Building news apps for the iPad: The buzz from the tech crowd about Apple’s iPad has died down, but the iPad is beginning to get more interesting for the journalism world. That’s because we’re starting to see news organizations unveil their iPad or iPad-like apps: Wired showed off a tablet app — being developed with Adobe, which is having its own issues with the iPad — this week. And as this Advertising Age article points out, we’ve already seen what will likely end up being iPad apps for magazines like GQ, Esquire and Sports Illustrated (in the form of iPhone apps, in the former two cases).

We saw The New York Times’ iPad app, of course, at the iPad’s introduction last month. But this week, Gawker reported rumors of a battle within the Times over the app’s control and price: The print folks see it as another way to distribute the paper and want to charge up to $30 a month, while the digital side wants to price it at $10 a month. (Gawker also explained how this all relates to the Times Reader.) Color Apple-watcher John Gruber and former Salon editor Scott Rosenberg unimpressed.

The Lab has two thought-provoking posts on different aspects of the iPad: First, John-Henry Barac, who designed the iPhone app for The Guardian, has some fascinating thoughts about news design for the iPad. He sees the element of touch as being particularly important, describing it as a more focused, physically direct means of obtaining information. “I think you don’t want it to feel just like a great big PDF that you’re dragging around,” Barac says.

Second, former newspaper publisher Martin Langeveld examines the business impact of the iPad on publishers, concluding that the iPad will “bring an enormous increase in online shopping.” He has several practical tips for publishers on building strategies for the iPad era, focusing on creating new types of content for mobile devices and personalizing advertising to create new mobile-based revenue streams. As Ken Doctor put it, “The tablet is not a repurposing platform, to regain the old business. It’s a great, new opportunity to reinvent the business.”

Google backtracks on Buzz: Much of the talk online this week was once again about Buzz, Google’s new real-time social media platform. Since that talk didn’t have much to do with journalism, I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on it, but here’s the light-speed wrap-up to keep you up to speed: Buzz came out last week with a lot of problems — it was called awkward, confusing and, most commonly, an invasion of privacy.

Google quickly announced some changes based on that negative reaction, and acknowledged that it probably wasn’t tested enough before being released “in the wild.” Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, downplayed the privacy issue, saying Buzz had harmed no one. If you want the details, Silicon Alley Insider has a quick timeline of Google’s various responses.

One thoughtful take I want to highlight, particularly for those interested in theory: Software engineer Kevin Marks compares the theoretical structure of Buzz to that of Twitter, noting in particular that Buzz can’t match the subtle effectiveness of Twitter’s “overlapping publics,” thereby leaving Buzz conversations dominated by people we don’t necessarily want to hear.

Plagiarism’s online migration: For the second straight week, we saw a primarily web-based journalist resign after being caught plagiarizing: New York Times DealBook reporter Zachery Kouwe had plagiarized from The Wall Street Journal and Reuters and resigned after an internal investigation, a week after Daily Beast investigative reporter Gerald Posner’s plagiarism of the Miami Herald was uncovered.

I mention this not because two back-to-back cases of plagiarism are necessarily related to the future of journalism per se, but because a worthwhile conversation about ethics and plagiarism in the Internet journalism era has sprung up around Posner’s and Kouwe’s responses. Posner in particular blamed “the warp speed of the net,” and Kouwe referred to the speed with which he felt compelled to blog for the Times in his rationale.

The Columbia Journalism Review sees in all this the danger of increasing news productivity demands, not just in ethical lapses but in the lack of quality — “what’s not getting out because it doesn’t pass the time/productivity stress test.” After Posner’s resignation last week, True/Slant’s Michael Roston noted that you’ll seldom see plagiarizing bloggers because they “don’t need to” — the ethic of the link that reigns in the blogosphere makes it easy for bloggers to make points by openly building off of others’ work while giving appropriate credit. Finally, Poynter’s Kelly McBride offered some web-oriented tips for writers and editors on avoiding plagiarism.

A win for citizen journalism: We saw what may be a first in the journalism-prize world this week with the prestigious George Polk Awards, when the award in a new category, videography, went to an anonymously produced video of the death of a young Iranian woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, during protests last summer. The video went viral on the web, getting millions of views and helping spark worldwide support for the Iranian resistance movement.

