Sustainable online media outlet?

I'm gonna have to keep an eye on minnpost.com
They're a small nonprofit online media outlet, and the friendly competition at the Minneapolis News says minnpost ain't doing so hot. But heck, in this economy who is?
Minnpost's top leadership hail from newspapers, so I think their guiding philosophy might be a little too dead-tree-centric. I don't know where they got the idea for the masthead but that color scheme and banner is pretty ugly. The stories seem of typical newspaper-length. That means, probably too long for the web. And the multimedia isn't presented as strongly as I'd like to see for a web-only outlet.

But that's only from a cursory glance in one sitting. I haven't compared coverage from minnpost.com to the Star-Tribune, (which declared Chapter 11 in January), the Pioneer Press, and other news outlets that folks may get their news and info from, but I'm wondering:

-What sets Minnpost's content apart from the rest? What is it's style? For it's own sake, I hope the reason isn't that it's the only nonprofit purely-online periodical in the area.

-How do online visitors interact with Minnpost.com? How long do they stay on the site? How many times a day do they visit? Do they use the RSS feeds? How lively are the discussion boards under the stories? In short, why would people use minnpost.com at all?


These questions, I think, any online news outlet would have to answer profoundly well in order to survive among the shouting masses of online content. (I'm not saying minnpost can't answer these questions well, I just don't know the geographic area and the web site yet)

Also interesting is this article's summary of minnpost's financials. The top boss says of his $1.35 million budget this year, he projects to pull in about 25% of it, or about $300k, in advertising. From the story: "We've been averaging more than $16 per 1,000 impressions, and I believe that is quite high in the market," [founder Joel] Kramer says.

I honestly don't know how well that $16 per 1,000 impressions stacks up, so I'll be looking for stats from other operations to compare.

The rest of the moolah is a combination of grant money and, since it's a nonprofit shop, donations from viewers like you. Donations make up about 38 % of the budget.

And Kramer notes the strategy that increased the site's web traffic the most: "Having interesting, lively content with a lot of frequency by the same writers, that's really what's made the most difference."

Hmmm, sounds like, oh, I don' t know, a BLOG. That's not meant to be a criticism at all. It's just a validation of the blog format as a vehicle for news delivery.

Let's see (and hope) that this nonprofit news outlet can find its stride and prove that its revenue model can work, and possibly even be cloned elsewhere.