In online-nonprofit-news terms, Charlottesville Tomorrow is an old timer. It’s been covering the growth and development around the Virginia city since 2005 — back when “twitter” was still a term confined to ornithological circles.

Born from executive director Brian Wheeler’s interest in local government (he serves as chairman of the county school board), the privately-funded Charlottesville Tomorrow isn’t just hyperlocal — it’s hypertargeted. No social calendars, no little-league scores, no general local news — just growth and development, covered at a level of detail no one else can match.

That focus helped Charlottesville Tomorrow build a positive reputation in the community and relationships with local media organizations, whose resources to cover those issues have shrunk. And one of those relationships recently became official: Charlottesville Tomorrow in August partnered with the local daily newspaper, The Daily Progress, to publish Charlottesville Tomorrow content in the Progress’ print and online editions.

Daily Progress managing editor McGregor McCance had Charlottesville Tomorrow on his radar for years. “It was a case where I was able to review them over a long period of time and personally get comfortable with what they were producing,” McCance said. “It wasn’t as if someone had hopped in the door here and said ‘hey, we’d like to start writing stories for the Daily Progress, what do you think?’”

This isn’t a nonprofit flirtation or limited trial run. Since early September, around 40 percent of Charlottesville Tomorrow’s articles have appeared in the Progress’ newspaper and website. No money has changed hands under the partnership, and both sides are fine with that. Wheeler sees it as an opportunity to get the Charlottesville Tomorrow brand in front of more people, while McGregor can integrate reputable growth and development articles into the Progress’ local coverage.

A casual relationship

The editorial workflow between Charlottesville Tomorrow and the Daily Progress is informal. Wheeler and McCance trade emails at the beginning of every week to arrange story coverage. Submitted articles are run through the Daily Progress’ copy desk, where editors are free to change headlines and tweak text. In some cases Charlottesville Tomorrow will use recommendations from Progress editors to conduct follow-up interviews and lock down certain points.

Finished stories appear in the Progress’ print and online editions, as well as on Charlottesville Tomorrow’s website. Online stories on both sites are structurally similar, but they differ: Compare the link-heavy approach of Charlottesville Tomorrow, with meeting transcripts and audio, to the barebones Daily Progress approach.

Both sides are pleased with the partnership thus far. Wheeler and his staff have made small adaptations, most notably in schedule coordination, but their output and processes remain largely the same as before the agreement. McCance said Daily Progress reporters whose beats overlap with Charlottesville Tomorrow seem enthusiastic about the partnership because it reduces coverage gaps. At this point, issues around heavy edits and rewrites are theoretical, and neither Wheeler nor McCance is too worked up about how they might play out.

McCance has a sense that the Charlottesville Tomorrow partnership may free up Progress reporters to pursue deeper stories, but he stressed that the new content won’t replicate the paper’s full-newsroom glory days. “Let’s face it,” he said, “even with their help, which is terrific, we’re still a thinly staffed paper trying to chase down stories instead of doing feature coverage all the time. It’s still not easy. It’s still extremely difficult.”

Three events close the deal

Wheeler and McCance noted separately that overlapping events created an atmosphere conducive to the Charlottesville Tomorrow/Daily Progress partnership. These same events may not be directly duplicative, but recognizing them could yield useful variations in other markets (nonprofits and mainstream outlets take note).

The events fell into three buckets:

— Over its four years of publishing, Charlottesville Tomorrow earned the respect of the community and, by extension, McCance and his publisher. This is the one area nonprofits may be able to control: Build a reputation by focusing on long-term growth and service. The cliche “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” also has the added benefit of moderating an organization’s burn rate.

— The extended decline of the newspaper business eroded the Daily Progress’ staff, making it difficult to adequately cover local government and related issues. This, as we all know, is happening everywhere, and that begs the question: If a respected local nonprofit can supplement newspaper coverage through a mutually beneficial relationship, why not give it a shot? A stubborn competitive instinct isn’t always an asset.

— The economic uproar of the last year made it easier to sell experimental ideas. Newsroom staffers who want to take a risk, and can show even a modicum of projected uptick on the bottom line, could use the turmoil to get sign-off on new ideas.

McCance offered a straightforward assessment of these interlocking elements: “The question is, if only one of those tracks had occurred over time, would we be doing this partnership? I don’t know. Probably not. Let’s be frank about it, we’re not paying them [Charlottesville Tomorrow] any money for the content. And I think their content is good. So for a newspaper that’s seen its newsroom staffing shrink by about 40 percent over the last four years, that’s not a bad option for us.”

Best practices from, and inspired by, Charlottesville Tomorrow

Given Charlottesville Tomorrow’s track record, and the growing interest in the nonprofit option, I asked Wheeler to share tips that could help similar organizations. Wheeler offered a few (see below), but he also credited the continued guidance he receives from the Charlottesville Tomorrow board. So consider this tip 1A: assemble a board of knowledgeable community members and listen carefully.

Wheeler’s other tips:

— Mind the books. As executive director, Wheeler divides his time between administration, fundraising and creating content. Nonprofits need to file tax returns and monitor income, just like for-profit companies, so Wheeler recommends allocating money for a bookkeeper and assigning someone — likely the person at the top of the org chart — to also manage the outreach and fundraising components.

— Give yourself time. Raise enough money upfront to get into a consistent workflow. Fundraising — and a mandate from his board — allowed Wheeler to launch Charlottesville Tomorrow with a two-year gameplan. This gave him time to get the editorial structure in place and build a reputation within the community.

