Beginning today, you’ll see our expanded daily business report.

When you check out our enhanced Business Agenda daily section below, you’ll find two new features:

• A daily business news story, analysis or backgrounder from Brad Allen that will deal with local and regional business developments and trends and, often, with how they relate to the “big picture” economic world. Brad is an experienced reporter in both the general and financial press, and he also has spent a large chunk of his career in the corporate world, particularly in investor relations for technology companies. You can read some of his recent MinnPost articles here.

• A partnership with the Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal, one of 42 local business newspapers owned by American City Business Journals. Its staff will bring you coverage of breaking local business news, as well as features and backgrounders. Look for two daily news summaries: Our A.M. Report will go live about midmorning, and our P.M. report will be posted in mid- or late afternoon.

The new package is meant to complement our occasional in-depth business stories, such as Dave Beal’s Wednesday report on some of the psychological forces driving investors’ decisions in the world’s financial markets.

We hope you find our expanded coverage helpful in providing a more comprehensive look at the business and economic world, and we welcome your feedback on the enhancements. You can leave your thoughts in the comment section below.

Don Effenberger is a MinnPost news editor. He can be reached at deffenberger [at] minnpost [dot] com or followed on Twitter @DonEffenberger.

Wow!

Give to the Max Day generated 158 online donations to MinnPost in the past 24 hours, totaling more than $18,000.

We didn’t make the top 10 list for most donors, which you can see here.

But for the size of our enterprise, the results were impressive.

The donations have been coming in faster than we can enter them in our database, so we’re not sure yet how many are first-time donors. We’ll update on that. And we'll let you know how close we are to our goal of 1,600 members by year-end.

Update: We have 76 first-time donors, bringing us to 1,611 members.

Give to the Max Day is a project of the new giving portal GiveMN.org, and we are an outreach partner of GiveMN. 

Overall, the day generated more than $13 million in online donations to more than 3,000 Minnesota nonprofits. Since the number was so high, the $500,000 in matching funds GiveMN assembled will generate less than 5 cents of match per dollar. But I’ll bet a lot of nonprofits will be happy anyway to see so much online donation activity. I know we are.

Give to the Max Day is over.  But you can still donate online to MinnPost here.

Thanks to everyone for your support.

Waiting for exactly the right moment to become a member of MinnPost? Wait no more.

Today is ‘Give to the Max’ Day. That means your membership donation to MinnPost will be matched in part by local foundations -- as long as it’s made online through GiveMN.org.

And just by joining, you’ll move us closer to our year-end membership goal.

We have 1,535 annual members right now. Our end-of-year goal is 1,600. Only 65 to go.

From $50 Cub Reporters to $5,000 Media Moguls, we have categories to suit almost every pocketbook. And payments can be spread out, as long as each payment is at least $10.

To become a member at the level of your choice, click here.

Thanks for doing your part. After you join, 64 to go.

P.S. If you’re already a member, click here to make an extra gift to MinnPost. Under Make a Donation, enter the amount in the box next to Other. Then click Donate. Extra thanks.

Want to feel some MinnPost newsprint in your hands?

We've just published our second anniversary commemorative print edition — The Best of MinnPost.com.

The stories and photos were selected from among the thousands we’ve published in the past 12 months. You can read everything online here.

But if you want to turn the pages with your morning brew, just pick up a free copy at your neighborhood Dunn Bros Coffee. Distribution to more than 60 locations will be complete by next Monday.

Many of you are receiving emails from all the nonprofits you support -- telling you about the Give to the Max campaign.

The campaign starts next Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 8:01 a.m., and runs for exactly 24 hours.

Donations made to nonprofits that day will be matched in part by local foundations -- if the donation is made through the new GiveMN.org portal.

MinnPost, like other nonprofits, definitely needs your donations. 2009 has been a tough year for journalism enterprises and nonprofits, and MinnPost is both. 

Here’s how you can help us on Tuesday:

If you’re already an Annual Member, click here to make an extra gift to MinnPost. Under Make a Donation, enter the amount of your gift in the box next to Other. Then click the Donate button below.

If you’re not yet an Annual Member, join here. From $50 Cub Reporters to $5,000 Media Moguls, we need you.

We have 1,530 Annual Members right now. Our end-of-year goal is 1,600.

Just 70 more needed. Are YOU a member?

