Photograph by Jennifer Hengst
The living room in Margaret Freivogel’s Kirkwood home looks about as much like the temporary base of operations for an ambitious, interactive news website as the Art Museum’s main exhibition gallery looks like a good place to play paintball. It actually feels a lot like the placid refuge of a librarian: Quiet study would seem to be the prevailing activity here; what seem like thousands of books cram built-in shelves that reach the ceiling; a pair of cats lazily stretch out in opposite corners of the room. The only signs of tech life are a laptop on a cluttered desk and an iPod resting in one of the few corners of free space on those shelves. A safe estimate of the page-to-pixel ratio here would probably be in the neighborhood of 1,000-to-1.
Yet for the past year, this has been the incubator for Freivogel’s pet project, The Platform ( stlplatform.org), which, when it launches, promises to be a daily cocktail of print, audio, video and “interactive” news meant to offer more context and in-depth reporting than St. Louisans have been used to getting from their local news outlets of late.
This would probably be a good time to point out the fact that Freivogel and the other founders of the site—Dick Weil, Dick Weiss, Bob Duffy and Freivogel’s husband, Bill—are all former Post-Dispatch editors who took a buyout offer from the paper in late 2005. (Duffy is also an occasional contributor to St. Louis Magazine.) It’s also probably a good time to point out how adamant they are that they’re not, as both Freivogels note more than once, “taking aim” at their former employer. In fact, she was hesitant to discuss the site at all, thanks in part to an “antagonistic” article about The Platform that ran in the Riverfront Times last May and, in her opinion, pitted the nascent site against the print news veteran. “This is not a head-to-head competition,” she says. “That would be silly.”
Margaret will, she says, have a proper office in the not-too-distant future. (The site is tentatively set to launch in January, though as this article went to press, those plans were becoming more tentative.) Her office won’t be a big one—it won’t need to be big, thanks to the inherently low-maintenance nature of managing a website—but if The Platform delivers what she says it will, there’s a good chance it will be no place for sleeping cats.
What “interactive” means in the context of news reporting is still a little vague—if you think it sounds like the journalistic equivalent of the inmates running the asylum, you’re not alone—and even Freivogel has a difficult time defining everything that it will entail when it comes to The Platform. When pressed for details, she says things like, “People have just begun to scratch the surface of what interactive means now” and “The potential is there to be very creative and to communicate much more effectively with people,” but there were few set-in-stone specifics beyond that when she agreed to discuss the paper in September.
The basic components of the site are easy enough to grasp. As is the case with similar online news outlets that have sprung up across the country within the last couple of years—among them, Crosscut Seattle and Minnesota’s MinnPost—good ol’ fashioned written news stories on politics, medicine, the economy and culture will make up the backbone of The Platform, but they’ll just be the starting point. The editors will also post links to blogs and stories on other sites (“We want it to reflect our judgment of what’s interesting and important to the city,” Margaret says) and upload slide shows, podcasts and video. The method by which reporters report the news will be informed, in large part, by the type of story they’re covering. If the energy of a rally held on the steps of City Hall is best conveyed through video, the theory goes, why bother writing a story that might not capture the visceral details and immediacy of the experience when a video could?
The rest of the content—the interactive part—might be best described with an example from one of those other sites: Last spring, Crosscut Seattle reported that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had plans to begin distributing the news by way of an experimental “electronic paper.” The lightweight, low-power, super-thin, foldable screen would be about the size of a small tabloid newspaper and display real-time news—it was the story of a new digital branch on the evolutionary sapling of post-print media … reported by an only slightly older branch from the very same tree.
The only thing more striking than that unintentional irony was the very real glimpse the story provided of the potential for interactivity in the struggling-to-find-its-place-in-the-new-media news industry. Originally posted to the Crosscut website on May 17, it was amended the next afternoon with an editor’s note that alerted readers—and linked—to a story posted on the Post-Intelligencer’s site that refuted Crosscut’s story, followed by a response from the Crosscut reporter (which was mixed in among comments from visitors to the site who preemptively mourned the impending death of paper broadsheets while praising Crosscut as the future of journalism) that refuted the Post-Intelligencer’s refutation. The only thing missing was an MP3 download of the reporter’s taped conversation with the corporate hotshot who allegedly said the paper was considering electronic paper in the first place.
It was all very … meta. (Not to mention a little “he said, he said, we said.”) But it was also an example of the potential for story evolution that excites Margaret and the rest of The Platform’s founders. “If we write a story and somebody who’s in that story calls up and says, ‘You got this all wrong, and let me tell you why,’ there’s no reason that you can’t just say, ‘OK, I’m going to interview you right now and put this up as an additional piece of this presentation,’” she says. “There are so many ways that you can get an ongoing discussion going online.”
Discussions and comments and input from readers sound like the first steps on the slippery slope down to user-submitted content, and while the Freivogels acknowledge the, uh, cost-effectiveness of citizen journalism (“We’ll be looking for free content,” Bill says, “so we’ll be looking for offerings from citizens who are out there and wanting to write about what’s going on in their communities”), they’re both well aware of its pitfalls. “I don’t think that unvetted contributions substitute for what you can do with a staff of journalists,” Margaret says. “But I do think that there are things that people are beginning to experiment with where you can have the kind of interaction with your audience that broadens your sources and broadens your understanding of an issue.”