— Understand the needs of your market. The city of Charlottesville factored heavily in Charlottesville Tomorrow’s development. “There’s a real passion about this community and the quality of life,” Wheeler said. “This group of people [the board] said, ‘we really want to be a part of something that protects that’.” A similar nonprofit would struggle to take hold in a dispersed community with few common interests.

And here’s a final bit of analysis derived from my conversation with Wheeler:

— The advantage of objectivity. Debating the pros and cons of a nonprofit news outlet requires tracking its coverage over an extended period of time. It’s like an NFL draft class. You can’t judge specific selections until years later when the swirl of talent, injuries, and opportunities settles into its natural state. What’s interesting about Charlottesville Tomorrow is that it has a track record. It can be judged. The Daily Progress, in perhaps the most overt thumbs-up a newspaper can offer, opened its print and online platforms to a nonprofit outsider.

Here’s the thing, though: Charlottesville Tomorrow has an agenda. At least one defined by its choice of topic — it focuses entirely on growth and development issues. Clearly, Wheeler cares about the topic.

But the commingling of agenda and objectivity is where Charlottesville Tomorrow is most instructive, because the organization is balancing that agenda against its hardwired objectivity. For example: The Charlottesville Tomorrow board is intentionally made up of Republicans, Democrats and independents. Funding comes from benefactors whose interests are sprinkled across the political spectrum. The content itself, which Wheeler describes as “gavel to gavel, C-SPAN style,” is delivered in a straightforward, just the facts sort of way.

Photo by Brian Wheeler used under a Creative Commons license.

Here’s the third and final part of my interview with Jesse Thorn, host of public radio’s The Sound of Young America. (Here’s my intro post, Part 1, and Part 2.)

In this excerpt we talk about MaxFunCon, his upcoming weekend convention of fans of his radio show and a mix of former guests and other interesting folks. It sold out in a matter of days.

I think this is actually a big potential area for some media operations; while the Internet has reduced people’s willingness to pay for content, it’s terrific at forging a connection with between the producers and consumers of that content. And, in person, people are a lot more willing to pay for some iteration of that experience.

Think of the music business: Selling the actual music to listeners is much more problematic than it used to be, but many musicians are doing just fine by refocusing their energies more on touring, house parties, personalization, and other ideas that play off the audience’s connection.

Jesse also talks a bit about an interview John Hodgman gave to Wired last year (I wrote about it at the time) that played off that issue of small and passionate audiences vs. big and unengaged ones. I wish I could tattoo what Jesse says about that backwards on the foreheads of news execs, so they’d see it every morning in the mirror.

You can listen to the interview by pressing play in the audio player below, or by downloading the MP3 directly here.

[See post to listen to audio]

There’s also a full transcript below. Also, there’s a little bonus coverage at the end. Oh, and a little swearing.

Josh: You announced some months ago that you were having — I forget the exact terminology you used, but what sort of is a weekend Maximum Fun/Sound of Young America experience, Maximum Fun Con.

Jesse: I like to compare if to the Wayman Tisdale smooth-jazz cruise.

Josh: Yes, exactly! I’ve always associated you with Wayman Tisdale and I’ve never quite understood why. I thought it was your basketball career.

Jesse: You thought it was because I was so good at boxing out.

Josh: That’s right! Exactly. That’s your real strength as a host. Tell me a little bit about what that is, what the idea and the impetus was and how — it hasn’t happened yet, but how the sales and how the build-up has gone so far.

Jesse: There were sort of a couple of imputuses behind it. One was that I had a wedding and my aunt and uncle didn’t go because they had already booked a trip on the Dave Koz smooth-jazz cruise. There are multiple smooth-jazz cruises, if you’re wondering. That kind of annoyed me, but then I thought: “Man, I should have a sweet cruise.”

Then I had gone to this conference that happened to be in Seattle at the same time as or — I was at Bumbershoot in Seattle, and it was at the same time as this thing called PAX, which is the Penny Arcade Expo. It is a video game conference that is both the fan conference for video games and the industry conference for video games.

And it’s run by these guys who make a web comic about video games. It’s a very popular web comic — but they also get 50,000 people coming to this conference that they put on.

And it was originally like: “Hey, our web comic is kind of about video games, we like video games — let’s have a video game weekend.” And then when another conference went out of business, it became the video game industry conference, and I’m sure it’s how they make all their money and etc., etc.

So I thought: “Man, I wonder if I could do something like that.” Because there isn’t anything like that for the kind of stuff that I’m interested in, like comedy and certain kinds of nerd stuff that aren’t comic books or sci-fi. And so I thought: “Well, maybe I’ll have a con, like a Comic-Con.” Because I had gone to Comic-Con and frankly thought it was really smelly. So I was not into going back. I just didn’t want to wait in line for four hours to see a panel on, I don’t even know, Y: The Last Man, or something like that.

And so I thought: “Maybe I could put on a con.” So I looked into putting on cons, and it was just more complicated and annoying than I wanted to get involved with, frankly. And really expensive — I couldn’t figure out how to make it cool enough to be worth the money for people.

So then I was like: “Well, what’s another alternate thing?” I was on a website for UCLA because we were thinking about holding this conference that we were thinking about putting together at UCLA. And they have this retreat center in the mountains east of Los Angeles, and it’s only for educational events. Which — I’m a public radio show, so I get to qualify as an education event.

