Building the Platform

Posted by Philip Barron at 6:34 AM on May 18, 2007.

A change in the way the people of St. Louis get their news may be on the horizon, as Chad Garrison relates in the May 9 issue of the Riverfront Times:

In November 2005 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch cleared its North Tucker Boulevard headquarters of proverbial deadwood when it offered longtime staffers a buyout package worth tens of thousands of dollars. From the editorial department alone, some 40 staffers — all age 50 or older — took the bait.

Now a few of those early retirees are planning a return to journalism — and they're taking aim at their former employer. By early this fall, they plan to launch St. Louis Platform, an online paper they believe will one-up the Post-Dispatch in both content and technological savvy. Heading up The Platform are former Post editors Margaret and Bill Freivogel, ex-managing editor Dick Weil, former features editor Dick Weiss, and ex-writers Robert Duffy and Laszlo Domjan.

Fun times ahead! The Lee Enterprise-owned Post-Dispatch hasn't had real daily competition since the demise of the Globe-Democrat in 1986 (I'm not counting the seven month run of the abysmal, tabloidish St. Louis Sun which came in with a roar and went out, mercifully, once Ralph Ingersoll II got tired of losing money). As for the Web-based side of it: while the P-D's online analogue, STLtoday, may be heavily-trafficked (the #1 St. Louis web site, it claims), the website has long suffered from a crowded, user-hostile design and a lack of interaction with a fairly active independent online community (read a wide variety of local bloggers).

Can the Platform carve a niche for itself? Much of the answer revolves around money, of course. The people behind the project hold up the online, nonprofit Voice of San Diego as a model. The Voice displays graphic ads on its pages though only one ad, curiously enough, on its home page where you'd expect to find several premium-priced adverts. No classifieds, either. What you do find is a tin cup, or a couple of them. As Steve Outing noted in his piece on nonprofit reporting at Poynter Online:

Is Voice of San Diego a harbinger of news reporting to come? As explained on the site, "Initial funding comes from San Diego foundations and individuals, a structure which allows Voice to be independent and nonpartisan. Long-term, Voice will rely on a combination of individual donations, corporate sponsorships, foundation grants, and advertising."

Looks like the Platform builders will be looking for some deep pockets in the St. Louis community.

What kind of news stories will the Platform provide? Looking again to the Voice as a model, one might expect almost exclusively local coverage, looking to fill in gaps in coverage left by the P-D or to explore stories more deeply. It would interesting to see a more ambitious approach, using traditional syndication or perhaps building alliances with networks of citizen journalism websites to provide stories from beyond the St. Louis metro region.

As for that looked-for "technological savvy": Is the sky the limit? Interactivity ala in-house blogs and forums, and RSS feeds are all reasonable expectations. Allowing comments for individual stories would be fairly novel, as would incorporation of video content. If AP syndication is part of the Platform, the Hosted Custom News product would bring in bloggers/readers who would in turn, through their own links and commentary, attract other eyeballs to the news site.

Lots of questions, but the next few months will provide some answers as the Platform is raised.

Tagged as: newspapers, st. louis platform, st. louis post-dispatch, voice of san diego

Philip Barron is a St. Louis writer and author of the blog Waveflux.