Polk Awards curator John Darnton considered it a statement on the power of citizen journalism: “This award celebrates the fact that, in today’s world, a brave bystander with a cellphone camera can use video-sharing and social networking sites to deliver news,” he told The New York Times. NPR’s David Folkenflik still gave credit to professional journalists for verifying, curating and sifting through video like this and establishing its newsworthiness.

Former Wall Street Journal online reporter Jason Fry compared the Neda video to two other famous new videos shot by “ordinary citizens” — the Zapruder film and Rodney King video. The biggest difference in what the Neda videographer did, Fry argues, was not so much in the video’s shooting, but in its distribution: Both Zapruder and George Holliday needed gatekeepers to disseminate their videos, but Neda’s videographer needed none. That difference is a radical one, Fry says — it ”changes not just how news is found and made, but how it is shared and therefore defined.”

Google opens Living Stories to the masses: Another quiet development that could prove big in the long run: Google News opened up the code to its Living Stories format to anyone on the web. The project was launched in December with The New York Times and The Washington Post, but this move will allow any news organization to incorporate Living Stories into its site.

Living Stories allows readers to follow a large story with lots of developments in one place, sort of like a “personalized RSS feed reader, but customized to pay attention to just that one story,” as ReadWriteWeb put it. We’ve been seeing calls, particularly in the last several months, for news organizations to make these “explainers” central to the way they communicate news, and this could be a key tool in making those types of pieces more accessible to news orgs everywhere. At O’Reilly Radar, Mac Slocum urges news sites’ developers to start incorporating Living Stories immediately.

Reading roundup: I’ve got four pieces that are well worth your time this week. First, in a lecture at USC, Columbia professor Michael Schudson offered a thorough historical case that journalism in many areas is getting better, not worse. This is not naive, Pollyanna-ish optimism; this is a sensible, studied survey of why the future of journalism is fundamentally a hopeful one.

Second, a French journalism site proposed a vision for a “Google newsroom” — a newsroom divided into halves focusing on creation and curation of journalism. It’s a great starting point for discussion about what the newsroom of the future should look like.

Third, speaking of curation, this Robin Good post has a pretty comprehensive look at what it looks like in journalism — Good calls curating journalists “newsmasters.” The post is a little unwieldy, but it offers a good overview of what news curation is all about.

Finally, Time foreign correspondent Jeff Israely gives 11 valuable lessons from a year working on an in-progress news startup in a post here at the Lab. It’s a must-read for anyone thinking about going into a new journalism venture — which, these days, might include a lot of ex-print journalists.

And this is what it feels like: 15 hours a day, seven days a week, from the 7 a.m. check-in with your spouse-turned-business-partner to the midnight bookkeeping.

No kids, no vacations, no car. No office; your only away-from-home base is a former Main Street antique shop that sells shared-workspace memberships to freelance software developers and the like for $100 a month. No novels before bed; there’s no time. If it’s a Saturday and the Michigan team is playing, you can watch the game, but run back to your keyboard during the commercials, okay?

In the two months since Ann Arbor became the nation’s newest no-newspaper town, there’s been lots of talk about its status as ground zero for the new ecosystem of Web-native niche outlets. But I wanted to know: In a business that’s always been oiled by routine — midnight press runs, 6 a.m. broadcasts, 11 a.m. news meetings, 6:30 deadlines — how will tomorrow’s hyperlocal news professionals structure their day? So, a few weeks after the Ann Arbor News folded, I spent a morning with its most established successor, the one-year-old, online-only Ann Arbor Chronicle, to get a sense for the future of the newsroom routine.

I found a lot of new routines and emerging practices. But more than anything, I found a pair of journalists cheerfully working their minds and bodies raw to make their business an outlier, profit-wise.

Creating 10 heavily reported and edited posts a week, maintaining the site’s daily news digests and gossip feature, editing three regular columnists and selling the ads to support it all requires “literally every waking hour” the couple has, Chronicle editor Dave Askins said.

Askins, 44, “sometimes works through the night,” said publisher Mary Morgan, 48, who says she’s dropped 50 pounds since launching the business last year. “I can’t swing that.”

Could you? If so, here’s a 10-point glance at the daily and weekly routines and rules Morgan and Askins used to build one of the nation’s first sustainable, hyperlocal Web startups.

