MinnPost Is A Bit Underwhelming

I guess I’m not the only one who is a bit underwhelmed after the first week of MinnPost.com.

• Mark Glaser at MediaShift says MinnPost could be the next wave of journalism. 
• The Center for Citizen Media blog is disappointed, saying "it has nearly zero to do with edge-in community journalism."
• Former Stribber Steve Yelvington (found via Minnesota Monitor) pans the site as "a mid-20th century product in a strange 21st century world, and I found it needlessly dull."
• A parody site, MinnToast.com, launched on the same day as MinnPost.com.

Maybe it’s unfair, but I guess I was expecting a bit more. Though as I said last week, the lineup of journalists is impressive but the site is painfully spare on journalism.  Stories, people! As of this writing, these are the stories by section that the site currently features:

• Region: 7.
• World/Nation: 4.
• Politics: 1.
• Health/Science: 1.
• Business: 0.
• Arts: 2.
• Posts: 28.  Clearly, here’s where the meat is. Posts are shorter, blog post-like news stories that adhere to traditional journalistic standards. Some of the posts on this page are also listed in other sections.
• Sports: 0.
• Multimedia: 2. Stories that include video. These stories are also listed in other sections.
• Community Voices: 4.  These are citizen opinion pieces.

Let’s be generous and let them double count their stories: That’s a mere 49 stories over the course of the week. The stories are of the highest journalistic standards and writing of course, but if, as editor Joel Kramer has stated, they are targeting news junkies, shouldn’t there be more content?

I personally was looking forward to the sports coverage because I’m a sports nut. During a time when the Minnesota Vikings boast the likely rookie of the year in Adrian Peterson and a head coach who may not last the whole year, zero sports stories?

Of the three sports-related "posts" on the site, two are Jay Weiner stadium pieces and one is about the 1927 Yankees?!?

Jay Weiner is great at what he does, but I’ve read the stadium story a thousand times before.  It’s not that stadium stories aren’t important, it’s just that they’re not sports stories–they’re politics stories.

Steve Yelvington‘s criticism is that MinnPost takes traditional journalism and puts it online without taking advantage of the medium.

I couldn’t agree more; innovative MinnPost is not. But I’d be fine with that if it sated this news junkie’s media addiction. I’m certainly going to give it a lot more time, but after a week, MinnPost is not the fix I was hoping for.