The news from MinnPost’s second birthday party:

The official MinnPost staff team won round one of the Trivia Battle of the MinnPost Brains by a bare half point. They scored 19.5 (out of a possible 25.5). Congrats to news editor Don Effenberger, co-managing editor Susan Albright, office manager Gin Kujawa and writer Joe Kimball.

The official MinnPost members team -- Brad Lundell, Sheila Smith, Becky Beyers and Marshall Tanick -- scored 19. (They earned their spots on the team by scoring well in a prelim round and rounding up the most votes in an online election.)

Many of the 175 or so party-goers formed teams to participate in the trivia battle. Audience team scores ranged from a high of 17.5 to a low of 1.

Before you scoff, try your luck below.

The highest-scoring audience team was Sarah’s Stars. The Stars turned out to be Eric Black, David Brauer and two other celestial members of the Brauer family named Sarah and Abigail.

For the record, even though they did not move on to round two: The next highest-scoring audience team was B.D. Nelson and the Nickelodeons with a score of 17.  

In round two, eight bonus questions based on obscure personal info submitted by MinnPost journalists, the official staff team got two right and the other two teams were left in the dust. Luckily, the extra four points did not change the outcome.

Thanks to Trivia Battle emcee and MinnPost humorist-in-residence Uncle Al Sicherman for writing the round one questions. They are listed below with their answers and Al’s commentary. Party photos by Jana Freiband are below. If we got your name wrong, let us know.

Slide show 1 | Slide show 2 | Slide show 3 | Slide show 4

Round one questions, answers and associated drivel by Al Sicherman

1) In 1963 the son of a famous singer was kidnapped and released after payment of $240,000 ransom. What was the son's first name?

Frank. Frank Sinatra Jr. had a guest spot playing himself on "The Sopranos," in a role in which the character Paulie Walnuts referred to him as the "Chairboy of the Board."

2) The word "dust" appears 24 times in the first four pages of this book.

The Grapes of Wrath. The G of W was published in 1939. The movie was made in 1940. And it won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel that year. In 1962, 23 years later, the Nobel Prize committee cited Grapes of Wrath as one of the main reasons for granting Steinbeck the Nobel Prize for Literature.

3) What designer is credited with popularizing the "little black dress?"

Coco Chanel. She died in 1971.  She was the only person in haute couture to be named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

4)  In 1978 Dan White killed a big-city mayor and this man.

Harvey Milk. Milk also was one of that Time magazine 100. The article described him as the first openly gay man elected to any substantial political office in the history of the planet.

5) This household appliance was promoted in advertisements starting in 1973 by the famous former husband of a major movie star.

Mr. Coffee. (Half a point for Joe DiMaggio and not listening carefully to the question.) The just-retired Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe in January 1954. She filed for divorce on grounds of mental cruelty 274 days after the wedding. He never remarried, arranged her funeral in 1962, and had a half-dozen red roses delivered 3 times a week to her crypt for 20 years. After that he apparently said the hell with it.

6) Name the book whose first line is "All children, except one, grow up."

Peter Pan. Peanut butter used to be gritty. In 1922, a guy named Joseph L. Rosefield began selling peanut butter that was churned like butter so it was smooth, and because the oil didn't separate from the peanut butter it would stay fresh for up to a year.  One of the first companies to adopt this new process was Swift & Company which in 1928 renamed its product Peter Pan. In 1932, Rosefield had a dispute with Peter Pan and began producing Skippy peanut butter.

7) A best-selling 1960 children's book was written because the publisher bet the author that he couldn't write a book with a total vocabulary of 50 words. What's the title?

Green Eggs and Ham. The editor was Bennett Cerf, publisher and cofounder of Random House and panelist on "What's My Line?" He was bigger than a breadbox.

8) Who has scored the most career touchdowns in Super Bowl games? 

Jerry Rice. 8 touchdowns.

9) The trust that funds a boarding school for underprivileged students, which opened 100 years ago, owns the controlling interest in what major company?

Hershey. Milton Hershey School is a cost-free, private, coeducational home and pre-kindergarten through 12th grade school for children from families of low income, limited resources, and social need. 

10) This 1957 hit by Patti Page was later recorded by Bette Midler and Jerry Vale, among others.  

Old Cape Cod.  [[I was distracted from reading the following drivel by Doug Grow's request that I sing "Old Cape Cod."]] Patti Page has sold more than 100 million records in her career, making her one of the biggest selling female recording artists in history. Other hits include “Mockin’ Bird Hill,” “I Went To Your Wedding,” “Mister & Mississippi,” and of course “Tennessee Waltz” which sold more than 20 million copies. Today (November 8) is her birthday; she just turned 82 and still performs occasionally. 

