiron Club Dinner. This year, the celebrity will be supplied by Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, Senator Al Franken, the mayor of St. Paul, two former candidates for governor, the majority leader of the Minnesota State Senate, and local news personalities. “I’m in the show. This year I’m in three dance numbers,” MinnPost CEO Joel Kramer told me. “I never danced before I got involved in MinnRoast.” Of course, at one point, Kramer probably didn’t have much experience running a nonprofit news site either, but he seems to be adapting to both well. As funny as MinnRoast is, it’s serious business for MinnPost: Kramer said each year the fundraiser has contributed more to the nonprofit’s bottom line. “Revenue from MinnRoast this year will be in the neighborhood of 10 percent of our overall revenue.” That would be up slightly from 9 percent in 2011, according to MinnPost’s most recent year end report. MinnPost is often pointed to as a bright spot in the nonprofit journalism landscape (it ended last year in the black), so it’s worth looking at what makes their fundraising efforts work. Events are a big part of that. Like a lot of nonprofit news sites (and increasing number of for-profit outlets), events are part of business for MinnPost, which counts its annual birthday party and book blast among its regular events. This year, they expect more than 900 people will attend. With tickets ranging from $35 to $175 and sponsorships starting at $800, you can figure out how that math adds up. For nonprofit news sites — and nonprofits in general — it’s all about finding as many ways as possible for people to give you money. In a way, MinnPost is extending the idea of its membership model. If you’re already a donor, you’re likely to check out the show, but MinnPost hopes their audience brings a friend to have a good time. Kramer told me one of the benefits of the show is the sponsors’ use of their tickets to bring people unfamiliar with the site. That introduction can be valuable if it creates an impression, even if it is during a night of silliness. “People go to lots of fundraising events, and unfortunately most of them can be a drag,” Kramer said. “We just put the emphasis on a tremendous amount of fun and minimal amount of time raising money at the event.” In that way, the event also serves as a tool of community engagement, bringing together readers, journalists, and public officials. MinnPost gets to act as a kind of convener and help generate money for their work. MinnRoast would already be noteworthy because it brings leaders in Minnesota’s political parties together for a night where the talk is less partisan than normal. Kramer said it’s a fairly polarizing time in state and national politics and taking a break from that can be healthy. “I think it’s a good idea to break the tension for people that are fighting with each other or in adversarial relationships to have a night off to have fun and be reminded we’re in the same community,” he said. It’s worth noting that because of the annual show, MinnPost has been criticized for having a seemingly cozy relationship with people in power — or at the least, singing and dancing in silly costumes with them. MinnRoast will likely continue to grow. They expected only 200 people in the first year and saw 400. This year they’re close to selling out the theater where the event is held, which could mean a bigger venue in the future. More specifically, Kramer said MinnPost needs MinnRoast, as well as the other events the site hosts, to continue to grow as they try to adjust how the site makes money. In 2011, about 21 percent of MinnPost revenue came from foundations, a percentage Kramer knows will change whether MinnPost is proactive in finding new dollars or not. Kramer said one of their goals for 2012 is to increase advertising as well as donations through memberships. “Our goal is to keep building the other sources of revenue,” he said. |
Human-assisted reporting, mass intelligence, and mobile mobile mobile: What we learned at ISOJ Posted: 24 Apr 2012 06:57 AM PDT
You can check out our complete liveblog from the event; ISOJ has posted recaps of the symposium’s sessions; and Alf Hermida did his usual stellar job blogging everything in sight. But we also wanted to distill some of what got us thinking. A future of focused brandsWhat will newspapers and media companies look like in the future? Richard Gingras of Google News said news outlets will continue to move away from being general-interest publications and become more of a “stable of focused brands.” As alternative news channels like Twitter and Facebook continue to grow, and as more and more people get their information on-the-go, Gingras said news companies spend too much time worrying about their home pages and not enough about their article pages. