Not long ago, I was walking through the 7th Street Transit Center in downtown Minneapolis near the Target Center when something caught my eye — an empty City Pages rack. The sight of it brought an unexpected twinge of sadness.
I didn’t know anyone who worked at City Pages, the defunct alternative weekly that served the Twin Cities from 1979 until last October, but the shuttering of any publication is never good for those of us in journalism. The Star Tribune, CP’s last owner, shut it down, citing pandemic-related revenue shortfalls. I moved here well after the twin heydays of the Twin Cities Reader and CP in the 1990s, when both award-winning alt-weeklies broke news and poked bears on each side of the Mississippi.
CP was the last survivor, and in the months since its demise no entity stepped into the arts and entertainment chasm. But now, four former CP editors — Emily Cassel, Jay Boller, Jessica Armbruster and Keith Harris — plan to resurrect the spirit of CP in a website they call Racket. It’s a word that evokes the quirky, distinct phrasing of the late David Carr, the former Reader editor known for his exemplary media columns at The New York Times.
“We wanted something that was an expression of us,” said Cassel, CP’s first female editor-in-chief. “We are all a little bit noisy, rambunctious. I think part of that alt-weekly spirit is that you are a little bit loud in a way that is not always super pleasing to the listener. So we love the idea of making a racket.”
Carr might have called this effort a “caper.” It may not be illicit or ridiculous, but it’s certainly a gamble. Instead of relying solely on advertising, Racket — which launches August 18 — hopes to generate revenue through three levels of subscriptions, from $50 up to $999 a year. The founders fronted the seed money themselves, betting folks are so starved for alt-weekly content that they’ll pay for it — something readers never did with CP, which was free and available at gin joints and coffee shops all over the Cities.
“A huge part of the reason City Pages didn’t make it is that advertising dollars dried up from the places that would have traditionally funded an alt-weekly,” Cassel said, meaning bars, restaurants, concert venues and strip clubs. “We certainly thought about advertising as a model, then looked around and said, ‘We don’t want to be in that same situation again. We don’t want to be relying on ads when it seems like those ad dollars could go away in an instant.’”
By going digital only, Racket eliminates CP’s newsprint and delivery costs. There won’t be a Racket office, either; everyone is working from home. (When the editors do need to meet, it’s usually at the Midtown Global Market on Lake Street.) All those things reduce monthly overhead, lowering the threshold to turn a profit.
Thing is, it’s hard to convince people to pay for something they’re used to getting for free. Community newspapers like The Villager and others tried this in recent years, with limited success. Cassel, though, is encouraged that 1,300 people signed up for their two free newsletters, with about half buying subscriptions.
“To have not published a single word yet and have that, that was confirmation to us this was the right thing and we’re hopefully moving in the right direction,” she said. “We’re asking people to support a totally different business model that’s online only and, once again, doesn’t exist yet. That wave of support was really humbling and felt very cool to see.”
Before the four committed to the project, Boller said he emailed Tom Ley of Defector, the employee-owned sports and culture website culled from the wreckage of Deadspin. Defector was launched by former Deadspin staffers who quit or were fired in a dispute with new owners. Though it sells no ads, Defector generates enough money from subscriptions to pay the salaries of more than 20 staffers, according to the Washington Post.
Ley responded quickly and suggested Boller and Cassel join him for a video chat.
“That was kind of our first stroke of luck with this whole endeavor,” Boller said. ”The first question I asked him was, how did you do what you did, and how can we copy it? He laughed and kind of took us through the process. They made it seem incredibly easy.”
Fifteen minutes after the call ended, Boller said Ley emailed them both, urging them to go for it. “That was a vote of confidence as we began a thing we were pretty clueless about how to get off the ground,” he said.
So what will Racket read like?
“I think (readers) should expect to see a lot of the quirky minutia of Twin Cities life that we were doing,” Cassel said. “You can expect some weird cultural phenomena, and explorations of weird subcultures or small groups you otherwise wouldn’t hear or read about.
“We’re pretty lucky here, all things considered. We have MinnPost. We have the (Minnesota) Reformer. We have the Sahan Journal. We have options. But we don’t have anything in the niche that City Pages was, this kind of fearless, scrappy little kid brother that’s always trying to punch up and has something to prove, that annoys the people that need to be annoyed.”
That would be welcome. There’s never enough investigative journalism in any market, even one with two daily newspapers and multiple news websites, and the restaurant industry could certainly use less root, root, rooting for the home team and more in-depth looks at operations and best practices. Same with the business community. Alt-weeklies traditionally fill those lanes.
But there’s another issue with Racket that isn’t easily solved: Lack of diversity. All four co-founders are white residents of south Minneapolis. Cassel hopes to recruit freelancers from every corner of the Cities to write about what’s important in those areas.
