The Twin Cities Daily Planet officially launched May 1, 2006, after spending nearly a year in test mode, attracting more than 30 local media partners, recruiting 15 editors, and raising $30,000 in additional funding.
As of May 20, the hard launch had nearly doubled its monthly unique visitors from 3,594 to more than 6,500. Page views tripled to more than 300,000 for the month versus 87,426 for the month of April.
Those numbers were nudged, in part, by a Minneapolis Star Tribune news item that was picked up on Jim Romenesko’s widely read media column. A forthcoming Editor & Publisher story was also in the works. However, the site is also updating its home page daily and sending out a daily email newsletter, alerting readers to new stories.
“We seem to be generating some local buzz,” said project leader Jeremy Iggers.
While most of the Daily Planet’s content is provided by more than 30 ethnic and community newspapers, including Hmong Today, the Minnesota Women’s Press and the Minneapolis Spokesman-Record, the number of original news stories and opinion pieces generated by citizens has increased steadily, Iggers said. Some of the citizen contributors have been students in Twin Cities Media Alliance board member Doug McGill’s citizen journalism classes, which are being offered in partnership with the Resource Center of the Americas.
“People are telling us that they appreciate seeing the many stories from neighborhood, minority and immigrant media … that don’t get covered in mainstream media outlets,” Iggers said.
Some possible future partnerships are in the works:
- Both US Internet and Earthlink, the two finalists in the bidding to run a municipal WiFi project in Minneapolis, have said they plan to use the Daily Planet as their local news provider during neighborhood pilot projects that are to start in June.
- The local NBC affiliate, KARE11-TV, has expressed an interest in some kind of partnership.
- A popular local web site, www.mnspeak.com , has approached the Daily Planet about possibly joining an advertising consortium this summer.
So far, the venture has received a $20,000 grant from the Otto Bremer Foundation and a $10,000 grant from a local family fund, the Still Ain’t Satisfied Foundation. Other grant proposals are pending.
Databank Inc. has provided, free of charge, its donor management and membership software, which will help the project maintain a database of donors and volunteers and accept online contributions. Also, a part-time operations manager has been hired.
“If present audience trends continue,” Iggers said. “We are going to become a significant presence on the local media scene.”
