Statement Of Purpose
What Is The Mound City Messenger & Why Are We Starting It?
In recent years, the local media landscape has continued to degrade. Recently, the Riverfront Times, our region’s long-running alternative weekly, was sold and laid off all of its staff. Now, it’s nothing more than a site that links to other news stories. While some RFTwriters have found other homes, the city lost a major resource for local news and events. Sauce Magazine is also announcing significant layoffs. Our local commercial media ecosystem is in a moment of crisis and change. To be sure, there’s nothing special about St. Louis – this seems to be a phenomenon that has infected the highest levels of our national media. Outlets big and small have been shuttering or announcing drastic layoffs, due to the reality that digital advertising simply doesn’t pay enough to keep the proverbial lights on.
As is, it appears that there aren’t enough actual reporters left on local publications’ staffs to do much real reporting. That’s why we’re trying to put together something different. It is a volunteer-based, non-commercial news site focused on local news. While trying to do this non-commercially will be challenging, we think it a reasonable response to the reality that commercial news media is a largely-failing business model. We have to try other models, or else we will simply be accepting a less-informed future. Most media observers expect that this decline will continue, at least in the near-to-medium term. There are no ready answers to the revenue questions driving this trend. If the worst predictions about AI taking over a lot of these jobs come true (the metamorphosis of the RFT has already hinted at this future), then we’re likely to see even more erosion in local investigative reporting. Unless we choose to explore other paths, we shouldn’t expect that things will improve.
How Does It Work?
The idea behind the Mound City Messenger is to create something akin to the old KDHX model: an outlet mostly controlled and run by the folks who are creating the content. While KDHX has long had staff, the shift of control away from the volunteer DJs and programming committee is a more recent phenomenon. Both then and now, KDHX volunteers spent hours per week preparing and doing their shows. Why? Because they love music and this city. Our goal is to find people who feel similarly passionate about their communities and the stories that surround us in our daily lives.
This site is non-commercial. Mound City Messenger won’t be running ads or printing “branded content” that blurs the line between a news story and a paid ad. While the decision to be non-commercial will limit our potential revenue, it means that we are essentially the only news outlet that isn’t running ads/branded content for charter schools, or other ventures that base their business model on receiving public tax dollars. Similarly, you won’t see ads for new apartments or other buildings that were publicly subsidized with future public education dollars. In short, we will not have a financial interest in perpetuating the current dysfunction in local reporting on how public dollars are being spent. This will allow us to have far clearer ethical lines, which have become increasingly rare in our local print news landscape.
It is a truly nonprofit venture. That being said, we’re OK with folks posting their crowdfunding accounts for tips. We’ll also occasionally have pledge drives to try to raise the funds to cover the hosting fees and costs related to promoting the website and stories. The goal for advertising is to pay for social media promotion to accompany each week’s main story. Will that take a ton of money? No. Unlike KDHX, our overhead is super low. There is no physical building that has a mortgage to pay or radio antenna tower that has to be serviced. Same goes for no fees to keep the frequency license. As such, fundraising will not be as big of a part of the Mound City Messenger, compared to radio stations that have costs around maintaining expensive equipment, etc. that it takes to run a radio station. In that way, the Mound City Messenger’s fiscal bar will be far lower than a community radio station. We hope that will allow us to cover local happenings without the spin that is so common in other publications that depend on ad revenue from the very people and groups that they should be covering with a critical eye.
What Will Mound City Messenger Cover?
Mound City Messenger will focus on local affairs and politics, but the perspective will diverge from most publications. We will be focusing on the people who actually make decisions: our local gentry, while reducing the amount of time spent analyzing political drama. While plenty of outlets will continue to cover the soap opera-esque distraction that is local political official interactions, we are more interested in the monied people in the private sector whose development plans, etc. direct the work that we see at City Hall. At the end of the day, our local elected officials usually just rubberstamp things that the region’s wealthy bring to them. As such, we don’t think these elected officials should be given the amount of attention that they are regularly granted. By covering the sideshow at the Board of Aldermen, etc., local publications often act as willing partners in distracting the public from what is actually going on and who the important players are in deciding our local public policy. This doesn’t mean that Mound City Messenger’s coverage will totally ignore local elected officials. Rather, the goal is to “right size” coverage of decision making to reapportion public responsibility in a way that enables the general public to see who should actually be accountable for the difficulties that the city faces.
Part of that is bringing back better campaign finance reporting. Our local media has mostly joined in the bipartisan political messaging that campaign donations don’t really seem to matter much. We think they do. One of the main ways to see which politicians are in the pocket of which oligarchs is to look through those reports. This is an important part of making informed decisions about your vote. This campaign finance coverage will be done in a way that puts election foes’ fundraising side-by-side, and it will strive to remain neutral. That doesn’t mean it won’t tell a tale, as these reports let the public know who is willing to take the most money from the worst interest groups.
Similarly, we’re going to focus more on labor, as opposed to business reporting. Most of us are workers, not owners or CEOs. We’ll also be reporting on both organized and unorganized labor, as most workers aren’t in unions. We want our reporting to be about real things. Sure, there will probably be strikes to report on, but we also want to report on the social part of unionism and worker organizing. Having to go to work to pay your bills is something most people can relate to. So, we’re going to talk about it.
We Will Not Normalize Corruption.
We live in a fabulously corrupt city, where said corruption has been almost completely normalized as “how things work.” Just because it has been normalized, the negative effects of corruption continue. While consultants and lawyers line up at the trough of public dollars, everyday taxpayers suffer the impacts of delays and cost overruns. In many ways, this is exactly by design. All the while, our political and business leaders perpetuate the idea that this state of affairs is completely fine. The press, whose job is supposed to be providing the public with critical information, has largely been accommodative in doing their level best to make sure the public accepts the current state of things. On top of that, outlets often promote the idea that the politicians they support are in the right, when details of stories clearly indicate that they were not.
