Joel Kramer has been doing some excellent analysis of MinnPost’s traffic data. I get the impression that few publishers have this depth of understanding of their website’s traffic. Or, if they do, aren’t building businesses based around transparency for advertisers. But on most websites, ours included, the vast majority of unique visitors are passersby. They [...]
I’m digging the fundraising experiment MinnPost started running today: Readers can help fund a specific writer: David Brauer. As it’s set up, you can contribute in increments of $10 or $25 toward Brauer’s writing. All contributions up to $10,000 will be matched by a generous donor. This type of funding makes a lot of sense [...]
MinnPost has an excellent story with accompanying video about people who are working to identify the graves of people who lived and died in Minnesota’s state hospitals and were buried in numbered graves. This is a great example of well done web journalism: Grave by grave, group restores Minnesotans’ forgotten lives In death as in [...]
It’s tough to keep stuff on the public Internet private. For example, MinnPost.com is supposed to launch at 11am tomorrow but it can be found online today at http://build.minnpost.com. Here is a screenshot in case the site is taken offline until launch (and a PDF of the homepage): (Lead with Weed) I’m glad to see [...]
MinnPost.com has released a preview of what their soon to launch news site will look like: It looks pretty good. Clean. Fairly scannable. Links to a river of news stories and posts along with a link to a river of comments would seem like valuable additions. I’m a bit surprised that there isn’t more real [...]
Imagine my surprise when I found a post from MinnPost.com in my Google Reader: Very cool. And it wasn’t truncated. Double cool. That’s a small thing that makes a big difference for news hounds. I’d still like to see permalinks (#7) to news releases. Without permalinks, it’s impossible to link to specific news stories. I [...]
I feel like offering some unsolicited advice to MinnPost.com. If you’re not into techie web stuff, just move on now. Last week, I mentioned that MinnPost.com’s pre-launch site’s lack of an RSS feed was kind of scary considering how important RSS is to the news hounds the site is apparently targeting. This led to a [...]
A new news site is about to launch in Minnesota with a big list of names you’re probably familiar with. Basically, dozens of people who’ve taken a buy-out or been fired from the StarTribune or the Pioneer Press are going to be writing for this site. This is a look at what I see from [...]
