Try to imagine this: A new attempt at online journalism is launched in Chicago. But its creators aren’t following the usual model—setting out on a wing and a prayer, betting that notice and funding will come their way before the operation collapses.
McClellan called her “chintzy” and explained, “So I thought to myself, if she wants to help these people with their new venture—and these are people who worked years and years for her late husband and whose efforts helped build his fortune—why not give them the $2 million they need? What does $1.5 million mean when you have at least $414 million.”
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When I read this I tried to imagine former Tribune Company CEO Dennis FitzSimons, who came into $38.3 million (yes, I know—a trifling sum by comparison) when Sam Zell took over, giving Steve Rhodes 50 cents to help the Beachwood Reporter along. Neither Emily Rauh Pulitzer nor Margaret Wolf Freivogel, editor of the Platform, sounded amused by McClellan’s argument. “If something like this or any new endeavor is supported by one person,” Pulitzer explained, “it’s not going to survive. It needs broad community support, and [the challenge grant] is helping to achieve this.”
The Platform name betokens the connection with the newspaper. The famous “platform” in Saint Louis journalism circles is the one written by Joseph I in 1907 that the Post-Dispatch has carried on its editorial page for decades: “I know that my retirement will make no difference in its cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”
The only thing certain about the Platform’s future is that it won’t be spent as the Platform. With a beta version of stlplatform.org already up and running, the Post-Dispatch announced at the end of March that it was starting a new editorial-page blog it had decided to call the Platform, which, to make its proprietary interest crystal clear, the paper had trademarked. After a staff huddle, the Platform announced that it would relaunch its Web site this Friday (or soon after) as the St. Louis Beacon. “A beacon is a light to steer by,” the Web site explains.
And that’s what happened. Savage tells me the Weekly sold 40 to 45 percent of its blocks for the first two issues of this campaign and 18 percent the third week. “All of the articles were assigned, edited, and laid out,” Savage said in an e-mail, “so there wasn’t any additional expense, other than the time and perhaps the folly of covering up the work we had produced. Everything was available online.”