Being cognizant of this, Mound City Messenger has decided on a policy of not endorsing candidates. Why? We invite readers to just look at the Post-Dispatch and the American. Their editorial boards adopted positions that they were on this or that political “team,” pushing their publications to absurd levels of advocacy via their editorial sections. It has not benefited the city and has actively contributed to the deterioration of the city’s information ecosystem. As much as possible, this publication will steer away from that kind of writing. It is deleterious to our civic health. It has contributed to a situation where public accountability is obscenely difficult. In many ways, dodging accountability is one of the primary purposes of much of our existing political media coverage. This is the opposite of what the “Fourth Estate” is supposed to be doing. It’s a recipe for dysfunction, and we believe the evidence of this lies all around us. Another upside of this? No campaign ads! Being ad-free has its perks.
We’ll also be departing from the mainstream in coverage of nonprofits and other groups that are intimately connected to our local power structure. Conventional outlets have largely adopted editorial lines that lead readers to believe that nonprofits can fix major social problems. Too often, stories lead the reader to believe that small, unscalable programs actually provide potential society-wide solutions. In most cases, they simply don’t. Pretending that they do misleads the public and encourages them to not seek accountability from our elected leaders. Mound City Messenger will not participate in continuing this harmful pattern of distraction.
This isn’t to disparage the work of nonprofits. Most nonprofits do good work, and their employees really want to help people. But philanthropy and tax credits can’t make up for our nation’s ragged social safety net. Again, Mound City Messenger is a nonprofit media outlet. We understand the limitations that come with being a non-commercial outlet and will not claim to be a tonic that cures all of the ills in our local media ecosystem. We’re just striving to give readers a more accurate view of what is possible via the perpetually underfunded system of private nonprofits that simply can’t replace a proper social safety net.
Finally, while it is safe to say that this publication’s general bent and editorial direction is left of center, we will do our best to try and win people over to our side with our words, instead of turning them off by signaling to them that this site is “not for them.”
Arts and Culture Coverage
Mound City Messenger will also focus on producing arts and culture coverage. This will largely be confined to smaller spaces, including unofficial DIY venues. The Post-Dispatch and others will continue to cover major concerts at big venues, while we will be working to make sure that the RFT’s demise doesn’t leave smaller spaces and lesser-known artists without a promotional outlet. That’s gonna be true whether we’re talking music, poetry, art openings… you name it. As a DIY website, our affinity to DIY arts and music is natural. On top of that, we hope to cover the literature scene and even contribute to said scene by publishing poems and short stories submitted by local writers. We will have an events calendar and all of the things one has come to expect from publications that cover visual arts, music, theater, etc. We’re even hoping to have at least one original, local comic strip as a regular feature. We have folks working on related podcasts, which will share the publication’s interest in local labor happenings, as well as the city’s rich history.
The Sports Section
What local publication is complete without a Sports section? We’re looking for people who are interested in covering local sports and related entertainment that don’t get many column inches in the main local outlets. There’s plenty of coverage about MLB, NFL, and NBA games. Why not a regular roller derby column? We’re definitely looking for more wrestling coverage. There have to be at least a few pinball and bowling leagues that could be covered. Do you participate in or watch these events and want to spread the word about how much fun they are? We’re here to help you spread the word!
We’re Focusing On Quality, Not Quantity
We strive to be realistic about what a volunteer-driven outlet can produce. We won’t prioritize posting daily content. Instead, Mound City Messenger will focus on releasing a reasonable amount of unique content on a weekly basis. The goal is to make high-quality news and cultural content accessible and to cover angles and events that are often ignored by the mainstream outlets. This site will focus on quality, not quantity. Folks already face a firehose of media, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually very informative. We aim to produce content that is actually informative, while not contributing to the generalized noise that dominates our local media landscape.
Will It Work?
We have no idea. We know that a lot of people can’t stand the poor media ecosystem that we live in. Whether enough people are willing to volunteer their time to change it is an open question. As previously mentioned, the for-profit model seems to be spectacularly failing at doing this kind of journalism and paying their bills. This means longstanding organizations with experienced reporters can’t even make giving people decent information profitable. Mound City Messenger is an attempt to make information distribution viable in a manner not mostly driven by commercial considerations. If not this way, then how to create a site that will help rebalance our local media ecosystem back towards more honesty will continue to be an open question. In any case, non-commerical outlets are needed, and we hope to be part of filling that need. As the old adage goes: better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.
How Can You Help?
We’re gonna need quite a few writers to create a steady stream of articles. As a volunteer-driven publication, we can only expect so much from each writer. We know people are really busy. This is a communal passion project, and that’s one reason why we’re looking for people who want to write about the people and things in our metro area that bring them joy. This will only succeed if there a decent number of passionate St. Louisans who step up to contribute their time and talent.
Mound City Messenger invites guest OpEds, but we also want our opinion content to relate to our hard-news stories. Without that context, we’d be giving readers one side of an issue without the information necessary to form their own informed opinion. We want to avoid this common trap.
Are you interested in helping? Reach out to us at editorial@mouncitymessenger.com or via the site’s submission form. We accept OpEd submissions from the public, and we encourage local music and arts venues to send us their schedule of upcoming events. We also welcome short stories and poetry submissions for publication. We’ve added a “news and other tips” form to the bottom of pages, allowing the public to help keep us in loop on stories that might be of interest to other readers. Whether it’s a tip about an upcoming show or a hot news item, please reach out to us. The intention is for this to be a public service in the truest sense of the word. That will only happen if the public is involved in the process.