Whatever form it eventually takes, they’re still going to need plenty of experienced writers to produce the kind of reporting they’re looking for. For now, Margaret is the only full-time employee—the staff could grow to as many as a dozen once the site is up and running—but she says she has a large group of people, most of whom are ex– Post-Dispatch reporters, eager to get started ... and the number keeps growing with every buyout. (“By the time we’re up and running, who knows how much of a staff they’ll have left?” Bill jokes.) They didn’t leave the paper because they’d had enough with journalism—“It’s what we do,” says Duffy—they left it because they’d had it with having to take shortcuts.
Life—and the state of their employment—was a lot different for the Freivogels and company when the seeds of The Platform were sown several years ago. Since the mid-’90s, the group had overseen a nonprofit dedicated to promoting excellence in journalism; it started with an annual lecture series, but as time passed and newspaper budgets were cut, discussing the profession’s problems no longer felt like an effective use of time. “We finally decided we should stop griping and figure out what we could do about it,” Margaret says.
They settled on using money from the nonprofit to fund good reporting and place it in appropriate outlets. The idea was attractive—mainly because they were still working for the Post and didn’t have the time to do the reporting themselves—but it was about that time that things were deteriorating at the Lee Enterprises–owned Post-Dispatch to the point that they’d decided to leave. Now the question became “If we’re going to start a website—and if we’ve got the time and resources to develop it—why not use it ourselves to just go ahead and report the news that we don’t think is being reported?”
It seemed simple enough to the bunch of old print veterans (“Basically, the idea we had was ‘Well, you take words and you put them on a screen and you can send them out for free,’” Margaret says), but as they talked to more people who were familiar with what the Web made possible, their plans changed yet again to incorporate the interactive, multisource approach that has become the foundation of The Platform. And given the fluid nature of the Web, it will probably change again. “We very much expect this to evolve and grow over time and be shaped by our own experimentation,” Freivogel says. “The potential is there to be very creative.”
To this point, establishing a business model and finding a way to fund the site has been one of the larger stumbling blocks—and the main reason the site has yet to launch: When readers expect to get content for free online, how do you bring in the cash necessary to keep the operation afloat?
Because the founding members of The Platform see it as a “civic asset for the community,” Margaret says, they’re structuring it as a nonprofit, planning to rely at least initially on grants. She estimates that The Platform will need about $2 million in capital to cover operating expenses for the first two years. As of September, they had a little over $100,000 in seed money. They don’t plan to let a lack of funds delay the launch indefinitely, though. “It’s not like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus,” Duffy says. “We’re going to have to crawl at first.”
Once the site is up and running, keeping the cash flowing will be a separate challenge altogether. Margaret expects advertising to account for part of the site’s revenue, but she’s also hoping for user contributions like those that NPR and public television receive from their listeners and viewers. “You get everything for free on public radio,” she says, “but they have a very large number of donors because people believe in public radio and want it to continue.”
Of course, NPR has decades of goodwill built up with its listeners. Whether the donation model works for The Platform will depend on whether visitors to the site believe in what its founders are trying to accomplish—and how quickly they come to their conclusion.
An even bigger question, though, may be “Who will those visitors be?” The demographics are skewing older every day, but the Web is still the province of a—comparatively—younger audience without the attention span for anything that takes more than a few minutes to consume and with a tendency to be less interested in civic matters. And the style of in-depth reporting on tightly focused local stories that The Platform’s founders hope to provide is the kind of stuff that typically attracts a more mature reader. Freivogel says she’s aware of the inherent conflict, but she’s still confident an audience for her brand of news exists—in fact, whether it’s to her detriment or not, she’s not really interested in thinking in terms of a “target audience.” “I don’t believe that older people won’t find their news online, and I don’t believe that younger people aren’t interested in those topics,” she says. “I think it’s going to be our challenge to find a way to reach those people, to deliver things in a way that they find interesting and easy to get to.”
(They may want to try humor. As the director of the school of journalism at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Bill Freivogel likes to ask his students what their main source of news is. Their answer? The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. That being said, The Platform’s editors only plan to go so far to woo the younger audience. “I know that to an extent we’re running in the face of certain trends,” he says, “but we’ve decided that the content we’re going to be providing is the anti–Lindsay Lohan story.”)
It’s hard to talk about audience fragmentation—and the effect it has had on the type of news that major outlets pursue—and not talk about the Post, but in keeping with her vow to not make it an “us versus them” issue, Margaret is careful not to say anything that could be construed as a direct shot at her former employer: “We don’t want people to think we’re overpromising and underdelivering.”
Bill is less veiled in his assessment. “Our goal is that when people look at our site, we hope that they will have an idea of what’s really important that’s happening in the city, the state, the nation and the world, and I don’t think you get that at stltoday.com.”
Regardless of how they hope to do things better, though, neither Freivogel has any illusions about The Platform’s replacing the Post. They don’t plan to be nearly as comprehensive in their reporting (“It’s not as if we’re going to be covering the Cardinals,” Margaret says), and they know they don’t have the manpower to do it even if they wanted to.
And at the end of the day, they’re both aware that singling out the Post as the nexus of all that’s wrong with journalism is pointless anyway. It’s not alone: Good or bad, print news is a dying animal just looking for a front porch to crawl under and finally gasp its last breath. And the reporters who can find their niche online after it’s dead will be the ones to survive.
They just have to be able to get the damned thing off the ground first.
