Minnesota’s Northern Community Internet: hyperlocal and hyper-rural, too
KAXE-FM: small-town station with big ideas (and challenges)
KAXE-FM in north central Minnesota, the smallest and most rural grantee that has received support from CPB’s Public Media Innovation Fund, is trying to bring services closer to home in its region with hyperlocalized online news and citizen journalism. Mark Fuerst, whose firm Innovation4Media manages the Innovation Fund, looks at what the project turned up in its first year.
The more you watch public broadcasters react to the cascading changes in media, the more you realize that most of us are, well, broadcasters.
This should come as no big surprise. We’re trained as broadcasters and proud of our accomplishments. But this training and success makes it harder for us to think about innovative services that reach beyond broadcast.
I feel the weight of my 20 years in broadcasting every time I try imagining a “new media future” for my consulting work with stations and networks. The form and content of my creative thought is, more often than not, shaped by my experience as a radio producer and station executive.
Because of this bias toward broadcasting, I am fascinated by projects that break out of this pattern, including Lens on Atlanta, which is still in an early stage of roll out at WPBA/WABE under the leadership of Milton Clipper, and Northern Community Internet, 1,200 miles north in northern Minnesota.
These two projects are quite different in scale, but they share a common vision of service beyond the station. They aim to create and enhance community, partly through broadcasting but increasingly through online networks.
I will look at Lens on Atlanta in a later issue of Current, but here’s an introduction to the web project at Northern Community Radio (KAXE-FM) in Grand Rapids, Minn. The station’s board of directors and staff are looking to break the mold and recast “community radio values” in a new and, I think, profound way.
Northern Community Internet is a constellation of websites created by KAXE, a community radio station and regional broadcaster with three FM signals that each reach dozens of small towns and a few small cities in and around the Iron Range.
Community radio from its founding in 1949 has been a prototype of citizen journalism. It still is. Community radio has been and often is hyper-local, usually serving a relatively narrow segment of its broadcast region.
NCI redefines the usual community radio formula in at least three ways:
- It is aimed at a very broad segment of local citizens.
- For NCI, online technology is the primary delivery vehicle, where as almost all online properties created within public broadcasting are companion services, designed to support a broadcast station or network; and
- The service puts KAXE in the background. On most NCI web pages, the station’s name appears only at the bottom, with contact links.
This third point is particularly important. Almost every online project I have seen in public radio or TV endeavors to extend the broadcaster’s brand, and for good reason. Stations and networks have a enviable records of trusted service. But in all radio, and especially in community radio, any “brand” is double-edged. For every resident who loves their local community station, there are eight or nine who don’t. By lowering KAXE’s profile in NCI, the organizers deliberately tried to create room in the project for those other eight or nine potential users.
Like so many innovations, NCI emerged in part when the right people were in the right place at the right time. Maggie Montgomery brought experience and self-confidence to the challenge, and I have to assume she had a good deal of support within KAXE. Anyone who’s tried making these kinds of changes knows how difficult they are to sell to the usual stakeholders of a station. But Ms. Montgomery would not have gotten very far without other factors, notably the support from the Blandin Foundation, also based in Grand Rapids.
As the early NCI proposal circulated around KAXE, Blantin was separately studying how broadband technology could improve the quality of life in rural communities. That coincidence led to substantial support for NCI.
NCI also needed a spark plug, which came in the form of Ross Williams, a community organizer who was tinkering with his own hyperlocal online efforts which he described to me as a “Craigslist for rural communities.”
Early on, Williams and Montgomery agreed on one important point about NCI: Even though planners felt a strong temptation to make NCI a “local news site,” they realized that local news of the city council/public policy variety wasn’t going to attract a large audience in the sparsely populated region.
Williams in particular felt NCI had to offer features common to small-town newspapers and mom-and-pop rural stations — reports about births, deaths and family news: “For those who were wondering about all those people showing up at Martha Kupnik’s house, we are pleased to report that her sister from Seattle and her mother, who you probably know from Duluth, have been staying with her this week . . . ” Such is the hyperlocal news from Lake Wobegon, which you’d expect to be located hereabouts. In his vision, Williams explained, NCI should, be about “anything created by, for and about the people who live in that area.”
