New media, old school reporting

Former World staff take a gamble with The Frontier

On April 20, a series of earthquakes shook Tulsa’s media landscape. That afternoon, Tulsa World Enterprise Editor Ziva Branstetter and Staff Writer Cary Aspinwall were named Pulitzer Prize finalists for their reporting on the botched execution of Clayton Lockett. 

That same day, it was announced that Branstetter and Aspinwall, along with World staff writers Dylan Goforth and Kevin Canfield, had abruptly resigned from the paper to join a new media start-up. Branstetter and Goforth were in the middle of covering the fast-evolving Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office scandal stemming from the killing of Eric Harris. Jumping ship in the midst of such an important unfolding story made little sense.

Fueled by a poorly framed Talking Points Memo story on the resignations, idle speculation circulated that Branstetter and Goforth had been given the boot over their TCSO reporting.  

But they had been planning their departure for months. Once the World editors learned that the rumors of an eventual mass exit were true, they had little choice but to escort them to the door. The timing was unfortunate.

So how were four of the state’s best journalists wooed away from Tulsa’s paper of record for an unproven Internet news site? 

To start, the publisher behind the project is former World CEO and Publisher Bobby Lorton.

I spoke with Lorton and Branstetter early this month about their plans for The Frontier, which launches later in May (they’re publishing on medium.com in the interim).

Lorton’s family owned the World for 96 years before selling to Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Media Group in 2013. (Coincidentally, the day after plans for The Frontier were made public, BH Media announced its purchase of seven weeklies from Tulsa-based Community Publishers Inc., including Tulsa Business and Legal News and The Broken Arrow Ledger.) 

After the World sold, Lorton took a job at Prosperity Bank and assumed his days as a publisher were done. 

“I like being a banker, but I definitely felt a tug to get back into the news business,” he said.

That tug became more pronounced as Lorton watched the continued decline of the traditional daily model. 

“Surface news always has to happen—it’s the shooting down the street, the house fire, the sports scores,” he said. “But long-form journalism is starting to take a backseat to that. … It’s not the paper’s fault; it’s at the mercy of the financial model.” 

Lorton’s solution is bold. The Frontier is experimental: a web-only, in-depth newsgathering service with a strong investigative bent that will be ad-free and available only to subscribing members for $30 a month, with certain stories available for purchase a la carte to non-subscribers, along with podcasts and blogs from the writers. They hope to publish three to four stories a week initially, with additional contributions from freelancers. 

“Will the reader support really good journalism?” Lorton said. “That’s what I’m trying to see and prove. And I’m confident that it can work.” 

Some corporate sponsorships will help support the project, but the sponsors will be listed on one dedicated page rather than splashed all over the site. 

“A website that’s cluttered with ads, it’s distracting from the news story; it makes the website clunky and slow, and it irritates the reader,” Lorton said. “I wanted a website with no ads, that’s clean and loads fast and is focused on the story. Plus, I didn’t want a website that has 15 stories you have to sift through in order to figure out what’s the important story of the day. We wanted to have a model that’s quality over quantity—fewer stories, but deeper stories.”

“We don’t have to feed the beast of the daily paper,” Branstetter said. “This is no knock on the World—they have a paper to fill every day. I ran the enterprise team, and they were very good about letting me take the time I needed to do big projects. But in the mean time I didn’t feel like I could go off in the corner and work for three months on a death penalty project without producing. We always needed something in the Sunday paper. It’s hard to juggle all of that.” 

Lorton said his financial model is based primarily on what it will take to pay the salaries of his writers. The first year, he hopes to accrue 1,000 subscribers, which he said will be more than enough to pay the bills. 

The Frontier will operate with a skeleton crew for the first phase of its rollout; they won’t even have office space until November. With little overhead and a team of seasoned reporters with name-recognition and credibility in the community, Lorton is comfortable with the gamble—though his decision to roll the dice hinged on Branstetter’s participation. 

“I said I wouldn’t go forward unless Ziva would consider thinking about it,” he said.

Branstetter, now The Frontier’s editor-in-chief, said Lorton’s enthusiasm helped sell her on the idea.

“Bobby has a lot of energy, and that’s one of the things that really excited me about doing this, that convinced me to take this leap,” she said. “And everyone in this town knows how much his family cares about Tulsa, and to me that opens a lot of doors.”

Extended discussion with Bobby Lorton and Ziva Branstetter

Author’s Note: Below is an excerpt from my interview with Lorton and Branstetter, in which they discuss The Frontier’s format and financial model. 

Bobby Lorton: I had no intentions of ever getting back in the news business. I’m still a banker, I still work at Prosperity Bank, but I do believe that everybody has a purpose and a path to follow. I feel like there’s a void that’s continuing to happen with in-depth story writing that I feel is the cornerstone of a newspaper business. It’s enterprise writing. 

I had numerous people saying to me, “You need to look at different models and get back into the business,” and I just kept on getting pulled, pulled, pulled. And I finally said, “OK, I’ll at least take a look at some different models. If I do one, it’s not going to be like anything that anybody else is doing.” 

