Wednesday, June 13, 2007 - 6:10pm
James Lileks, recently "reassigned" from his decades-long gig as a regular columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune (prompting fears that he would be relegated to covering City Council meetings and bake sales) has a new gig.
He is the proprietor of maybe the smartest thing a MSM outlet has done in years -- buzz.mn. Follow the link for a minute.
The front page is mainly Lilek's musings on... anything really. Just today he's mentioned Hugo Chavez, the beautification of a historic Minnesota street, seatbelt violations, and the death of a Minnesota TV institution, Mr. Wizard, all in his inimitable style.
The rest of the front page is dedicated to local headlines, prep and minor league sports scores, recently updated user blogs and a fantastic user pictures section.
The Star Tribune gets it. People no longer look to the local paper for national and international news, stock prices, major league sports scores, or even classifieds. By the time a story gets printed in the morning edition of the local paper, it's old news. It's been spiraling around the blogosphere, it's been on (and off) the front page of Drudge, it's been delivered to your Yahoo homepage. You've seen it. You've moved on.
Same with sports scores. You see them on ESPN.com, you get them sent to your smart phone, you saw them on ESPN News.
More and more people are using Craigslist.com for classifieds, too. That stream of revenue is never again going to be as strong as it is now.
So what are people looking for from a local paper? Local news. Prep sports. Buzz.mn is all of that, and online, where ad revenues are only going to increase.
Plus it has the added advantage of being user-interactive. The user photo gallery has the effect of letting you be a photojournalist for your local paper. The user blog feature gives you the chance to have your take on local issues read. It's moderated heavily for quality and appropriateness, but for all intents and purposes, you can work for the local paper. Does anyone think this won't work?
Finally, buzz.mn has separate pages for each neighborhood of the Twin Cities, making the local news even more local. The Internet term "community" is now exactly that.
Buzz.mn combines the blogging phenomenon, the Flickr/Photobucket phenomenon, the Facebook/Myspace social networking phenomenon, and good old-fashioned local reporting to make a textbook example of how to succeed in the world of Web 2.0. Plus with a famous headliner like Lileks, buzz.mn is perfectly positioned to save the local paper in Minneapolis. Anyone from the Republic interested?