11) The Turkish military and militant members of this ethnic group have clashed along Turkey's southeastern border.

Kurds. There are by one estimate 100,000 Kurds in the United States. For reasons that can't possibly be explained, the biggest concentration of Kurds in America (10,000 to 15,000) is in Nashville, Tenn.

12) One of the members of a now-defunct all-girl singing group won over an audition panel in 1993 when, asked her age, she replied: "I'm as old as you want me to be. I'll be 10 with big boobs if you want." What was this group?  

Spice Girls. It was Geri Haliwell -- Ginger Spice. I always felt that that group needed a baritone. I wuz gonna call myself "Old Spice."

13) The strongest earthquake ever recorded, a 9.5, hit this Western Hemisphere country in 1960.

Chile. This is not the quake with the largest death toll; just the strongest quake. For modern times, the 9.3 Sumatra Andaman earthquake and tsunami in late 2004 is now estimated to have claimed 275,000 lives.

14) Name the impure mixture of uranium oxides obtained during the processing of uranium ore.

Yellowcake. The related names (for no points) are retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, columnist Robert Novak, Wilson's wife, CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame, AND Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who deserved conviction for having retained into adulthood the nickname Scooter. 

15) This nobleman was lord of the admiralty and principal supporter of Captain Cook's Pacific exploration, and was honored when Cook named a group of islands for him. Who was he? 

The Earl of Sandwich. John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, is remembered for sponsoring the voyages of discovery made by Captain James Cook, who named the Sandwich Islands (later Hawaii) in his honor. He is also the namesake of the sandwich. It is said that he ordered his valet to bring him meat tucked between two pieces of bread, because it allowed him to continue playing cards while eating meat, without getting his cards greasy.

In a famous exchange with dramatist Samuel Foote (which I have edited slightly for best effect), Sandwich declared, "Foote, I have often wondered what catastrophe would bring you to your end; but I think, that you must die of either the noose or the pox!" Foote replied "That will depend upon whether I embrace your lordship's principles or your lordship's mistress."

16) Jayne and Joan Boyd starred in commercials from 1959 to 1963 for what? And for an extra half-point, why were they replaced in 1963? (It's two, two, two questions in one!)

DoubleMint gum. Joan got pregnant (had a bun in the oven).  

17) South Carolina has two Republican senators; their first names are Lindsey and Jim. Last names, please. (Get both or get no points.)

Graham, deMint.   

18) This soccer player has more international goals than any other player in the history of the sport.

Mia Hamm. 154 goals. Hamm was born with a club foot, and had to wear corrective shoes as a toddler.

19) What was Anthony McAuliffe's famous one-word reply to a military ultimatum?

Nuts. It was a reply to a five-paragraph demand for surrender, from the German commander encircling the town of Bastogne. (In full, General McAuliffe's reply was: "To the German Commander, NUTS! The American Commander." It was typed and delivered to the German delegation by Colonel Joseph Harper, commanding the 327th Glider Infantry. Harper had to explain to the Germans the meaning of the word "nuts,” telling them that it meant "Go to hell."

20) Each title in the series of books about this New Jersey native contains a cardinal number. Name the person.

Stephanie Plum. Janet Evanovich's Plum is a bounty hunter in a blue-collar pocket of Trenton where (as she says) houses are attached and narrow, cars are American, windows are clean, and dinner (God forbid you should be late) is served at six.

21) In 1930 Ruth Wakefield cut up something and unintentionally invented a popular baked snack. What was this now-ubiquitous treat?

Chocolate chip cookie. Wakefield and her husband owned a tourist lodge in Whitman, Mass., named the Toll House Inn. One morning Wakefield was mixing a batch of chocolate cookies for the guests when she discovered that she was out of cocoa powder. She substituted broken pieces of a Nestle's semisweet chocolate bar, expecting it to melt into the dough to create chocolate cookies. That didn't happen, but the cookies were terrific. She called them "Toll House Crunch Cookies." They became extremely popular locally, and the recipe was soon published in a Boston newspaper. Nestle noticed increased sales of its semisweet chocolate, and soon won an agreement with the Wakefields: Nestle got to print the Toll House Cookie recipe on its package, and the Wakefields got . . .  a lifetime supply of Nestle chocolate.

22) In the pilot of this actor's TV series, his twin boys were named after his real twin sons, but the TV twins' names were changed in subsequent episodes. What's the actor's name?

