November 21, 2009
UTNE READER

Launch Your Own Media Empire

The do-it-yourself communications revolution

July/August 2002 Issue
By Craig Cox, Utne Reader 
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In a fit of pique late last summer, I started a newspaper. Well, not a newspaper exactly, and it was more like a fit of excruciating pain, but, well . . . I should explain.

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I live in a city with a single daily newspaper, one that employs more sports columnists than city beat reporters. Five years ago, during a mayoral election that seemed all-but-ignored by local scribes, I began recklessly fantasizing about how I could save our local civic culture by launching my own daily newspaper. I solicited printing bids, churned out business plans, ran the numbers, and waited for somebody to tell me I was crazy. Months passed. Years even. I had breakfasts, lunches, and fractured conversations with rich people, sort-of-rich people, and people who knew rich people, and pretty much everybody agreed it was a great idea.Nobody was writing any checks, though, and when one particularly blunt billionaire finally intruded sufficiently on my fantasy to set me straight ("There are better charities," he opined), I dragged myself homeward convinced there was no room in the media for idealists anymore.So I packed away my dream in that part of my psyche reserved for failure and went about my business. I put up a fence in the backyard. I fixed the front steps. I mowed the lawn. And late on a Sunday night in July, I checked into the emergency room with a kidney stone attack.My wife, who knows about such things, suggested that my kidney troubles may have been connected to my giving up on the newspaper idea. So I began thinking about a way I could satisfy that yearning without mortgaging our family’s future on a quixotic print adventure. So, on August 13, 2001, I launched the premiere issue of The Minneapolis Observer, a weekly e-mail digest of "all things Minneapolitan" (www.mplsobserver.com). It was an immediate success: A couple of dozen people read it, a few even ponied up $12 for a year’s subscription, and I felt a lot better.Such is the life of the independent press, but before you slap the "pathetic loser" tag on our ilk, look around. Do-it-yourself media are taking over.We’re more than a decade into the well-documented zine revolution, an era that gave us such masterpieces as Rollerderby, Fat!So?, Temp Slave, Race Traitor, and The Idler. And recently technology—and the increasing conservatism of mainstream media—have given rise to a new round of feisty journalism.
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