1. Weekly editorial meetings. The two hold a “publisher’s meeting” of one hour or more in Morgan’s home office every Sunday to set goals for the week, discuss how stories should be packaged and discuss long-term coverage.

2. Comparing schedules each morning. In the first of three or four check-ins with each other through the day, Morgan and Askins review their daily tasks and talk about when they plan to file stories.

3. Inbound links checked daily. The day before I visited, logs for the Chronicle’s WordPress site reported that it had drawn 277 visitors from a local sports blog, 28 from a local school blog and 23 from annarbor.com, the reincarnated Ann Arbor News.

4. Inbound tweets repackaged for the site. The Chronicle uses its Twitter account to encourage people to tweet in news snippets, which they check regularly and work into an around-the-town feed that publishes two to five items daily.

5. Google News Alerts every morning. Has any other service been adopted by every newsroom in the country with so little fanfare? The Chronicle is no exception; each morning, Morgan selects a handful of items from her 12 news alerts for phrases like “university of michigan” and “washtenaw county” for two news-from-out-of-town aggregators.

6. More than 20 public meetings a month. No, Mr. Simon, most local-news blogs don’t staff zoning hearings. But many do, and the Chronicle is one. When they launched, Morgan and Askins built their monthly schedule around a list of meetings the Ann Arbor News wasn’t covering. Today, exhaustive summaries of Ann Arbor’s Public Market Advisory Commission, Public Art Commission and Downtown Development Authority meetings are the Chronicle’s bread and butter, filling almost half its editorial time.

7. Two sets of eyes on every full story. A 5,000-word meeting story might take six hours to write and two to edit, Morgan said.

8. No deadlines. There’s no fixed publication schedule for full-length stories, said Morgan, a former business and opinion editor for the defunct News. Rushing to get the story first is outdated and doesn’t really matter to readers, she said. “The assumption is, well, we’re going to get it done as soon as we can given everything else we’ve got going,” she said.

9. Photos at every opportunity. Processing the shots takes a lot of time, Morgan said, but they’re the best way to cover an event. Even public meetings get captured by their Nikon D60.

10. Nonstop public speaking. During 10 years at the News, Morgan made it into a lot of local Rolodexes. When she launched the Chronicle, they started calling. Today, Morgan has a speaking engagement almost every week. When we spoke this month, Morgan was planning for a business association meeting, a local book festival and a senior center lecture. “Generally people want me to talk about our publication and the general media landscape in Ann Arbor,” explained Morgan. “It’s a way to get the word out.” She’s never yet solicited an appearance herself: “Groups, generally, are starved for speakers.”

Okay, last question: Are the routines exhausting? It’s a lot of work, Askins told me. But in the depths of a recession, it’s covering the couple’s mortgage, health insurance, living expenses, and maybe some retirement savings. (They didn’t give exact numbers.) And most of it, he said, is anything but routine.

“I wouldn’t trade this job for anything,” he said. “Mary and I were both reflecting the other day on the fact that if there were an opportunity to become an employee of another entity doing pretty much the same thing, there would be no way.”

“I’m not a very good cog,” Askins went on. “If we had to apply for jobs, I wouldn’t hire me. I would say, ‘That guy’s tasted what it feels like to be his own boss.’”

When you came up through the newspaper system, it was a lot like professional baseball: If you worked hard, showed some promise, then you moved up and got more opportunities to play before bigger crowds. That system seemed to die, however, just as I was coming out of journalism school a few years ago. Now, I have no idea how decent newspaper journalists get jobs, so I’m quitting the profession despite profound early success, and going into more debt to get a second professional degree.

I’m sorry for the bloviating, but here is my point: Newspapering as we knew it — its economic sustainability and moral righteousness — died sometime in the last decade. Yet the people who sank the ship, namely those of the baby-boomer, Woodward-and-Bernstein era, are still at the helm, and giving up their lofty newsroom positions only with cold, dead hands.

I understand that youth is ill-served in management, often, but unlike those currently in charge, we haven’t already proved we’re incapable of steering newspapers back to cultural and economic viability. My question is, both cheekily and seriously, when will your generation quit and let my generation try all these ideas we have about how the news should be presented?

Berke is kinder than I would have been in response. But Josh’s question — or more accurately, his attitude — really gets at a key reason why journalism is in the unfortunate state it’s in. It’s the assumption that the Rick Berkes of the world need to retire before there can be innovation in the industry.

