Q&A with Joel Kramer

The newspaper business has been good to Joel Kramer. The Brooklyn-born fifty-nine-year-old started his career—as a copyeditor at Newsday—with a public service Pulitzer for a story on the heroin trade and ended his career as publisher of the Star Tribune in 1998 by cashing in stock worth $8 million when The McClatchy Company bought the Cowles family’s paper. It’s been hard standing on the sidelines, watching more than 100 Twin Cities journalists lose their gigs to various profit-margin putsches, especially when the policies he was implementing in the late nineties—focusing on the educated news consumer rather than pursuing the circulation masses—anticipated this mess somewhat. But rather than lob an “I told you so” at the industry, Kramer left Growth & Justice, the four-and-a-half-year-old think tank he founded, and has now started up a million-dollar news website. He says it will tentatively debut in October.

Do you think your opportunity was created by the newspaper’s strategic failure or because of the rise of the Internet?
Some of both. The circumstance is that the business model, in which there was a lot of advertising and the advertisers paid a high price for the advertising because it served them in a way no other medium could, is deteriorating, you might say evaporating. And that’s not anybody’s fault. The strategy issue is that given that circumstance, what’s the best response for the newspaper industry? Most of them, particularly the Star Tribune, which I watch the most closely, have responded by trying to figure out how to hang on to the maximum number of readers. [Focusing on] the suburbs is one way to do that. My own view is that the better strategy would be to acknowledge that there’s a core of very serious newspaper readers who are really willing to pay for a daily newspaper. And focus on that audience. Raise the price, raise the quality.

What has the local press abandoned that you plan to do online?
There’s been a reduction in investigative reporting; analytical content. I’d like to be able to foresee the things that are going to be happening. For example, to have written a couple of years ago about, or about the logic of, a merger of the Minneapolis and Hennepin libraries.

So who pays?
We have concluded, at least in the short run, it can’t be a subscription model. We might be able to get 5,000 or 10,000 people who would understand its worth to pay us something. But to influence public dialogue and citizenship and democracy, you have to have a broad audience. So instead, we say to you, “Steve, you believe in this, you should donate money for this.” Like public radio, public television. That model works. Only a small subset of users pay, but people will pay if they believe in it.

So you’re asking for people to pay for a bunch of aging print writers writing in a new medium for an audience they’re not comfortable with.
Well, I’m confident that we have people who really want to do it and are excited about it, and part of what excites them is that we’re going to focus on the most news-intense audience.

What’s your slant? I’m a guy who  made $8 million when the Strib was sold and turned around and founded a nonprofit that proposed you should be taxed more. Is that the brand?
Absolutely. But we’re going to be nonpartisan. We will have commentary, but won’t have an institutional position. We want to promote lively discussion. We want to open it up, be edgier than newspapers, more courageous, but there are limits. And editors have to work to find those limits. That part will be fun. We’re not going to be bound by this model of trying to appeal to everybody.