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if there comes a time when a media company opts not to have a homepage at all. (Gingras’ comments echoed the themes in his TechRaking speech, which we shared on April 12.) Embrace human-assisted reportingBen Welsh, who mans the Data Desk at The Los Angeles Times, is a big proponent of using computing power to make reporters’ lives easier. That includes letting robots do some of the writing. (Here’s an example of the kind of stories that algorithms write for the Times.) He also gave one of the most succinct and passionate calls to action of the conference. You can watch his talk here. Appeal to “mass intelligence”The Dallas Morning News is shifting the focus of its reporting to appeal to a “mass intelligence” audience rather than a general one, according to publisher Jim Moroney: “When I say a mass intelligence audience I don’t mean elite,” but instead a readership that wants daily intelligence about the community that fits specific interests. (Moroney credits this Economist article for the term.) The Morning News is trying to differentiate itself in two ways: By shifting its production to fit devices like tablets, and by shifting its reporting with a plan they call “PICA,” which stands for Perspective, Interpretation, Context and Analysis. Take time to play in the news sandboxLouis Gump, vice president for CNN Mobile, said the company was slow to launch its iPhone and iPad apps because it wanted to figure out the right way to use its vast collection of video and images. CNN provides widely differentiated experiences; consider how different the iPad app looks from the iPhone app from the mobile site from the desktop site. CNN’s iPad app is among the top 10 free downloaded apps, with more than 19.5 million U.S. users in February 2012. Even with that success, Gump said CNN sees the iPad app and other mobile apps as a “sandbox” to test how the audience responds: “You can’t choose between mobile web and apps — like two wheels on a bike, you need both.” “Survival is success” in online news startupsRasmus Kleis Nielsen, who coauthored a report on the climate of online news startups in France, Germany, and Italy, found a culture similar to its U.S. equivalent. He said former reporters are trying to address perceived gaps in traditional media coverage but struggling to find and grow niche audiences, let alone generating enough revenue to thrive. For the companies he studied, the majority are not breaking even, and most operate at a loss. (Download the report, which goes deep on nine case studies, here.) The Carvin FactorIn analyzing the tweets of NPR’s Andy Carvin during the Arab Spring, University of British Columbia professor Alfred Hermida found that Carvin overwhelmingly quoted activists, bloggers, and alternative voices. While almost half of Carvin’s tweets and retweets came from people on the ground, they made up just about a quarter of his sources, with the rest being mainstream media and official institutions. In other words, his tweets served as a major amplifier of lesser-known sources. Hermida questioned how this sourcing structure could have influenced the framing and coverage of the events of the Arab Spring. Build something beautifulCreating a tablet app is not just a box for news organizations to check. Many of the panelists at ISOJ talked about resisting the urge to transfer web-based design principles to smartphones and tablets. Pedro Doria, digital platforms editor at O Globo (Brazil), showed us how the paper reintroduced the concept of an “evening edition,” providing an update to tablet readers at the end of the day. It’s rich with videos and photos — that what tablets are good at, Doria said — which keeps people in the app longer, and it features content specially designed for a lean-back evening mode of reading. Since the launch of the p.m. edition, Doria said the average time spent daily in the O Globo iPad app jumped from 26 minutes to a staggering 77 minutes. Don’t just build something beautifulISOJ’s all-star data panel made clear there’s a distinction between art and data that sometimes gets blurred at the expense of user experience. Pretty graphics must provide context and useful information to be journalism. Here’s an example that University of Miami lecturer Alberto Cairo gave of data that’s lovely but ultimately not useful. Execution is keyIt takes more than a killer idea to achieve greatness in the newsroom. As Moroney argued, “culture eats strategy,” and he acknowledged it as an area where his paper still had plenty of room for progress. Moroney said that means filling a newsroom with more Tiggers than Eeyores. That drew laughs and tons of retweets, although some said that wasn’t fair to Eeyore. Mobile will just keep getting biggerOkay, so we didn’t need a conference to tell us that. Just today we learned more than half of Facebook’s 901 million monthly active users uses it on a mobile device. The Dallas Morning News will shift more of its development resources to tablets, promising a groundbreaking app within a year. And while News Corp. was criticized for its single-platform strategy with The Daily, William Hurley — whose company helped design the iPad newspaper — said someone had to go first. Last year, The Daily was No. 3 on Apple’s list of top grossing apps, behind Smurfs’ Village and Angry Birds. Before diving into mobile, Hurley said, news organizations should consider their audience’s needs. Start with looking at access logs to see what devices people are most commonly using to visit a website. There’s a big world out thereConferences like ISOJ are a good reminder to sometimes-gloomy U.S. journalists that journalism is well, even thriving, in other markets. Globally, journalists face a slew of different challenges — fellow attendees from places like Argentina and the Philippines reminded us that FOIA protections aren’t universal. But it’s also an environment where international news companies with a bit of money to spare are doing interesting things — which means there’ll be interesting lessons for American companies to bring back from abroad. |
You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 |