It’s sort of like an ecosystem. They set it up so they have staff there that handles everything. All you have to pay is a flat fee per person. I thought: “You know what? I bet I could set up like the coolest sort of theme-cruise-in-a-summer-camp context.” And I could bring together all these cool people, and I bet I could get enough people to come that it would pay for people that I like and are my friends that I know through the show or elsewhere to come and present whatever cool thing it is that they do.

And so I was like, “Do I think I could do this?” So I got in touch with a few friends, like John Hodgman, who’s a contributor on The Daily Show, and his best pal and one of my favorite dudes, Jonathan Coulton, who is a very funny singer/songwriter. And some comedians I know. And I was like: “Hey, would you guys be interested in coming to the woods for a weekend and having a thing for like a hundred people?” And they were all like, “Yeah! That sounds fun!”

And so I started making spreadsheets and stuff. And eventually what ended up happening is, I booked all these people that I thought were amazing, and then I put tickets on sale. I charged people the amount of money that it would cost to go to a cool all-inclusive resort, or something like that. So it’s sort of like a cool vacation thing. We sold all the tickets right away. Like, in two weeks — a week and a half.

And I was like, “Oh, yeah! This is f**kin’ great!” Like, all my favorite things in this place. All these people who really love them and want to meet each other and hang out. And, you know, drink — there’s this guy called Dr. Cocktail who’s going to be there. He is a cocktail historian. And he is making this punch that was originally created for the Columbian Exposition in, I guess it would be what, 1892? And so we’re going to drink huge volumes of Columbian Exposition punch, which is probably made with some like bitter green liqueur or something like that. And…

Josh: And the blood of the colonies, or something as well.

Jesse: Yeah, exactly. And have a really great time. And this feels like such a — like I was so surprised when I sold all the tickets to it. Like, I didn’t have any idea what it was going to be, you know? I had to put the conference deposits on credit cards. I only had one credit card, so I got a bunch of new credit cards with, like, one year of no interest. And I just put all the whole — I put $20,000 on credit cards. And luckily I had very good credit going in. I don’t think I do anymore.

And it really worked out. And I was like, “Oh! Really, what I’m offering people is this thing that they really care about. And only a couple hundred people have to really care about it in order to make it completely financially viable. Like, if they really actually care about it. And that’s basically the thing that I’m selling. You know, Hodgman was in — there was this article in Wired. They interviewed John Hodgman about his previous career as a literary agent. And what’s this woman — who was the woman who was the star of Grace Under Fire?

Josh: Brett Butler.

Jesse: Brett Butler.

Josh: I remember that interview, yeah.

Jesse: Yeah, so he was the literary agent and he wrote a letter to Bruce Campbell because he loved the Evil Dead so much. And said, “Hey, you should write a book. Can I be your literary agent?” And when I say that he was a literary agent, I believe he was working as a receptionist at a literary agency.

So he wrote a letter to his hero Bruce Campbell. And Bruce Campbell said yes and they went out and pitched it all around town and it was the same time as Brett Butler was pitching his — was pitching her thing. (In my mind for a second Brett Butler turned into the former San Francisco Giants center fielder Brett Butler.)

Josh: Right.

Jesse: So Brett Butler was pitching her thing. And she got like a quadrillion-dollar advance because two million people watch her on TV every week. Bruce Campbell got like a $3,000 advance because no one in publishing knew who he was. But Bruce Campbell has, you know, 30,000 people that live and die for Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead and The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr.

And Brett Butler, even though millions of people watch her every week, none of them really give a s**t. You know — it’s just something that they watch. Every time something like this happens, I realize the extent to which the media economy is moving towards people who give a s**t over people who are willing to tolerate something. You know, it’s no longer something that’s just good enough so people don’t change the channel — now it’s something that people pick.

Josh: In the news business there’s been this big blow up the last month or so you may have seen the idea of micropayments, and the idea that what we need to do is to get everybody to pay a fraction of a penny to read every news article and therefore will recreate this mass audience and recreate this business model. What I always want to say is: The answer is not micropayments, it’s macropayments. It’s finding a few people who love you so much that they are willing to spend a significant amount of money. They feel that connection and they’re willing to express it in dollar terms. You create something for them to have.

Jesse: I talked to Doc Searls a little bit about sort of — he hates micropayments. He has a sort of pseudo-micropayments. The basic idea is you would basically budget a certain amount of money for supporting media that you like. Then it would sort of invisibly track what media you consume and apportion the money on that basis. And — if it happened, if somehow something happened to achieve critical mass like that — then great, that’s fine by me. But I’m not going to put any effort into it.! You know what I mean? Like I’ll take your money. But right now what I’m working on is trying to get people to like my thing enough that they’ll give me $2, $5, $10, or $20 a month.

Josh: Yeah. And how many people do that?

Jesse: Hundreds.

Josh: Hundreds?

Jesse: Hundreds. I think it’s maybe five percent of my total listenership.

Josh: That’s not bad.

Jesse: That’s not bad at all. I’m happy with it. I can always have more, and I was really surprised at how many I added with my last pledge drive last year. You realize real quick, when you’re doing something listener supported, why public radio stations have pledge drives. It’s because they really, really work. And hopefully, my next one will be as pleasantly surprising. But it’s kind of humming along.

Josh: Well, I’ve got to say, I’m a fan of the show. I think you do great work and I think you’re a really interesting model for where I think a lot of our businesses are going. So thanks for talking with me. I appreciate it.