Think how strange that is. Can you imagine that in the tech world? Some bright young kid with a brilliant idea, complaining to Bill Gates that the top six levels of management at Microsoft have to resign so that she can take over and do something new? Of course not. What that girl genius would do is start a company of her own — or at least find a different, smaller company that she thought could outsmart the old fogies in Redmond.

Can you imagine that in politics? Some young guy complaining that we can’t do anything until all these nasty 85-year-old senators die off, so we might as well just wait them out before we try to change things around? Of course not. He’d start organizing for Obama, or he’d run for city council, or he’d volunteer for his guy in the governor’s race. He’d do something.

But that’s not how Josh see it. Josh’s worldview is clouded by a fundamentally institutional view of the world. If he thinks The New York Times is doing a bad job, the first thought that pops into his mind isn’t: Well, let’s beat The New York Times then. It’s: I guess I should start studying for the LSAT.

Josh’s baseball metaphor is telling, since baseball is one of the few lines of work that is fundamentally hierarchical. (They even have an antitrust exemption to prove it.) If you think the owners of Major League Baseball are all stupid and insufficiently cognizant of your genius at shortstop, well, you really are pretty much out of luck.

And Josh’s problem is that he still thinks the news business is like baseball, when it’s a lot more like the tech world now. The barriers to entry have tumbled; some of the most popular news sources online didn’t exist two years ago. Things that used to be an advantage — like huge investments sunk in things like printing presses and buildings and circulation departments — are now an albatross. Three smart guys can draw a bigger and more engaged audience than a newsroom of hundreds.

Reading Josh’s question made me think back to what I think is one of the smartest things said about journalism in recent years. It’s from Politico’s John Harris, in an interview with Jay Rosen in 2006. Harris had just left The Washington Post, where he had worked 21 years, to start up Politico. Here’s Harris:

We live in an entreprenurial age, not an institutional one. That’s been true of many professions for quite a while, and increasingly (and perhaps somewhat belatedly) it is true of journalism. The people having the most satisfying careers, it seems to me, are those who create a distinct signature for their work — who add value to the public conversation through their individual talents — rather than relying mostly on the reputation and institutional gravity of the organization they work for…

…[O]rganizations like the Post or the New York Times have been insulated from the spirit of the age — precisely because they were secure and prestigious places to work…Most of the people in those newsrooms are creative, and in my experience they tend to think of themselves as individualists and even iconoclasts. But the reality for many (including me until two weeks ago) is that they have careers that are more reminiscent of the 1950s, when people got hired at General Motors or IBM and stayed put. I believe that for people who want this type of stability, journalism is not going to remain an attractive profession for much longer. But people who adapt will thrive and end up having more fun than in the old days.

Harris didn’t just complain that the Post wasn’t interested in creating a Politico-like site internally. He didn’t just say the Woodward-and-Bernstein generation who (quite literally) ran the Post should all retire and make way for him to take over. He took action.

Now, to be fair, there are lots and lots of really talented journalists who have no interest in taking that kind of action. They just want to report and write or edit or take photos. And that’s great — there’s no reason everyone should have to be an entrepreneur. If there are enough of them, there’ll be jobs to be had working for their new organizations.

But what bugged me about Josh’s comment is that he seems to think he (and his “generation”) know how to run a news organization “the right way.” The only thing standing in the way is the layer of old folks up in management. People like Rick Berke are crushing Josh’s dreams, basically.

And that’s a bunch of nonsense. If Josh and his buds know how to run a great news organization, I suggest they start one. It’s not that hard these days.

I think this institutional mindset among young journalists is a big problem. Anyone who talks to a lot of managers in newsrooms — “the baby-boomer, Woodward-and-Bernstein era” types — has heard them complain about their 23-year-olds: how they’re not interested in video or multimedia, how they’re not providing the fresh ideas the old timers wish they were.

Obviously, I’m generalizing here; there are plenty of innovative 23-year-olds doing great things in and out of newsrooms. But I think that the Josh mindset — of wanting the rewards of management without being willing to take the risks now required to get there — is more common than it should be.

The metaphor I like to use is the Catholic priesthood. Fifty years ago, when American Catholic families were still large and it was expected that one of the younger boys would become a priest, the priesthood was relatively representative of the Catholic population as a whole. Obviously not totally representative (hello, ladies), but relatively representative. Which is how you ended up with things like Vatican II: as the broader society changed attitudes, the church was willing to change with them.