Still, NCI, from its inception, was going to have news, and its development was heavily influenced by contemporary models of citizen journalism. Finding and training nonprofessionals to report on local events and issues was always a key element of the project. So were some innovative business practices, like citizen-funded reporting. For that part of the project they secured $30,500 from the CPB Public Media Innovation Fund.
Another factor that enabled NCI to emerge was the falling cost of web software. A decade earlier, the project would have cost far too much, but by mid-decade, the cost of an online software suite was within reach even for a small rural station.
With the pieces in place, Blandin provided a $25,000 planning grant, which supported a year of community ascertainment and planning. Montgomery, Williams and others held public forums throughout the service area, which stretches almost 100 miles in every direction — from Lake Superior on the east to Canada on the north, Bemidji on the west and Brainerd to the southwest.
Sufficiently impressed by the assessment and planning, Blantin provided seed capital, this time $125,000, which allowed Williams and an outside developer to build the “nested” set of community websites at www. northerncommunityinternet.org.
NCI offers six distinct regional community sites — for Bemidji, Brainerd, Grand Rapids, Cass Lake/Leech Lake, the Iron Range and Park Rapids. Each has offers multiple subsites that focus even more tightly on small communities —19 interconnected sites and subsites in all, so far, all created for less than $200,000.
With a unified backend, the NCI staff can selectively publish appropriate material on any or all of the sites, depending on local interest. Pages have space for original news features commissioned by NCI, as well as RSS news feeds from regional newspapers (which also get feeds from NCI), as well as event calendars, blogs, photo galleries, display ads and classifieds.
The designers did not aim to create something new and distinctive. Instead, as Williams explained, “We wanted to create something that . . . would take advantage of things (people) may already be using, things that are already part of their life.” The calendar comes from Google: it’s free, easy to use and compatible with many existing personal and group calendars. NCI’s citizen journalists use Blogger to file their stories for similar reasons.
The citizen journalists, as Montgomery explained, are “a combination of paid community journalists working as stringers and volunteers who are part of local community journalism clubs.” Stories flow through Katie Carter, the NCI project editor who assigned stories, edits the product and negotiates fees, if any. When possible, stories move both ways — from NCI to broadcast on KAXE and sometimes from KAXE to text on NCI websites.
The output has been substantial: citizen journalists produced 164 stories over about seven months, almost all features rather than hard news.
How’s it working?
Richard Tait, the consultant who helps me manage the Public Media Innovation Fund, has many clients eager to “think outside the box,” but he cautions them about Rule No. 1 for Innovators: “Your first idea is usually wrong.” Innovation turns out to be a process of improving and reshaping original concepts that almost always need refinement. It should come as no surprise that Northern Community Internet did not take off like a rocket.
Traffic has been modest at best. Revenues fell short of targets. Even some production and design features did not work as anticipated.
For example, repurposing content from the website to radio was awkward. While the common problem in radio is to convert audio news into text for the Web, NCI found was that the reverse is also challenging. “We had difficulties in translating some of the print stories into interesting radio,” Montgomery explained. Consequently, KAXE often found the most attractive radio version of a text story was an interview about the story.
Even with the impressive copy flow, citizen journalists could not keep the regional sites stocked with new stories every day — a basic requirement for sites that aspire to attract daily traffic. Part of the problem was a design issue: Longer, commissioned pieces with longer shelf lives were featured at the tops of the landing pages, while the faster-changing items (local news headlines, classifieds, and events) fell “below the fold”—you wouldn’t see them unless you scrolled down the page. Since then, NCI has arranged its pages to highlight popular stories.
In its first year, the project also did not generate the level of readership and reputation needed to become an integral part of the local communities.
NCI’s monthly traffic ranged from about 1,000 visitors in January, as the site was getting started, to a high of 1,931 visits in July, when the population swelled with summer vacationers. Since August, the traffic has remained more or less steady around 1,500 visitors a month.