BONUS COVERAGE:

Jesse: Do I get to join in the Harvard social clubs? I guess what I’m trying to ask is, having done this interview, does that gain me access into any wood-paneled secret rooms?

Josh: Absolutely!

Jesse: Yes!

Josh: There’s a library card that you’re issued, but it’s actually not a library card.

Jesse: Oh f**k yeah!

Josh: Yeah, so you get that, and there’s a retina scan. It’s all upgraded to the latest technology.

Jesse: Oh my God! That sounds fantastic! I can’t wait to throw away this old pipe and get a new Harvard pipe!

Josh: That’s right! We actually only sell them in pairs with cardigans now.

Jesse: I went to the University of California at Santa Cruz, so needless to say, my old pipe is made of artisanal blown glass.

Josh: Is that the banana slug campus?

Jesse: Yeah, you got it!

Josh: Yeah. So I always confuse them and the Anteaters at Irvine!

Jesse: What you’re really looking at either way is I’m just happy I got into a UC.

Josh: Didn’t get stuck with Cal State.

Jesse: Yeah, exactly.

As promised yesterday, here’s Part 1 of my interview with Jesse Thorn, the host of public radio’s The Sound of Young America. (Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say “The Sound of Young America podcast,” given what Jesse says below about his interactions with both the public radio mainstream and his devoted core audience online.) Here we talk about the show’s philosophy, how his audiences guide his choices, and how he supports himself. Among the topics we cover:

— How having a show on dozens of public radio stations can still only generate about $10,000 a year;
— How showing your mistakes can build listener loyalty;
— How a truly dedicated audience can turn into a business model; and
— How an NPR voice can get you a beautiful wife.

You can listen to it by pressing play in the audio player below, or by downloading the MP3 directly here.

[See post to listen to audio]

There’s also a full transcript below.

Josh: For folks who might be unfamiliar with your show, how would you describe The Sound of Young America?

Jesse: Well, the log line is a public show about things that are awesome. So basically if you imagine Fresh Air, and then take out all of the boring parts, and…no, there are no boring parts on Fresh Air, which is one of the best radio shows in the world. But if you take out all the parts about, like, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and then put in interviews with rappers and comedians and rock and roll guys — that’s pretty much The Sound of Young America.

Also, you should maybe remove like, maybe 25 percent of that kind of weird public-radio dispassionate disconnection in interviews. Like, maybe I might actually engage my guests a little bit personally.

Josh: Right.

Jesse: Or make a joke. So, yeah, it’s sort of like Fresh Air, 25 percent less dispassionate disconnection, a lot more rappers, significantly more comedians, and some rock and roll guys.

Josh: I imagine that the unique set up of your show gives you complete control over your guest list. It seems that you tend to have people who you feel a bit more of a passionate appreciation for than for a show that might be also programmed based on what’s the news of the day or what is — who’s on book tour or having to connect with the culture at large. Yours seems more self-directed.

Jesse: Yeah, I mean, part of that is — I think you’re very correct in making that assertion. Part of it is that outside of my intern Brian, who is sitting behind me right right now putting t-shirts in mailers, it’s pretty much a one-man operation and has been for quite some time.

And it’s a very personal program. I think the strength of The Sound of Young America is my personal editorial perspective. So I pick the guests that come on the program, based on my own personal taste, interest, and cultural knowledge. Sort of in the same way that Flavor Pill tells you what party to go to on Friday night, or what club night is the hot club night that night. I try to point you towards what’s a cool thing.

That’s largely just because I did the show basically for free for the first five years or so and still barely make anything. When you’re doing that, it’s a lot easier to get yourself excited about working for free, interviewing someone that’s like totally your hero or you think is totally awesome, than it is to get yourself geared up to interview someone for free about civic responsibility or something like that.

Josh: Right. I’m curious how you feel that approach changes the connection that your audience has with the show. In writing endeavors and blogging and other things, I think when people can see an identifiable personality behind a journalist writing — as opposed to the voiceless newspaper style — that they feel a stronger connection, and they feel a more of devotion to the show. Even if that personality that the writer is having might not complete the one-to-one match up with the readers, just as your sensibility might not completely match up with your audience’s. Does it increase that connection?

Jesse: Undoubtedly. It’s a self-conscious choice. When you’re doing something that’s supported by donations — you know, my livelihood is completely dependent upon people feeling, like, more than a utilitarian connection to what I’m doing. You know, if people — I think as many people as listen to like Morning Edition or something like that, or watch Dateline — is that a show? Dateline NBC?

Josh: Yes. That’s the predator show, yeah.

Jesse: Yeah, you know — they have enough connection to it to watch it, but whether they would have enough connection to it to willingly donate money to support it is an open question. So when you’re doing something that’s on the kind of scale that I’m doing it and so on, having that sort of connection — it’s why I’m on Twitter and I participate on my forums and I blog. And I do another show called Jordan Jesse Go!, which is much more sort of personally oriented.

I was just talking with somebody yesterday. I was talking with the comedian Todd Glass, who does a podcast called Comedy and Everything Else. He’s a really brilliant comedian, but when he started this podcast it was his first outing in this kind of broadcasting mode. He was saying: What do you do with your really old episodes? Do you bury them? Did it take you a long time to figure out what you were doing? And I said: Yes, frankly it did take me a long time to figure out what I was doing. But we actually podcast our old episodes, at least the ones that we have recordings of, from when we were in college seven years ago just because some of our big fans really like that and they’re like really into seeing how the show developed and stuff. So even though it’s a little bit embarrassing, anything that I can do to make a more profound connection with the audience is — I kind of see that as being my job. That’s what pays my bills.