But over time, for a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of this post, becoming a priest became a less attractive career prospect. Fewer young American men were willing to sign up. And the result was that the ones who were willing tended to be more doctrinally conservative, more traditionalist, more orthodox, and more married to the old ways than their predecessors. They’re called the John Paul priests after the man who led the church during their career, but the shift in attitude is as much the result of a shift in demographics as it is one pope’s leadership.

I think there’s something similar in a lot of young reporters in American newsrooms. For a variety of reasons, joining a newspaper’s staff isn’t as appealing today as it was 30 years ago. But for those 23-year-olds who still want to work at a newspaper — a lot of them sound as if they want nothing more than a fedora with a press card in the brim. They view a story in the paper as somehow “real” and a piece on the web site as less than legitimate. (This, despite the fact they haven’t read a printed newspaper in years.)

The industry attracts, disproportionately, young people with Josh’s institutional mindset, I fear. And that is going to have a much bigger impact on where the news business goes than Rick Berke’s retirement date.

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.

The issue should be up on the Nieman Reports web site sometime soon. But in the meantime, here's a preview of one of the pieces, by Margaret Wolf Freivogel, editor of the nonprofit startup St. Louis Beacon. —Ed.]

The spotlight often focuses, justifiably, on the threats that downsized newsrooms pose to investigative reporting — the kind of muckraking that should (but didn’t) spot a governor dickering over the value of a U.S. Senate seat. But investigative reporting has a less celebrated cousin in the family of watchdog journalism — that is hard-hitting analysis. It is equally important and equally threatened by the economic earthquake rattling journalism.

Investigative reporting exposes corruption. Watchdog analysis exposes sloppy thinking by raising uncomfortable questions about public policy and political issues. Both are essential for keeping public discussion real and public officials honest.

For example: Did the Senate really have the legal authority to refuse to seat the appointee of Illinois’s tainted governor? For days, most senators vowed they would prevent Roland Burris from taking the seat vacated by President Barack Obama. But a previous court case involving Rep. Adam Clayton Powell and other legal precedents seemed to offer strong precedent that said they’d have to seat Burris.

We reported this in the St. Louis Beacon, our online-only nonprofit regional news site that launched last spring. Our reporting — and analysis — might not have directly influenced the Senate’s decision to seat Burris, but it did give our readers telling and little-known facts that turned out to be important in the outcome of the controversy.

At first glance, an online-only news publication might not seem the ideal home for watchdog analysis. The Web is known for breaking news, short video, and pithy opinions. Watchdog analysis requires words, sometimes many of them, and it demands patient attention to looking at issues from several perspectives. At the Beacon, we’re acutely aware of these challenges. Yet we do this work because we regard watchdog analysis, along with investigative reporting, as among our core responsibilities and greatest opportunities for serving our region.

Among our founders are several veteran St. Louis Post-Dispatch expats who still take inspiration from the tradition of the newspaper’s three editors named Joseph Pulitzer, whose platform commands “always be drastically independent” and “never be satisfied with merely printing news.” These two phrases capture the approach and value of the entire genre of watchdog analysis.

“News That Matters” is the Beacon’s motto. Amidst the flood of information swamping all of us, our mission is to help St. Louisans understand events, trends and issues that have long-lasting significance for our region. To do this, we provide watchdog analysis that takes several forms. We give readers the story behind the story. We provide context to illuminate why something is happening, explain what’s at stake, and assess what might — or what should — happen next. We raise pertinent and sometimes impertinent questions that can fundamentally reshape the assumptions of a current debate.

Our most ambitious and sustained effort has been a project called “Facing the Mortgage Crisis.” It began early last summer, when subprime mortgage foreclosures were mounting, but the larger economic meltdown was not yet apparent. Working in partnership with our local public television station KETC, which mobilized resources to help prevent foreclosures, the Beacon zeroed in on a series of tough questions.

How did so many homeowners get overextended? Why was the larger economy ensnared in their problems? Why was it so difficult to funnel help to those who needed it? Would the proposed solutions work? Beacon reporter Mary Delach Leonard dug deep into each one to understand and analyze what was known. To do this, she explored St. Louisans’ housing situations and tapped experts with St. Louis perspectives.

