MinnPost launches; does Minneapolis care?

MinnPost.com launched today with a roster of familiar writers (many ex-Star Tribune), a printable PDF edition, and a homepage ad for the St. Paul Pioneer Press "e-edition."

MinnPost.com undoubtedly will discover whether there's a significant market of news junkies eager to read "a thoughtful approach to news" presented in the tone and voice of the Star Tribune circa 1985. When I looked, the lead online story was a Doug Grow piece about how the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party is in debt, and the lead piece in the 8-page printable PDF companion had to do with restoring the graves of people who died in state hospitals.

Not exactly the Daily Mole. For that matter, it's not even Star Tribune Online circa 1994, which had a deep commitment to hosting and facilitating community conversations (and even offered publishing tools to community organizations). MinnPost is a mid-20th century product in a strange 21st century world, and I found it needlessly dull.

Between them, MinnPost.com and a blog like the Daily Mole illuminate some of the problems facing newspapers, particularly big papers like the Star Tribune. Some people really wish the Mary Tyler Moore show would come back to their television sets. Some care passionately about local politics. Some couldn't give a rip and some haven't pulled their noses out of MySpace in six or eight weeks. In the last century one "core product" could rule them all; in this century we are heading to a state of not having a core anything. But in a world where anyone can be a publisher, there's a place even for ex-Strib graybeards (although certainly not at union scale).

At the troubled Star Tribune, the Par Ridder soap opera is over but the bad news hasn't stopped; daily circ fell another 6.53 percent to 335,443 in the latest ABC report. I don't envy editor Nancy Barnes as she tries to fix that. Like it or not, the world has changed in ways that make a quality metropolitan daily newspaper less valuable.