Josh: It’s difficult to think of a newspaper city-hall reporter inspiring that kind of completist approach — like, “I want to get his early EP when he didn’t know what he was doing, that early city council meeting he covered where he screwed up the mayor’s name.”

Jesse: Yeah, but you know there are people like that. In San Francisco, there are a couple of city columnists, Matier and Ross, who would only mean something to San Franciscans, but they’ve been writing the Chronicle for many years and they also do several other multi-media endeavors on radio and TV in the Bay area. They have a very strong editorial voice, even though they’re basically doing a local news scoops dot-dot-dot column. But you know, it’s not completely incompatible.

Josh: Yeah. So tell me about your history of interactions with the public radio mainstream. Your show is on a couple dozen radio stations. It seemed from your list that they all happened to be in Vermont for some reason. But when you started this show back in college and you thought, okay, this might be something I want to do for a living — how has your dance with public radio been?

Jesse: Well, you know, I started the show before the Internet was a viable way to transmit rich media, for the most part. It was like 2000 when I started the show, so — you know, I guess I could have done something in like Shockwave or something like that. But basically, my idea when I started the show was it was really cool that you could have your own radio show! And sort of quickly became: Well, maybe someday I could have my own radio show professionally. Because of the dire landscape of commercial radio, I pretty much keyed in on public radio early on.

So the history of the show is sort of like — it started as my college radio show with my buddies Jordan [Morris] and Gene [O'Neill], and we started doing a lot of comedy and original stuff, realized that was too much work, so we started including a lot of interviews which are a much easier way to fill time when you’re a full-time student and you have to program an hour a week.

So we did that for a long time. Eventually Jordan and Gene graduated, I started doing the show by myself and it really became an interview show then, because I was terrified of trying to host a call-in talk show, which is a very challenging endeavor.

So then after I graduated, I continued to do the show at the same college radio station I had done it before. I was driving back and forth between San Francisco where I was living and Santa Cruz where I went to college, which was like an hour and a half drive.

About three and a half years ago, or something like that, I heard from the NPR station in Santa Cruz, KUSP — apparently there was somebody on their board who listened to the college radio station sometimes and had heard my show. He told the program director, hey, there’s this really cool show on the college radio station — maybe you should think about bringing it into your schedule.

And right around that same time which was sort of the very beginning of podcasting, I started podcasting. Basically the reason I started podcasting was I figured if 80 people would listen to me, that seemed worth a couple of hours of work. It wasn’t that much work to make it into a podcast from already being a radio show. Then eventually Apple launched podcasting support in iTunes, and my audience went from 200ish to 2,000ish and then it really seemed worth it to do a podcast.

I kind of went along, deedle, deedle, doo, and eventually Public Radio International contacted me. At that point, I had a couple of affiliates, but they were like tiny college radio stations that I had contacted myself and offered the show for free. PRI contacted me because public radio was trying to have more sort of younger-person-oriented shows. We did a big dance for a really long time around it and eventually they picked up the show, right around the time that WNYC in New York picked up my show for a trial run. And after PRI picked up my show, WNYC decided to make my show permanent and I’ve added affiliates along the way.

Public radio operates like public television, on a very locally controlled basis. So, you really have to convince one program director at a time. It’s been quite a challenge. The reason I have so many stations in Vermont is because Vermont Public Radio added me. I just added a bunch of stations in New Jersey because New Jersey Public Radio just added me.

It’s really station-to-station baseball, trying to get stations to pick up your…wow, that was a really complicated mixed metaphor, radio stations, station-to-station baseball. It’s a long row to hoe, getting stations to pick up the show.

So, at this point, to be frank — I go back and forth. But at this point, I’ve almost checked out of trying to get radio stations to pick up my show. Just at this moment — this may be different tomorrow, or next week, but at this point, I’m kind of feeling like if they do, they do, and if they don’t, they don’t.

Frankly, most of my income comes from other sources besides public radio. Even if you are on 20 or 30 public radio stations, you don’t get a lot of money out of them. So, maybe my time is better spent making my show better than it is convincing a 58-year-old guy in triple-pleated khakis that my show about interviewing comedians and what not is worth their airtime.

Josh: Not to mention rappers. The rappers are probably the scariest part.

Jesse: Yes, the rappers are a big one. Frankly, rappers are so hard to get to show up. As much as I love hip hop — it’s my favorite kind of music, I love it, I always have loved it — I don’t have as many rappers on the show as I’d like to.

Josh: So, do you have a read on what percentage of your audience is listening through the podcast versus through radio?

Jesse: You know, I am on a couple of big public radio stations, God bless them. WNYC in New York and WHYY in Philadelphia, which are two of the biggest public radio stations in the country. I’m also on some mid-sized public radio — I’m in some mid-sized markets on public radio stations as well, like KUSP in Santa Cruz — the Monterey Bay area is actually a pretty big market, a couple of million people. I’m in Salt Lake City and that kind of thing. New Jersey’s no joke either.