Ray Romano. Romano grew up in Queens and graduated from Hillcrest High School in 1975 in the same class as Fran Drescher. Before breaking into show business, Romano attended Queens College, where he majored in accounting and made it to the Dean's List for three years.

23) Name the painter whom critics have called "Jack the Dripper." 

Jackson Pollock. Pollock grew up in Arizona and Chico, Calif. Expelled from one high school in 1928, he enrolled at Los Angeles's Manual Arts High School, from which he was also expelled.

24) The singer/guitarist with this band is the only person ever to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three times and is credited with popularizing the use of the wah-wah pedal.

Cream (Eric Clapton). Clapton has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Yardbirds, of Cream, and as a solo performer. (Wah-wah!)

25) What board game has a Queen Frostine card?   

Candy Land. You may be saddened to note that the character Plumpy was removed in 2002.

Slide show 1 | Slide show 2 | Slide show 3 | Slide show 4

Cynthia Dizikes, who has been MinnPost’s Washington correspondent since January, is leaving us to take a metro reporting position at the Chicago Tribune.

To replace her, we have hired Derek Wallbank Jr., most recently a researcher/reporter for Congressional Quarterly in Washington, and previously a reporter and political blogger for the Lansing State Journal in Michigan.

Cynthia told us she was very reluctant to leave MinnPost, but in the end the chance to be a reporter for the big newspaper in her hometown won out.

We’ll miss her. She was an enthusiastic and dogged reporter and a prolific writer, and she established MinnPost as the place to go to know what’s going on in Minnesota’s congressional delegation.

But we’re excited about Derek.

In Lansing, Derek covered the K12 education beat, and directed coverage for and wrote the Lansing State Journal’s state and national politics blog, which won an award from the national Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors in 2007 for outstanding political commentary. In 2008, it was listed as one of the best state political blogs in America by the Washington Post. 

Derek won a first-place award in 2008 for statehouse reporting in newspapers with circulation under 70,000 from the national Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors. 

In Washington, Derek managed CQ’s events database, reported on campaigns, elections and health-care overhaul efforts for CQPolitics.com and CQ HealthBeat publications, and analyzed congressional districts for CQ’s Politics in America reference book.

Derek says his favorite stories have involved either “uncovering things in government statistics” or  “sticking around for a story when the rest of the media had given up.”

To learn a little about Derek’s personal interests, such as the fact that he and his wife are renaissance fair junkies, check out this recent interview with him on the mediabistro blog Fishbowl DC. 

Derek starts today, and will be trained in and introduced to Minnesota’s congressional delegation by Cynthia, who will be moving on Nov. 20.

Joel Kramer is CEO and editor of MinnPost.com. He can be reached at jkramer[at]minnpost[dot]com.

Voting for spots on the members team -- for the Trivia Battle of the MinnPost brains -- is now closed.

The last vote was cast at 11:43 p.m.

And the winners are: Brad Lundell. Sheila Smith. Becky Beyers. Marshall Tanick.

Their bios are here. Congrats to them and their devoted friends.

Time to celebrate
The Trivia Battle is the centerpiece of MinnPost’s second birthday party -- Sunday at St. Anthony Main Event Centre. The event goes from 2 to 5 pm and the Trivia Battle starts at 2:45.

It’s free to all 2009 donors/members. ($10 for non-members.) Join or renew here.

Round one
The Trivia Battle will have two rounds.

For round one, emcee Al Sicherman will read 25 questions created by him for this event. Answers will be in writing.

Round one is open to the official MinnPost staff team, the elected MinnPost members team, and as many audience teams as want to compete. Audience teams can have 1 to 4 members. Cell phones and PDAs not allowed.

Answer sheets will be collected and scored by PriceWaterhouse Coopers volunteers flown in for this occasion. While they score, Al will explain the questions and what he thinks are the right answers. Disputes settled outside.

Round two
Round two is a three-way competition of the staff team, the members team, and the top-scoring audience team from round one.

Al will read 10 questions, developed from trivia nuggets submitted by MinnPost journalists.

Answers will be shouted out. Depending on his mood, Al may require shouters to say “Ooh! Ooh! I know this one!”

We'll give two points for each correct answer. If any team gets one.

The winners
First, second and third place winners will be decided by the total number of points earned in rounds one and two. MinnPost prizes for all three teams.

It’s not too late ...
... to RSVP to vkujawa [at] minnpost [dot] com. See you Sunday.