“It’s definitely something we’re conscious of, and we’re going to have to make more of an effort to reach those neighborhoods and those communities and do a good job serving them,” she said.
All 4 founding Racket staffers might be white, but I swear for years I thought Keith Harris was an erudite but funky Black man.
Good luck to them in any event. As the first employee of City Pages (nee Sweet Potato) and a Media Savant, I will be subscribing soon. –Mk
Any diversity of thought?
Still all left of center?
“But there’s another issue with Racket that isn’t easily solved: Lack of diversity. All four co-founders are white residents of south Minneapolis.”
I wouldn’t worry about it. Look at MinnPost.
While I understand push for the subscription model in the business sense, I don’t in a journalistic sense. Who and what will this be for? The beauty (and ugliness I suppose) of ad based journalism is that EVERYONE has access. While newspapers cost money of course, I could and still can pay for one at a physical location, should something of note occur, and read about what’s going on. As can folks like some of the other commenters on this piece. I am fairly certain Mr. Tester, for example, will not be ponying up hundreds of dollars, or even fifty, to access what he will undoubtedly label “fake news”, much as I won’t, to visit any of the various fever swamps of conservative online media. No matter the importance or persuasiveness of the message or argument, coming from those sorts of outlets it will never reach the ears of those who might be given a measure of pause about their personal position, or at the very least be entertained by the debate. As for the apathetic, the largest subset of all, what in the world would drive them to visit, when the readership is thus constructed as a closed loop, with only true believers as its mouth piece. I was an avid reader of the old Deadspin, and am online at its former sister sites daily, as well as other left leaning internet media outlets. This was the first time I’ve heard of Tom Ley’s venture, much less knew its subscription was available. Unless the only goal is reaching a bare niche of extremely online readers of a narrowly construed worldview, (which serves what purpose beyond navel gazing?), what exactly is the point? How does this grow beyond a small cadre of writers, barely scraping by, muttering to themselves about things they and their readership are in agreement about and have discussed a thousand times? It works on the right because they let EVERYONE in, and because a fair number of those folks are “easily persuaded”, we’ll say, to purchase whatever the sponsors are selling. For better or worse its gives those outlets clout by sheer force of numbers, they wouldn’t have were they to be subscription only services. While that model cannot work as effectively for a left leaning outlet, as there’s not a lot of liberals willing to buy prepper beans and the like, unilaterally limiting readership to ONLY those willing to pay up front seems like a recipe for irrelevance.
Some thirty or more years ago, City Pages reached its apex as an incisive alternative news medium when it published the “Faulty Towers” article by Jennifer Vogel that exposed the scandalous Riverside Plaza acquisition by Brighton Development and Sherman. Minneapolis city officials (the government!) and the developers tried to get City Pages to retract the article, but CP did not; the article contained no significant errors.
At that time, the fearless Steve Perry and Monika Bauerlein were editor and assistant editor repectively; Jennifer Vogel wrote the article.
That was the kind of lazy, trash journalism that plagued City Pages. Mindless contrarianism masquerading as actual reporting. Simple solutions to complex issues. Sometimes the work was ok, but there was plenty of this Fox-news quality nonsense.
City Pages and some of the other news outlets mentioned sometimes have good stories; but they also are known for leaving out details especially when dealing with complicated issues–such as state laws, police and govt stories especially.
Very much this. Complex issues boiled down to simple, often wrong, solutions.
Re this:
“it’s hard to convince people to pay for something they’re used to getting for free. Community newspapers like The Villager and others tried this in recent years, with limited success.”
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Have you checked The Villager lately? They seem to have transitioned well to a subscription model.
I have. What I wrote accurately reflects what publisher Michael Mischke has told me about their subscription model — some people are paying, but they need more, and not paying is a hard habit to break. I trust you’re one of their subscribers?
I’d be happy to pay for Jane McClure’s reporting if I wasn’t also paying for Mischke’s garbage editorials.
I want them to succeed and I will give them a try.
I’m reminded that I really enjoyed, and missed, The Rake.
Well, their business is model is… their business; but I would have one question that doesn’t seem to have been asked. A predominant business model, and one that these seemed to have followed in the past- is to build something, and then sell it when the price looks right. That’s what they did with Reader and City Pages right? So the only question I would have regarding Racket is whether or not these guys are duplicating a business model of the past (albeit with subscriptions) or are they going to stick with this? Are they building a home or something they think they can sell to a higher bidder at some point? The only reason I would be interested is that I’m not really interested in building equity for these guys to cash in on by subscribing to their new venture. And we’ve seen that selling these things off essentially kills them so what’s the point in supporting a project like that?