Just by virtue of being on those stations, I think my audience is a lot bigger on the radio than it is on the podcast, frankly. I think it’s probably 75-80 percent on the radio. A lot of public radio stations run 12 repeats of Garrison Keillor every weekend. And if you throw up a repeat of just about anything on WNYC, and you have a reasonable time slot, 30,000 people are going to listen.

Josh: Yes. How many podcasts subscribers or listeners do you have?

Jesse: For The Sound of Young America, we’re hovering around a quarter-million downloads a month, which is obviously spread out over this big archive that we have. The downloads of a given show depends on the show, obviously, but if you discount the people who download on a one-time basis, sort of as best as you can, I’d guess that the actual subscriber base — like the people who are not only subscribed, but also download and check in on their podcasts a couple of times a week, and download a new show every time there is one — 12,000, 13,000, something like that right now.

Josh: I subscribe just to the RSS feed of your blog, and play things when you post them there. I don’t subscribe to the podcasts in iTunes or anything. It’s difficult to keep track of the various ways of getting to your stuff.

Jesse: The vast majority are from iTunes — about 95 percent of my podcast downloads are from iTunes. And I think it’s about 80 percent of my total downloads are from the podcasts rather then from the web. People don’t really like listening to audio on the web, frankly. So, the podcast is the most convenient way for people to listen, for the most part.

Josh: I started hearing about your show on MetaFilter, and other similar sorts of blogs a few years ago, and the conception I have of your show is as a podcast — as opposed to as a radio show, just because that’s the way that I approached it. Is your self-conception one or the other? Do you think of yourself primarily as a podcaster, as a radio host?

Jesse: It depends on the context. I mean I definitely think of myself as a podcaster much more than any other radio host I know. Whether I think of myself exclusively as a podcaster — no, I mean, I try and embody sort of the positive values of being on the radio, and especially public radio, which is a sort of, you know — a kind of high-mindedness or aspiration to quality and dedication to making something really good that is not always reflected in the world of podcasting, frankly. I mean, it is sometimes, often, but not always.

But on the other hand, if something comes down to it and I have to decide — if there was ever a sort of Sophie’s Choice, radio host or podcaster, I guess I would probably end up picking podcaster, just because, you know, that audience is my audience — you know what I mean? Those people are there to listen to my show. It’s not just somebody who happens to be going to pick up their kids and they always have their radio tuned to the public radio station. Those are people — the people who listen to my podcast are people who chose my show, and they — that audience is what sustains me financially, and that audience is — they’re the ones who send me emails and post on my forums and all that kind of stuff. So, ultimately if I had to pick it would probably, frankly, be podcaster.

Josh: I guess we’ll have to see what you put on your tax form every year.

Jesse: Well at parties I definitely tell people public radio host, because I do not want to get involved in explaining what a podcast is at parties.

Josh: Yeah, that’s how you get the action at the parties. You start saying you’re a public radio host.

Jesse: Hey, you know Andy Bowers, long-time NPR correspondent — he was the Washington correspondent, the Moscow correspondent for a really long time. Now he works for Slate. He’s a friend of mine and I found out that he met his wife — who is quite beautiful, by the way — at a party where she recognized his voice from NPR. So it can happen.

Josh: Yes. Gentlemen out there, invest in voice training.

Jesse: You got it!

Josh: Let’s talk about the financial end of things to the degree you feel comfortable doing that.

Jesse: Sure.

Josh: You mentioned the donations that you get from your audience. Is that the majority of the money you generate from the show?

Jesse: I’m trying to think if it’s literally the majority. I think it’s — I think it is. I think it’s a little more than half. I’m sort of doing the math off the top of my head right now. But yeah, it’s a little more than half, and about a quarter comes from underwriting — which is actually MetaFilter you mentioned. He, MetaFilter supports the show financially too. And then sort of like a smaller portion — let’s call it — comes from public radio stations. I think — I did my taxes recently. I think the amount I got from public radio stations was — I don’t think there’s any reason I’m not allowed to say this — it was like $10,000 dollars last year.

Josh: Wow, for being on a couple dozen radio stations?

Jesse: Yeah, right! But you know, what’s amazing about it is if I wasn’t with PRI, I wouldn’t be able to get anything. When WNYC ran my show before I was with PRI, they gave me some money, but only out of the kindness of their hearts, because they were trying to look out for me. Generally speaking, if you’re not with PRI, American Public Media, or NPR, you don’t get anything for your public radio show from stations.

Josh: Now we’re going to talk about MaxFunCon a little bit later, but have you thought any about expanding your brand into other products or projects? I mean, is there a book to come that could come out of the show, or is there something else that might make sense?

Jesse: Yeah, well, I made a television pilot this past year and was really happy with it. It didn’t end up going, basically because the network that I made it for changed the structure of their programming right before we finished, in such a way that the structure that we had used for the pilot was no longer compatible with what they were doing. But that was a really fun thing to do.

Whether I’ll write a book, I get a lot of solicitations from publishers and publishing agents. Writing a book is really complicated and hard, and at this particular second, I don’t know if I have a really compelling book to write. And I wouldn’t want to write a book that was lousy just to kind of cash in on my very very marginal marginal marginal fame. But that’s always a possibility.

I mean, there’s lots of places where — there’s lots of opportunities that are starting to come up, you know. I’ve been meeting with agents and managers lately. I think I’m gonna get me one of them. You know, people got those.