So how do I do it, and what do I want? What’s something that gets me interested and energized to get back into it? The websites that you currently see in news format are free with ads. They don’t work. Some of them will say they work, but really they’re financially supported by another entity that makes them work. But online advertising is so cheap to buy, which means it’s difficult to pay a journalist off of those. As a matter of fact, it’s hard to even keep the lights on. If it was just the website with your ads, that’s a challenge. 

I love Tulsa, and that’s why I want to be able to get back to what I call old school journalism. I think our communities are stronger when we have real, impactful information for people to read. That causes people to react, change their society for good, hopefully. But it also exposes things, it holds people accountable when you have a good team. So that was kind of my general model. I put it on paper to see what would it take, how much revenue would we have to bring in. I came up with the idea of four reporters.

Ziva Branstetter: To start with.

B: To start with. And we would focus on everything from city politics to culture. Tulsa and Oklahoma have a lot of interesting characters; we want to write about those as well.

Z: State government, health.

B. Yeah. You know, stories that make people think.

Z: Stories that start a conversation.

B: With surface stories, a lot of times it just leaves the person wanting more. The model is what’s limiting other media, whether it’s television or radio, they’re in the same boat. Television typically has a 20-second sound bite on a really deep story, and that’s it—that’s when they stop. And people have more questions and want to know more. In this format, since we’re not a daily, we’re not a weekly, we’re not coming out in any kind of format that’s typical—I’ve had people ask me, “Is this going to come out once a week?” The story’s going to come out when it’s going to come out. That allows us to write that story in a full form.

Z: And we can email all our members and let them know, hey, there’s a new story. Cary (Aspinwall) is really active on social media—Twitter, Instagram, Facebook—so that’s another avenue.

B: So if you don’t have ads, how do you get revenue? I wanted to have one that is membership-driven, and those are difficult. Lots of people will say, “Well, who’s going to pay for news?” Well, that’s right: People won’t pay for most news. But if you do important, impactful news, there is a group, I think, in almost any community that is hungry for this kind of information. So that’s who we’re trying to reach. We’re not trying to reach everybody. Not everybody is super interested in some of these stories. But there is a group in almost any community that want to know what the mayor is doing, instead of a press release.

So how many members will it take to pay salaries? I came up with a model that doesn’t take a lot of members, and we’re not charging a lot for it. I think it’s a test. But I’m pretty confident there’s a hunger for it.

Z: The pieces of this model exist elsewhere, but not exactly like this. 

B: If I look at the websites out there that are kind of working, most of them are free websites, and they’re either dependent on advertising or they have a non-profit function with funding from foundations. The foundation model actually does work—but then it doesn’t tell me will the reader support really good journalism, and that’s what I’m trying to see and prove. And I’m confident it can work. 

When I had that first conversation with Ziva and she was interested, that’s what kind of started the ball rolling, and it was just baby steps. I just took small steps over a long period of time. I thought, who else do I want? Who else would be an important piece of the puzzle? Because if you just hire four journalists with average experience, it would never fly.

Z: Or young and energetic, but people without a brand, without a following.

B: And it’s not that they’re not good writers, but to be an investigative journalist is a whole other game. You can’t learn that overnight, and it takes a special person who’s not afraid to ask the right questions, who stands up to people who are going to intimidate her or him. That ultimately is where it has to start from. I wanted reporters with credibility in the community, with connections in the community, because they have that trust factor. The readers who are going to pay for this have to trust the writers and what they’re saying. 

We’re doing fact-based reporting. We’re not chasing opinions. But we do know that everyone’s got an agenda, so when someone is telling us this interesting story, a good investigative journalist takes their time, and then they start doing checks. 

Z: The reporting hasn’t changed; the standard of verifying and documenting, that’s just the same as it always was. We’re going to try some different things with the writing, some multimedia things. It’s being presented in a different way.

B: It’s a different format, a different genre, and you’re paying for this content. Even with the World, you pay as a subscriber, but the website allows a lot of free looks. … This will be members only. We’re going to probably give you the headline and a few sentences, but, you know, you have to make a choice: Do you want this content, or do you not? And it’s not for everybody.

Z: We’re going to have a side rail with some of the blogs.

B: Yeah, that’ll be free, some of the content that you’d probably never pay for. We’ll have some podcasts as well.

Z: We haven’t finalized the details on this, but we’re talking about a per-story download price for our big projects. Not on every single thing, but on the big projects. We also want to work with the library to have a free subscription available there. 

B: The challenge right now is the pressure. Newspapers lived for decades in really healthy financial times. The news division and the financial side of the paper were completely separate, so it allowed the newsroom to chase stories that might make an advertiser mad, might make a politician mad—whatever it is. A good story is making somebody react—happy, sad, mad, whatever, depending on what side you’re on. Exposing, making people think. But if you get into a mode where you’re so concerned financially about losing readers, upsetting a politician, upsetting an advertiser, then you start to lose your strength as a journalist. I fully believe that with our model, we’ll have the freedom to get back to those ways, where we’re not beholden to any entity.