To our surprise, perhaps the most insightful explanation of the big picture emerged when Leonard focused microscopically on the plight of one person, Maureen McKenzie. This reporting took weeks of effort as Leonard worked to gain McKenzie’s confidence, pored over her documents, tracked down and questioned her originating mortgage broker, and interviewed counselors and consumer advocates who put her situation in context. As Leonard’s reporting was in motion, the economic crisis exploded.

The Beacon introduced our three-part series about McKenzie this way:

The collapse of some of the nation’s oldest financial institutions started on Main Street America with hundreds and thousands of homeowners such as 56-year-old Maureen McKenzie of Kirkwood who in May lost to foreclosure the small ranch house that had been in her family since it was built after World War II. How could this happen? The answer is … complicated. The Beacon will unravel the story of how Maureen McKenzie of Kirkwood, Mo., lost her 900 square feet of the American Dream.

McKenzie’s experience, and Leonard’s reporting, challenged conventional wisdom about the mortgage crisis. Most discussion at the time presumed borrowers were largely to blame for overextending themselves to satisfy their outsized consumer appetites. This longtime homeowner wanted nothing more than to stay in the house she’d always loved. But aggressive lenders, who had much to gain and little to lose by luring her into a loan she could not afford, played a big role in her demise.

McKenzie was a cautious borrower. Yet the explanation she was given of the terms of her variable rate loan made it nearly impossible for an average consumer to understand the potentially dire consequences that would befall her — and so many others. The truth is that she’d be losing ground financially even while she made her monthly payments. And while it might theoretically make sense to renegotiate loan terms so that homeowners like McKenzie could keep their homes, time and the fractured nature of the mortgage market made this impossible, and she lost her home.

McKenzie’s story did not have a happy ending, save that her courage in sharing her experience enlightened others about the pitfalls they might face. And it instructed the larger community about the complexities of bad mortgages that, to this day, remain the knot at the center of our tangled economy.

Like good investigative reporting, good watchdog analysis begets new lines of inquiry. The Beacon’s mortgage crisis coverage has branched into related questions. For example, if the federal government is bailing out big banks, how will this initiative affect smaller ones? (Local bankers characterized the plan as unfair and unwise.) Why hasn’t the Wall Street bailout trickled down to Main Street? (Local housing counselors identified three alarming reasons and predicted that the wave of foreclosures will continue to gather momentum.

Our most recent related project, dubbed “Beacon-omics,” addresses economic questions that are obvious but still perplexing: Why is deflation bad? What, exactly, are mortgage-backed securities? Is 0.00 percent interest a good idea?

Just as investigative journalism gives citizens the information they need to hold public officials accountable from a legal and ethical standpoint, watchdog analysis provides the information citizens need to hold them accountable for sound public policy.

Why are we doing this kind of journalism online? The first reason is happenstance. Print and broadcast newsrooms are shedding reporters and institutional memory. New online regional news sites like the Beacon offer an immediate home for serious work — and as we read about the loss of newsroom jobs, the Beacon is interviewing for new hires.

It’s also true that online news sites are ideal for meeting citizens’ needs for information — when and at whatever depth they choose. A web-based news organization can provide instantaneous coverage of the latest developments on a topic such as the mortgage crisis. At the same time, we can compile in-depth analysis of context and potential solutions and make this material constantly and easily accessible.

Having spent 34 years working in print, I know that much newsroom effort is geared toward playing up stories that will appeal to “everyone” — an elusive concept that often results in lowest common denominator coverage of little interest to anyone. Digital stories, we’re learning, get traction when they’re very interesting to some group of people — usually those who are knowledgeable about the issue and eager to learn more. By digging deeply on questions that matter, we can construct a path to understanding complicated issues, and anyone’s access to this path is just a mouse click away.

Finally, as good journalists know, the experience and wisdom that make watchdog analysis possible reside not in newsrooms but with people in the community. The Web is by its nature an interactive medium, so this makes it easier to draw community resources into a larger conversation.

Certainly, in the short time we’ve been doing this, we haven’t taken full advantage of all of the ways that we can do watchdog analysis online. We’d like to make better use of multimedia tools and not rely so much on our words alone. By hiring more reporters, we could pay sustained attention to more issues — and now, with a Knight Foundation grant for local reporting, we will make advances in meeting this goal.