NCI’s most-visited part is “hub” home-page, which generated about 42 percent of last year’s pageviews. Grand Rapids is the most popular local section, generating 22 percent of NCI pageviews and more than 7,000 visits in 2009 — from a population of only 7,000 people. NCI also has some traction in Bemidji, pulling 14 percent of the total pageviews and 6,375 visits in 2009 from a population of 13,500.
Appealing to smaller towns has proved to be much more difficult. For example, NCI’s shared Cass Lake/Leech Lake portal scored only 120 pageviews for NCI though Cass Lake alone has half the population of Grand Rapids.
What would make a difference in attracting an audience? For one thing, Williams concluded, NCI needed a scoop: “We never had the story” — the news item that gets everyone talking — “which might have established NCI as a go-to source for news and information.” And they need endurance. Williams concluded, sensibly, that it would take “longer than six months to establish readership and reputation.”
So, NCI ends its first year like so many startups. They burned through their initial capitalization. They put something new on the media map. Their decisions were right on some things — journalism alone would not be enough — and wrong on others—selling ads proved to be a real slog.
In their report to CPB’s PMI Fund, they explained that NCI never thought city council news would keep them in business, but they may have underestimated the value of “other services such as blog feeds, classified ads, search, etc.. [which] brought significant numbers of people to the site, [while] only about 10 percent of the access was to the community-supported journalism section.”
The traffic shows the value of broadcast promotion: The Grand Rapids site did well because KAXE is based there.
Personal involvement, personal contacts, and broadcast promotion certainly played a role in making the Grand Rapids Internet portal the most active part of NCI. To boost all of the sites, KAXE may have to give NCI even more promotion on air. If there is a best practice for building online properties from existing media, it’s coming from BBC and CNN, which provide continuous co-promotion to build awareness and drive daily traffic.
As you probably guessed, the fiscal aspect of NCI also did not work out as anticipated.
The innovative ad program, which included finding sponsors for specific journalism projects in advance of their creation, proved to be a difficult sell. (Other “crowdfunding” efforts are teaching this same lesson.) And user donations to NCI were equally disappointing: NCI’s grant report showed that “Links on [NCI] did not generate many, if any, contributors, despite . . . [the presence of] large display buttons and a specific appeal at the end of each story.” When money did come in, the donors often had personal connections with KAXE or NCI that were far more intimate and complex than just landing on the NCI site.
Innovation: ongoing process
This kind of disappointing realization may look obvious in retrospect, but it easily can be obscured by the excitement that surrounds any large-scale innovation. And it is that willingness to believe in a long shot that often gives the innovator the courage to strike out on an ambitious project.
Montgomery and Williams are determined to keep trying. Their grantee report to CPB explained: “A full test would require a much larger investment over a longer period of time. The six-month time frame of this test was not long enough to build the audience and credibility needed to attract large amounts of financial support.
But the results were encouraging enough to keep them at it. “We believe that this model could be self-sustaining,” they wrote. “We may need to choose a different strategy — focusing on fewer communities.”
The Blandin Foundation has already provided an additional $5,000 to keep the wheels turning and the commitment from KAXE is bolstered by the enthusiasm of local journalists who believe in the NCI concept, even though, according to Montgomery, “we really don’t currently have the resources needed to maintain those relationships.”
As part of the next phase of NCI, Montgomery is committed to securing additional outside investment and, perhaps shifting some of the development emphasis toward a kind of local news bureau that serves northern Minnesota and shares coverage of local stories with a variety of media.
Mark Fuerst is known for his own innovative work, including 10 years as g.m. of Philadelphia’s WXPN-FM, where he helped to bring Triple-A music to public radio and create The World Café, and for his role in founding the Integrated Media Association. Based in Rhinebeck, N.Y., his firm, Innovation4Media, is managing several CPB projects, including Public Media Metrics, which tracks activity at public broadcasting online properties, and the Public Media Innovation Fund, which placed investments in 24 new-media experiments and development projects over the past three years. E-mail: markfuerst 
gmail.com.
Web page posted March 2, 2010
Copyright 2010 by Current LLC