The Minnesota Independent

» see minnesotaindependent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

State politics is the least exportable thing a country makes. A Minnesota statehouse beat in 2008 assumed you already knew what a DFL primary was and why a congresswoman's church speech might interest the IRS. I was in Ankara on a TTNet line reading the American internet through its national layer, the layer where everyone has already agreed what the argument is about. This site worked one level below that, and one level below that is where the distance starts.

It launched in August 2006 under the name Minnesota Monitor, one site in a chain David Bennahum was building out of Washington through the Center for Independent Media. The theory was the same one that produced Colorado Confidential the same year: local political reporting was collapsing, and foundation money could buy a small paid staff to hold a statehouse to account for a fraction of what a newspaper spent. The Minnesota site took the Independent name along with the rest of the chain, and readers shortened it to MnIndy almost immediately.

It worked for a while. The newsroom ran on salaried reporters plus paid fellows under editor Paul Schmelzer, and pulled about 150,000 unique visitors a month. Traffic passed 250,000 in the month before the 2008 election and 260,000 in April 2009. A week after that election day, the Center for Independent Media cut two of six full-time positions along with the entire freelance budget, which is what happens to a newsroom whose income arrives as grants rather than as subscriptions. Andy Birkey was hired back later and a smaller freelance budget came back with him.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the stories it broke ~

Abdi Aynte reported that Keith Ellison would not back down over being sworn into Congress on a Qur'an, during a controversy the national press ran for weeks without much reporting attached to it. The site was first to report that the Living Word Christian Center may have crossed IRS rules on political activity during a Michele Bachmann speech from its pulpit, and CREW filed an ethics complaint off the back of it. It also broke the news that Rachel Paulose, then the United States Attorney for Minnesota, was under investigation for mishandling classified information.

Andy Birkey's beat produced the other kind of consequence. His reporting on the ministry of Bradlee Dean drew a fifty million dollar defamation suit in 2011, filed by Larry Klayman, naming Birkey alongside Rachel Maddow, who had covered the same material on MSNBC. Dean lost and was ordered to pay legal fees that came to $24,625.23. By the time that money was ordered, the newsroom Birkey had been sued out of no longer existed.

~ the network above it ~

The closure letter went up on 16 November 2011 under the title "MnIndy going forward". Bennahum wrote that after five years of operation in Minnesota the board had decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent, as part of a move toward national and issue-based coverage. A staffer told MinnPost the same day that the real reason was a merger with Media Matters. A Media Matters spokeswoman said that if it was true, it was news to her. Bennahum left the organization that year, after most of the state sites were already shut.

~ the archive moved house ~

Twenty-five comments piled up under the farewell and nearly all of them said the same thing, which was that the local reporting was the part they wanted. One reader asked where else to go and another answered with minnpost.com. A councilwoman thanked the site for covering the Anoka-Hennepin school district, and somebody asked whether the Bradlee Dean suit had done it. Nobody from the organization answered that one.

The front page kept serving into 2013 with the closure letter sitting at the top of the headline list, above a handful of national stories that had been pushed onto the Minnesota shell in its last weeks. The reporting was supposed to live on at AmericanIndependent.com and some of it did. The domain went somewhere else entirely: minnesotaindependent.com resolves today to bodenwischer-tests.de, a German comparison site for floor mops.

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