It’s been less than a year since the Beacon was launched. Our staff and resources are nowhere near the size of a major metro newsroom. Yet around us we find increasing recognition that our watchdog analysis is important. Fortunately, we’ve also found a willingness among St. Louisans and some foundations to step forward with support so the Beacon can continue the work we have begun — work we hope will demonstrate how vital kinds of reporting can be done in digital media and find new audiences who appreciate the effort.

Margaret Wolf Freivogel is editor of the St. Louis Beacon. She previously worked as a reporter, assistant Washington bureau chief, and assistant managing editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

So why did RappVoice.com yesterday look like this?

Because Gannon appears to have fallen victim to a threat a lot of local web sites should be worrying about: The coming wave of web-host shutdowns.

“I had absolutely no warning,” Gannon told me. “Just bang, out of the blue. I go to my web site and it’s not there.” His site had been replaced by a page saying his domain “may be for sale.” The two years of news he’d created had disappeared.

He’s working to track down where he hopes his web site’s database might still live, on some server in a city he doesn’t know, belonging to some company he doesn’t know. His hunt may work out (I certainly hope it does); it may not. But hopefully it can spur some journalists-turned-entrepreneurs to do the checks that can help prevent Gannon’s fate from befalling them.

(I first heard about Gannon’s problem because our sister publication, Nieman Reports, features a story by Gannon about his experiment in its next issue. You can read a sneak-peek PDF of it here.)

Web hosting is a really easy business to get into, thanks to the idea of reseller hosting. That’s a setup in which someone appears to be an actual web host, but in reality is only a middleman between the customer and the actual company with the servers. Anyone can start a web hosting reseller; as Wikipedia helpfully notes: “Reseller hosting does not require extensive knowledge of the technical aspects of web hosting.”

While there are many, many completely legitimate resellers — I don’t want to tar the whole sector — it’s also an area where fly-by-night (or, at the very least, financially unstable) operations can flourish during good times. When things go bad, they’ll sometimes just disappear — a phenomenon that can happen to non-reseller hosts too, since hosting is a highly competitive business with comparatively small profit margins.

Gannon told me he doesn’t yet know the details of his hosting arrangement; he let a more tech-savvy area resident handle those details. But he said he did use a reseller to host RappVoice.com, and that he thinks it’s the reseller that suddenly disappeared off the Internet.

I asked my friend, the tech journalist Glenn Fleishman, about Gannon’s situation. Glenn saw this sort of thing coming last month when he launched ItDied.com, a site dedicated to chronicling the shutdowns of web sites, web hosts, web applications, and all the other entities up in the cloud we rely on to do our daily work.

One of the things that I think is probably most disturbing here is that there is no good way, except for a financial reporter who wants to dig, to determine anything like the actual fiscal health of any hosting company, even those publicly traded. Many of these companies offer crazy loss-leader services that are designed to attract recurring revenue and upsold services. As the upsell disappears or customers fail to renew, they’re going to go cash-flow negative very quickly.

But the bigger firms have enormous retained value and good will, and if they were to hit a cash crunch or file for Chapter 11 or 13, they’d have every possible motivation to maintain their service at a high level to maximize the return to a buyer of those assets. Smaller firms, those with maybe thousands of customers, might not have enough cash flow or business savvy to run a firm under bankruptcy in such a way as to preserve value.

What can you do to avoid this fate? Here’s Glenn’s advice on how to make your hosting situation more secure:

First: Anyone who isn’t hosted at a major service like Pair.com or even (shudder) GoDaddy should check and see who actually owns their hosting.

If the company that they’re using for hosting is publicly traded, great — check the financials. But there are tens of thousands of other hosts, many of which are resellers. In those cases, because the reseller isn’t paying fees to the host, even if the reseller disappears, the host relationship should remain the same.

For those hosted by smaller firms, like Gannon, it’s worth checking out what you can find out about the company. If there’s no way to find that out (no personal contact info, no company history, etc.), it might be worth taking the pain now to migrate to a larger hosting firm with a long track record and no particular publicly bad decisionmaking that might lead to their demise.