You know, the other day a listener, who’s also a famous public radio producer, dropped me a line and said: Hey, would you be interested in being the voice of X in X major major major major brand for a national radio campaign my friend is producing? I said yes, and it didn’t end up working out at the last minute, but — you know, if I had gotten it, it would have been roughly two days of work and would have represented 15 or 20 percent of my net income for the year. So, you know, there’s opportunities.

Photo by Nicole Lee used under a Creative Commons license.

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.

MinnPost has had early support from major donors and foundations, and we believe that serious journalism is a community asset, not just a consumer good, which is why we’re nonprofit. But we are focused on breaking even by 2011, or at the latest 2012, without relying on foundation support to keep the lights on.

Why? Because (a) we think it’s possible to reach break-even; and (b) we think it’s desirable, since foundations already have so many causes to support, and it’s questionable whether they have the capacity to support journalism on the expansive scale that may be needed to replace what’s being lost, especially regionally, in the for-profit industry.

We can argue the merits and demerits of each approach and, in our age of digital experimentation, it seems wise to let every flower bloom. But it’s important to understand MinnPost’s approach, to make sense of my dispatch from the frontlines.

Traffic

We draw our MinnPost members — more on how people become one later — from among our readers, and because the inventory we have to sell to advertisers is our page views, traffic to our web site, MinnPost.com, is critical to our financial success.

Google Analytics tells us exactly how many times each item we publish gets read. This has a powerful effect. It makes us want to do more of what gets read, and less of what doesn’t, while remaining true to our mission.

What does this mean? A glance at MinnPost lets a visitor know that it’s for serious newsreaders. Our brochure proudly declares, “NO Britney. NO Paris. NO Lindsay.” MinnPost is not a place to visit for stories about entertainment celebrities, or sex, crime, and advice for the lovelorn — even though we know that such content would bulk up our page views.

Even for our serious audience, we’ve learned that $600 spent on one long story produces a lot less traffic than $600 spent generating six to 12 shorter items. We still do longer stories every day, including many that combine in-depth reporting and analysis with personal voice.

But a careful reader of our site over the past year will note that we have a great many more short, quick hits, published all day long. So while we are spending less on news today than a year ago, our traffic has more than doubled during that time. On a three-month rolling average, we now have more than 200,000 unique monthly visitors and more than 700,000 page views — and in mid-February we enjoyed our first 31-day period with more than one million page views.

We are confident we can keep this number growing and keep quality high. Even short-form work can involve outstanding reporting and analysis — for evidence, check out David Brauer’s Braublog any day. But it does mean that we do a lot fewer ambitious investigative reports than I would like us to publish.

In 1974, I copyedited a Newsday series called “The Heroin Trail,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. I’ll bet Newsday spent more money on that project (adjusted to today’s dollars) than MinnPost’s entire news budget in its first year. Our most ambitious MinnPost investigation, financed by a Watchdog Journalism fund we created, was a series on the resegregation of Twin Cities-area public schools, and it cost less than $15,000, fully loaded. Another major project was a series on the intimidating reign of our former state attorney general. Its author, Eric Black, acknowledged that it made him antsy to give up daily posting for weeks while he worked on it.

News staffing

MinnPost is a professional journalism site. It has always been part of our mission to support professional journalism and pay for it. But how we do so has changed substantially since we launched.

At the outset, our editors were on staff, and all our writers were freelance, paid by the piece. Some critics wondered whether it was possible to publish a five-day-a-week news site with all freelance reporters and writers. Our editors wondered, too. The nightmare question was, “What if one morning all the writers say they’re not available today because they have other assignments, or they want to play golf?”

During 2008, we added one full-time writer, then a second, reducing the freelance budget accordingly. Later still, we put four of our best reporters on full weekly retainers and several more on part-time retainers—again reducing the budget for paying by the piece. In January, we added a full-time Washington correspondent, an unusual step when so many bureaus are shrinking or dissolving. The new system works much better. The critics were right.

Paying for news

Like almost all news on the web, MinnPost content is free to all, but we do ask our readers to become members, which entails making an annual donation. This is a variation on the model that public radio and public television use, but minus the intrusive pledge weeks.

The good news is that more than 1,250 people have signed on as members during the first 15 months, with donations ranging from $10 a year to $20,000. On our membership list, you can see that the two most popular categories are Cub Reporter ($50–$99) and Night Police Reporter ($100–$249).

Yet we know that many thousands of our regular readers are not donating. Even some who have told us how much they like what we do are not yet donating. To reach break-even, we probably will need 5,000 donors by 2012. And we need to achieve these results without expensive incentives, like mugs or CDs, and without paying a large membership-support staff. (Ideas are welcome.)

We regularly ask ourselves whether we could charge for premium content on our site. With such a strong expectation out there that the Internet will be free, we have not yet come up with a viable idea. (Again, your ideas are welcome.)

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.

Our strategy is based on providing advertisers a high-quality environment and excellent service and asking them to pay accordingly. For example, we don’t allow intrusive advertising that interferes with the visitor’s reading experience. We also help our advertisers create effective banners and landing pages.

In one respect, this is working. Our advertisers pay $15 or more per thousand impressions, or appearances, of their ad, and we have been able to hold this rate in these tough times — though we have increased volume discounts, and we now target local advertisers’ ads to local readers only, thereby increasing their value. Meanwhile, our local competitors often offer our customers half that rate, and national networks like Google Ads offer to sell ads onto our site for a tenth of what we charge or less.