Today MinnPost opens a window onto an important segment of our community: the lawyers.

In huge firms and one-person practices, in the state and federal courts, in nonprofits, businesses, legislative bodies and law schools, lawyers and the law have a big impact on public life. The media rarely report on that impact, or how the work gets done, except when the most controversial cases or incidents pop up.

One of the challenges, of course, is finding the right person to uncover and tell the stories. We believe we’ve got a good one for you.

Sam Glover is a lawyer in Minneapolis, specializing in representing consumers in debt cases. 

He created the blog Lawyerist and he has become a nationally prominent blogger about the legal profession — in fact, we discovered him by searching for “Minnesota attorney who blog.” 

Sam also created a consumer law blog — called Caveat Emptor — and he writes a monthly column for Consumerist. He is a frequent speaker on practicing law and he teaches appellate advocacy at the University of Minnesota Law School.

As a group, lawyers do not have the reputation of being great writers, but we were attracted to Sam because he can communicate complicated ideas in plain English.

We’re calling our legal posts Behind the Bar, and we expect to have a fresh post up on the site about once a week.  I hope you’ll read the first piece, join the conversation in the comments, pass along story ideas and spread the word. 

Joel Kramer is CEO and editor of MinnPost.com. He can be reached at jkramer[at]minnpost[dot]com.

As news publishers struggle mightily to find a sustainable financial model, here’s one theme that I see gaining traction: Loyal audience is more important than mass audience.

The editor of Slate, a well-known national site in a news magazine format, said recently in a talk that a possible path to financial success for Slate rests not with the 7 million unique monthly visitors to its website but with about 500,000 loyal readers who want quality, long-form journalism.

MinnPost shares this strategic belief in the power of a loyal, engaged audience. Loyal readers are prospective members. They are ambassadors for our work, in person and online. They are the people whom our advertisers and sponsors want to communicate with, on our website and at events. They add content to the site through their comments, news tips, and Community Voices articles.

It is easy to lose sight of this more engaged audience, because of the most-quoted measures of traffic on the Internet: unique monthly visitors and page views. A unique monthly visitor is one web address visiting a site at least once during a month. Page views represent the total number of pages opened by all these visitors on all their visits. 

But on most websites, ours included, the vast majority of unique visitors are passersby. They come through a search or a link from a blog, and they visit the site precisely once, usually for a quick glance at one page. In many cases, if you ask them 30 seconds later which site they just linked to, they won’t remember. It would be folly for us to build a business plan around consumers like that.  

(In fact, the passerby phenomenon, driven by Internet search and linking, is a major factor in why online advertising revenue doesn’t come close to replacing what newspaper publishers are losing in print: There are simply too many page views, too much inventory, chasing too few advertisers, so online advertising rates stay low.)

One traffic-measuring site I like is Quantcast, where the public can compare results among websites.  The numbers are accurate only for sites that, like MinnPost, agree to be quantified — i.e. give Quantcast access to their data. According to Quantcast, 168,000 different people visited MinnPost during the past month (as measured on Oct. 28). This is a somewhat smaller number than unique visitors, because Quantcast aims to count a person only once even if he or she visits from, say, both office and home.

About 71% of these visitors to MinnPost in the past month were passersby, Quantcast reports, and they accounted for 32% of the visits to the site. Another 29% of the visitors are called “regulars,” which means they visited the site at least twice but fewer than 30 times, and they accounted for 51% of the visits. Finally, there are the addicts — fewer than 1% of MinnPost’s visitors — who visited at least 30 times each and together accounted for 17% of the visits.

In other words, about 48,000 repeat visitors accounted for 68% of the 385,000 visits Quantcast measured to our site last month. These repeat visitors account for a much higher percentage of our total page views, since we know from our internal data that repeat visitors look at more pages per visit.

Based on other data we have, I’d guess that about half of these repeat visitors come to our site at least four times a month. Those 25,000 or so readers are our true regulars. Many of them engage with us in other ways: they sign up for our daily email (about 6,000), or our weekly Greater Minnesota email (2,800) or follow us on Twitter (about 4,700) or Facebook (1,100), or they are registered to comment on our stories (about 4,700). Then there are those who help our site succeed financially by donating — more than 1,500 annual members and a couple of hundred other donors, and the more than 600 people who attended our annual benefit, MinnRoast, in April.

Our challenge is to increase the numbers of people engaging regularly with MinnPost and to engage them even more. We welcome ideas on how to do this.