Frankly, it’s possible for any hosting firm of any size to go bankrupt (bigger firms) or disappear (smaller firms) with the current credit crunch, which has disproportionately affected smaller businesses. I’ve been reading how small businesses can’t get credit for short-term needs on reasonable terms even with a superb balance sheet. And with home equity drying up, they can’t turn to their own homes as a cheap source of credit, either.

Second: Make regular backups. This is crucial — just as your local PC or Mac needs backing up, so does your web server. Most hosting companies will make some sort of regular backup of your content in the event something goes wrong — but if your problem is that your host has gone out of business, having a backup on their servers won’t do you much good.

Make sure you have a complete nightly backup of any changed files. Most FTP software that’s any good offers scheduled backups to another location. There are scripts that can dump the current contents of MySQL databases to a file and then that file can be backed up, too. (If those last two sentences don’t make any sense to you, ask your local web geek.)

It might even make sense to pay $10 a month to a firm like Pair.com to have a relatively live backup that you could switch to.

Third: Consider having a third party handle your DNS hosting. DNS stands for Domain Name System, and it’s the mechanism by which a domain name (like niemanlab.org) gets tied to a specific server address (like 216.92.13.127). That connection is maintained on a DNS host, which is also called a nameserver.

Generally, your nameserver duties are handled by your web host. But again, if your web host goes out of business, you’d be forced to work with your domain registrar to repoint your DNS to a new site on a new host. That’s beyond the complexity level of most folks. I wrote a book on it (Take Control of Your Domain Names), although it’s slightly out of date.

It’s probably always better to have a separate, dedicated DNS registrar and/or host from where your stuff is hosted. I use easyDNS, which charges 2 to 5 times more than the cheap competitors, like GoDaddy — but they don’t try to upsell you, and they just do DNS registration, DNS hosting, mail forwarding, and the like. They’ve been very reliable, and they have a lot of customers like me. I gladly pay them $25 or $35 per year because they are easy to deal with.

For what it’s worth, this site is hosted on Pair, and I’ve had no problems with them. When, some months ago, I asked around to my nerdy friends about what host to use, Pair was the overwhelming recommendation. And, as they promote on their site, they’re profitable.

And a final update: As of Wednesday afternoon, Gannon had relaunched his site with a fresh installation of his blogging software — archives still missing: “In the meantime, we are starting up this ‘reborn’ RappVoice, to explain this unexpected interruption in our operations, to to have an outlet for new reports and information.”

Here’s an 15-minute interview I did with Rick. The questions I asked him: What will the next six months hold for newspaper companies? What sorts of newspapers are at the most risk? Will we really see closings of big-name newspapers in the next few months? What would be the revenue and cost implications of publishing fewer than seven days a week? If Rick Edmonds was in charge of a major metro paper, what would he do? Are any of the startup models being tried actually working — doing good journalism and making a profit?

If you don’t have 15 minutes, my paraphrased versions of Rick’s answers are below the video.

The interview in brief (and apologies for the sometimes-shaky video):

— What will the next six months hold for newspaper companies? (Really, really bad stuff.)

— What sorts of newspapers are at the most risk? (The major metro papers; companies with a lot of debt; companies with high costs through union contracts.)

— Will we really see closings of big-name newspapers in the next few months? (Yep — and probably not just the Rocky Mountain News. It’s less clear whether it’ll be just two-paper cities or whether there’ll be any major cities left without a paper at all. We’re also really likely to see major papers go less-than-daily.)

— What would be the revenue and cost implications of publishing fewer than seven days a week? (You’d lose some, though perhaps not all, the ad revenue from those days. They’ll try to convert some of those advertisers to online campaign or shift them to the remaining days. You’d lose some circ money. But on the production side, you save real money as soon as you trim out two days, and more beyond that. And you buy fewer trees.)

— If Rick Edmonds was in charge of a major metro paper, what would he do? (Cut days. But they’re in a really tough position with few answers. They need to cut a lot, but still find room to invest in new experiments. And it’s hard to do that without pushing away your current subscribers.)

— Are any of the startup models being tried actually working — doing good journalism and making a profit? Beyond Talking Points Memo. (I have hope for MinnPost — although they’re not yet making money. Pegasus News is doing interesting things on the revenue side, although the journalism is “not terribly ambitious.” [Sorry, Mike -- Rick's words, not mine.] But honestly, no one’s figured it out — unless you count NPR. And maybe there’ll be a few Joan Krocs who want to give money to fund worthy journalism.)