Speedier StarTrib Rules Roost In Minneapolis

Minneapolis may or may not be inspiration for that fictional town where “all the children are above average,” as the Garrison Keillor monologue goes. But it is definitely a place with high internet access, one of the country’s most respected nonprofit news sites, and a newspaper site that has bet its money on clarity and speed.

All this is in a media market where local advertisers spent almost $2 billion last year, according to media consultants Borrell Associates. About $280 million of that went for online ads, Borrell said -- an amount expected to grow 77% by 2015.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul market -- the 15th-largest according to Nielsen -- has a lot of competition for online readers, with the newspapers and TV stations out in front, but with radio making a stronger showing than in many other places.

The market’s largest newspaper, the Star Tribune, also has the area’s dominant Web site. Earlier this month, StarTribune.com unveiled a redesign that cleaned out the “junk” that had built up in the site since its last redesign seven years ago, according to the newspaper’s senior vice president for digital, Jim Bernard.

The new design was created with the help of the Sapient Corp., the same firm that helped design sites for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. The look is lighter and more colorful, relying on easy-to-find (and rearrange) Lego-like building blocks of content, he said.

Bernard stressed that the site is now faster -- much faster. Pages load twice as quickly as before -- in line with the speed of sites for such national players as The New York Times, ESPN and MarketWatch, he said.

It is all part of a user-friendly strategy, according to Bernard.

While other sites may boost page views by dragging users through page after page to get to the information they want, StarTribune.com has decided to give users a better experience, Bernard said.

“We believe the faster people get their content, the more time they will spend with you,” he said. And, he pointed out, if people with just five minutes check in during lunch, they will visit fewer pages if they spend two of those minutes waiting for things to load. That means “less page views and less ad dollars,” he said.

So far, according to Bernard, the StarTribune’s redesign has been a success. Page views rose 6% to 7% in the first two weeks after the April 5 rollout, and “the feedback from readers has been overwhelmingly positive,” he said.

StarTribune.com is by far the market’s most popular site, attracting almost 40% of area adults in a given month, according to the market researcher, The Media Audit.

Twincities.com, the site for the competing Pioneer Press in adjacent St. Paul, is visited by about 20% of area adults, according to Media Audit.

Three major television sites -- WCCO.com, KARE11.com, and KSTP.com -- attract 26%, 24% and 21% of area adults, respectively, Media Audit reports.

And in this market that spawned A Prairie Home Companion and is served by Minnesota Public Radio (a subsidiary of American Public Media), several radio sites also have respectable showings. The local 92KQRS.com is visited by 4% of adults, according to the Audit. And ClearChannel.com (a national site listing local stations) comes in at a hefty 9.1%. Even AmericanPublicRadio.com has a 4.5% following, the Audit reports.

Keith Moyer, a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication and former publisher of the Star Tribune, praises the paper’s redesign. “If’s faster and frankly a better site.”

He points to other innovations in the market as well: the nonprofit MinnPost.com and its political and public affairs reporting; local news aggregator BringMetheNews.com with its clickable radio-like reports; and an effort at the university’s Minnesota Journalism Center to find ways to lure young readers with news games.

Also, the TV Web site WCCO.com has set up a digital timeline called “the Wire” that lets users review news and other items for the day by scrolling over a line or clicking on the dots that represent postings. Users can even submit ideas for new postings to the staff.

Of these efforts, MinnPost has garnered the most attention.

Founded three and a half years ago by a small group that included two former Star Tribune publishers, the nonprofit has 15 staffers and several regular contributors, said managing editor Susan Albright.

MinnPost’s board contributed $500,000 toward this year’s budget, and the site hopes to raise another $500,000 from the general public, she said. It claimed more than 2,300 member donors as of January 2011.

MinnPost also receives foundation money, Albright said, but has reached a point where such funds are used for specific projects -- not relied upon for ongoing operations.

In its most recent month, the site registered 930,000 monthly page views and 775,000 unique monthly visitors, she said.