But the number of advertisers willing to pay for that quality is still too small. This much I know: If the rate for locally sold advertising drops to $1, or even $5, only publishers with truly gigantic global traffic will survive on ad revenues.

Increasingly, the pitch we’re making to advertisers is to sponsor part of the site, rather than just buy banner ad flights. This is working well. In the past two months, we’ve sold two sponsorships: One for the Daily Glean, a midmorning roundup summarizing and linking to the best of what’s in the other local media, written with attitude, and one for Community Voices, our daily op-ed feature. These opportunities give sponsors more exposure than they would get with regular banner ads and a stronger connection to our core mission.

Foundations have provided critically important funding to MinnPost. The Knight Foundation has been especially generous, but they told us from the outset that they wanted us to find local foundation support, too. We now have two major Minnesota foundations, the Blandin Foundation and The Minneapolis Foundation, supporting us with sizeable grants as well, along with smaller grants from a few corporate foundations. But our challenge, confronted by all nonprofit enterprises, not just those in journalism, is that we need unrestricted operating funds to sustain us until we fully develop our operational revenues—and many foundations prefer to fund a specific new activity. Right now, without the help of these foundations, we could not survive, and we are working to add additional ones, both national and local.

Finding our place on the web

When we launched, and occasionally since, some observers have predicted our demise because we’re a bunch of old newspaper people who don’t “get the Internet.” In response I readily admit that our primary interest is sustaining high-quality journalism, not exploiting what the Internet makes possible. But that doesn’t mean that we have not been open to learning all we can about how best to use the medium to achieve our goal.

Some things that the web makes possible might not help us get there. For example, take a look at the unfettered comments that populate so many web sites. From day one, MinnPost has accepted — and encouraged — comments on all our articles, but we have insisted on civility and set two hurdles in place to ensure it.

Those who want to leave a comment must register, and their full real names are attached to their comments.

Comments are prescreened by volunteer moderators and rejected not only for foul or hateful language but also for things like name-calling.

We took plenty of heat from web-savvy readers for this decision. But as readers have watched the quality of comment on respected sites that don’t require real names, many are now grateful for our approach. Recently we published our 7,000th comment. Some sites with looser standards appear to be reconsidering their no-holds-barred policies.

On the other hand, the web makes possible the convergence of the written word and video, and in this realm we are playing and learning. We have discovered, for example, that high-quality documentary video raises the same challenge as investigative reporting: high cost for the traffic generated. But rougher, newsier video works great.

Interactivity and social media have been more difficult for us to figure out for our site and audience, so we’re not as far along as I’d like on crowdsourcing stories, for example. But we are now tapping into a great community for getting tips, spreading the word about our work, and other forms of community building such as Twitter. Our Twitter account was launched in June with a couple of dozen followers and, eight months later, we have more than 1,300.

Guiding those who follow

I receive calls almost every week from people in this country and around the world seeking my advice about starting a regional web site. My colleagues who have started sites in San Diego, Chicago, New Haven, and St. Louis get these calls, too, which is one of the reasons we’re exploring starting a consortium of nonprofit regional online news sites: to help others get started.

I answer their questions and ask a few of my own. My number one question: Do you have significant start-up funds? When I started MinnPost, we had commitments of one year’s operating budget, about $1.2 million. The business plan called for having two, but my startup donors and I agreed that the time was right in late 2007 to begin, so we did so even though we were undercapitalized. It was the right decision, but it means I spend a great deal of my time finding the funding to sustain us through the next few years instead of devoting all my energy to the things that will sustain us longer term.

Many of the callers tell me they have no start-up funds in hand yet. “Well,” I say, “I’d start by getting some.”

With each new announcement of a paper closing, or a news company contemplating bankruptcy, or a dozen more journalism jobs being eliminated, my belief intensifies that the nonprofit approach has the best chance of sustaining serious regional journalism. But I am reporting back from the frontline of this digital journalism revolution that making it happen is no picnic. The same forces working against the for-profit model make self-sustaining nonprofit models challenging, too.

A lot of people are rooting for us to succeed, even counting on us to succeed. We’re making progress, hanging in, and learning and adapting every day. No promises, only possibilities.

Joel Kramer, CEO and editor of MinnPost.com, was editor of the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune from 1983 to 1991 and publisher and president from 1992 to 1998.

Basically Kachingle is a voluntary, centralized system that allows users to support the online publications they like. It’s compared in the article as an NPR-style donation system for publishers, but I like to think of it as a universal tip jar. If it works — and, like my post from yesterday said, “if” is the key phrase here — it would allow for a simple way for a user to pay any amount monthly that would be divvied up — minus a 20% cut for Kachingle — among all the sites that user had tagged as favorites.

As you can see, other than the initial effort of signing up for Kachingle and thus deciding to financially support online content, there is no mental transaction cost to the online user in visiting a news site or blog. Click, read, share any content as you’ve always done with no barriers in the way. The only mental effort expended is one time per Web site: Do I financially Support this site or not? If I support it, I make one click.

My mind immediately starts to try to poke holes in the idea — how to prevent click-fraud and spoofing, what to do about power-users who spend most of their time in a feed reader, how to marry it with social networking services to give supporters of particular publications the opportunity to share stories and influence readership patterns — but overall Kachingle, or something very much like it, strikes me as a no-brainer source of potential additional income for publishers. Why not give your fan-base the means to support you?

If there’s no costs to the publishers, and it’s treated as additional, not primary, revenue, what’s the downside? Tell me what I missed in the comments.