Publisher’s Desk

Hello Readers,

Welcome to Duluth’s newest news publication, the Duluth Monitor. We’re living in the future now, so we’ve decided to part ways with the paper mills and be online-only. As soon as the high quality of our product becomes apparent, we don’t think people will mind reading us on a screen.

Here is why the Monitor exists: We believe that people want more news. If you look at newspapers from even 20 years ago, they were noticeably bulkier, because they had more reporters publishing more stories. A hundred years before that, the city supported several newspapers, and information packed the pages so densely they were hard to read.

Now look at today. The newspapers that remain are thin sheaves rather than healthy bundles. There are very few working news reporters left in the city, probably fewer than a dozen, most of them laboring for paychecks cut by disconnected corporate owners. The TV news is complete fluff almost a hundred percent of the time. Among the newspapers, beats that used to be standard fare now go completely unreported.

The Monitor’s strategy for dominating the media landscape in Duluth, then, is as follows: Go to meetings, get stories, and publish them. It’s easy for us to promise our readers fresh news, because we know that most of the time, we’ll be the only media there. It’s a wide-open field. We’ll score touchdowns every week just by showing up.

We’re here to deliver the news. Hard, basic news—what’s going on in your town, your county, and your region. News used to be all over the place. Now it’s almost gone. The Monitor will bring it back, and people will remember what they’ve been missing. We sense such a demand for this that we think we’ll gather a lot of followers in a fairly short time. The quality of our articles will generate pageviews, which we will use to sell advertising as one plank of our business plan.

We’re running the Monitor as a for-profit operation. Now that the first issue is out, readers can see that we’re serious. Nobody will cover Duluth like the Monitor, period.

Long ago, aspiring artists had to rely on the generosity of wealthy patrons to pursue their dreams. Today, I think the patron model can help to launch investigative journalism in Duluth—except that patrons don’t have to be wealthy. I have started a Patreon account, where supporters can pledge a certain amount of money per month to compensate me and others for writing the articles in the Monitor. The pledge can be as low as $1 a month, which is $12 a year—the price of a magazine subscription. 

How much, you may ask, am I looking for? That is an excellent question. A year from now, if I was making $1,500 a month from the Patreon arm of the operation, I wouldn’t be sad. It would only take 1,500 people pledging $1 a month to reach that goal. Or 750 people pledging $2. Or one person pledging $1,500. Easy as pie. The Patreon money will be strictly used to pay reporters, the paper’s most valuable asset. All of the Monitor’s other expenses will be covered in other ways.

We’ll be a weekly newspaper, with a new issue appearing each Wednesday. You can expect three to five new stories per week to begin with. Since our output will be growing at the same time that other news operations are increasingly starved for news, we expect to do some business in reprint sales. The more reporters we have working, the more stories we’ll publish. We may publish occasional opinion columns by guest writers, but we do not expect opinion columns to be a regular feature of the paper. We’re not running recipes or reviews or calendars or poetry or personal ads. We will take your letters, though. Letters are always welcome.

Those who wish to be involved with the Monitor should consider reporting some news for us. We can send you to meetings with a digital recorder and see if it’s something you like. We might even be able to pay you something. We are always looking for ways to increase the flow of news through our pages, and that starts with sending you to a meeting. Email us for details.

I guess that’s all I have. Are there any questions?

Good, let’s go.