Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Hello, and welcome to a very special edition of our daily Flyover news roundup. I'm sure you all had this day circled in red marker on your wall calendars, but in case you didn't, it's Racket's fourth birthday! We published our very first stories, including our report from spending a full 24 hours in Uptown, a poll about whom Racket would disappoint first, and a gripe regarding Tesla drivers thinking they don't need front plates, on August 18, 2021.
(Notably absent on that first day? The Flyover. Yes, we introduced this unmissable daily news digest on day three with one of the finest headlines we've yet written.)
Anyway! The Flyover has four blurbs, and we've got four years under our belts, so I'm going to take this opportunity to reflect on those years below. YOTFO, as they say—you only turn four once. As the compiler of Racket's annual report as well as its Nostalgist In Chief I'll take any excuse to reflect on where we've been, so I revisited the reports of years past. Maybe you'll enjoy reading along.
Year 1: Is This Thing On?
We publicly announced the existence of Racket on August 2, 2021, and published our first stories two weeks later. (Note to past Em, Keith, Jay, and Jessica: Jesus, give yourselves a little more runway!)
Year one was spent... I think you could charitably describe it as "fumbling around with purpose." It's not that we didn't know what we were doing; we had decades of independent media experience between us and layoff-shaped chips on our shoulders post-City Pages. We published many stories I'm proud of. Among the important questions we asked in our early days: What the Hell Has Been Going On at MPR? and What’s the Deal with Winnipeg?
It's more that we were building something out of nothing, figuring out what we could and should pursue. More than that, we were still a little overwhelmed by the part of being business owners that involved business-ownery things—it felt like there was always too much to do and no one to slough work off on. We needed to learn how to make our own lives easier, if that makes sense.
We finished the year with 2,702 active subscribers and brought in $177,000 total; Racket's staffers took home a salary of $23,000 each. Yikes! But we were having a lot of fun and publishing the kinds of stories we wanted to see, i.e., those that didn't exist elsewhere in the Twin Cities' media ecosystem. And so, with our fingers crossed and lucky rabbits' feet affixed to backpacks, we stumbled into year two. (Fun Racket trivia: Through some weird search-engine alchemy, this October 2021 ranking of rotisserie chickens remains our most-read story ever with 100,000+ views.)
Year 2: This Thing Is On!
"We’re honestly kind of blown away by the growth Racket has experienced in year two, both literally, in terms of our numbers, and figuratively, in a 'look at us figuring out who we are and what we want to do' sort of sense," I wrote in our second annual report. Still true!
In year two, we rode along with bike buses and road-tripped to Austin, Minnesota, before putting forth a pro-Spam agenda. We wrote about the dearth of public bathrooms in Minneapolis, spent a day at a scammy megachurch huckster conference in the suburbs, and explored the uneasy relationship between outwardly "progressive" companies and unionizing workforces. Keith saw 30 concerts in 30 days. Jessica wrote the headline "‘Passion for the Hole’: The Uptown Sinkhole Has Become a Social Hotspot."
Those links are all over the place, yeah, but they all feel distinctly Rackety, and that's how year two felt in general. We had a better sense of what a Racket story was, and we spent our time pursuing that stuff. And the readership followed.
We finished year two with 3,606 active subscribers and and brought in $255,000 total; Racket's staffers took home a salary of $42,000 each—not exactly Rockefellerian numbers, but almost double what we earned in our first year. Notably, this is also the year we started photographing our own pets for the report:
Year 3: The Numbers Keep Going in the Right Direction
A funny thing happens when you figure out what your website actually is and how it runs: You have time to focus on the stuff you didn't in the past. That's what we learned in year three. We figured out ways to bring new subscribers to the site (member drives), and we figured out a better way to sell ad space on the site (a designated salesperson, turns out).
Of course, you have to keep publishing work that a.) you're proud of and b.) people want to read, or none of this matters. And we did, writing about the vampiric hedge fund destroying the Pioneer Press, exploring the evolution of queer nightlife, letting the U of M's pro-Palestine protesters explain themselves in their own words, and wondering, "What's the Deal With St. Paul?"
We finished year three with 4,061 active subscribers and and brought in $322,000 total; Racket's staffers took home a salary of $49,750 each. Why didn't we just give ourselves another $250? I don't know, I'm not an economist!!!
Year 4: Still Kickin'!
I just wrote about year four at length less than two weeks ago, and if you're still here, it's quite possible you read all 4,000+ of those words, too. So, I won't linger too long on the present except to thank you for being here—not in this Flyover post, I mean, but with us in general.
(Quickly, for the sake of formatting consistency: We finished year four with 4,878 active subscribers and brought in $373,500 total; Racket's staffers took home a salary of $56,500 each.)
Thank you for reading our stories and commenting with feedback and sharing gift links with your friends and loved ones. Thanks for coming to our events and listening to our nascent podcast. Thanks for sending Best Budget Bites recommendations and photos of your kids in Racket hats, and thanks for approaching us in public to tell us you like the website or to suggest a story idea. And don't forget—you'll have another opportunity to do that on August 30 at Arbeiter Brewing Co.
