Catherine Conlan, formerly of the DNT.

I'll second the comments by Rougement.  There are so many quality staff that have been laid off by the DNT - realizing, of course, that there are still people of incredibly high quality working there - but the reporting has unquestionably suffered.  

I would very much like to see someone in the community step up with an ownership model that's more functional - perhaps an employee-owned model - and start a new daily to compete with the forum.  It wouldn't take much to convince the few remaining subscribers to change over.  I question whether the forum could ramp up quality/quantity quickly enough to compete, so hopefully the new paper would have a fighting chance.  What the forum has done to the DNT is incredibly sad, again, with due deference to all the remaining hard working employees.  I know doing something like this would take lots of start-up capital, but I suspect there would be interested individuals somewhere in the community willing to bankroll a venture like this.  They should step up.

I'd be involved in a new paper in a heartbeat. I'm sure I'm not alone. There must be a sizeable number of ex DNT people out there too.

I contacted Minnpost and they told me that they would like to have a Duluth bureau with more coverage here.  That may have been lip service.  But if they would do it and I mean really do it, with multiple reporters an editor or two and possibly even some support staff that would be cool.  

I don't like all this talking of completely writing off the DNT, though.  Or newspapers in general, for that matter.  Anyone else remember the dot com boom, only ten or so years ago?  Everyone needed a website with a cool name and "dot com" after it to be in business?  Well, that's still true.  But the part where they said no one is going to shop retail anymore DIDn't come true.  Seriously, people believed it was the end of Main Street. But a hundred sites with names like hardware.com  couldn't compete on service and they couldn't compete on delivery and pricing as much as they said the could, either.  Sure, everything is different now, but its not the end, is it?

I think the same may be true of newspapers.  I know that it's happened elsewhere, but I don't see our daily paper going out of print.  And I have heard all the ideas of setting up a competing daily, or even a competing community web site ... I'm interested, but not if they have the express goal of vengefully destroying the DNT, for all the reasons listed above and many more.

You can't just begin with a negative as your goal, it just leads to negative.

@WildGoose -- what Sean said. I LOVE local newspapers. But I do want something thrtr to read, not just dreck. I do get news -- from the NY Times -- but it seems like the DNT is just circling the drain. We're not getting news there. Maybe it's time to move on.

That's not off topic at all Big E.  

I think I agree with you Calk and Sean and others, too.  But I just meant that if people are gonna rally around a new media outlet then it should be about creating rather than destroying.  And also, why start from scratch?

In a market segment that is already (nearly) hopelessly fragmented, why create something totally new? Especially if it is just a reaction to the DNT.  As a media outsider, I can't help but wonder aloud if it wouldn't be much better to bolster, support, and encourage the expansion of another existing publication such as The Reader, Business North, or one of my faves, The Hillsider.  UMD Statesman might be another example and there could be other contenders, I don't want to leave any out.    

-- 

By the way, I was at a meeting yesterday and some people were saying that they call the Superior Evening Telegram the "Uneven Telegram" or something like that.  So it's not just Duluth that has been hurt by Forum's cuts, Superior consumers got hit really bad and the surrounding communities (fmr Murphy-McGinnis papers) must be feeling it worst of all.

Forget the DNT and move on. The people that own that place are a Joke. Why waste the time. Get something else together and start something new. I currently subscribe to the DNT but would cancel if something better came a long.

Tell Marcil to go pack sand up his ass and people complaining need to find other employment and the DNT will go out of business. Will anyone even notice? Everything is online now.

"The Death and Life of American Journalism"...realnews.com network has an interview with John Nichols and Chesney on their co-authored book... and then some.

Does anyone remember not too many years ago when Main U. J-School was put under the wing of the Communications Dept?

Maybe we should have been reading the graffiti on the wall way back then...as journalism began to lower its standards and news became not too much more then show-and-tell; a public relations guide directed by the fat finger of the buy-out/buy-in corporations?

Curious too, who pickets nowadays? When corporations own the business doesn't even local 'management' become 'workers' too within that establishment?

Did all offices empty out yesterday or who looked down from above watching their fellow workers? I certainly would like to know.