Asaka's Take: Jay Boller, co-owner, editor, Racket
The variety of stories you can cover at a worker-owned publication is vast
A reminder that the best thing you can do with this newsletter is to share it. Here’s another installment of ‘Asaka’s Take’ with a look at my latest interview — Mark S.
Jay Boller started Racket, an online publication covering events in Minneapolis with his three colleagues in August 2021, after their previous workplace, print-based City Pages, shut down due to financial hardships.
Racket is now nearing 4,000 subscribers, whom Boller describes as a “literate” and “civically engaged” bunch. They pay to read the articles, and are always sending news tips.
The outlet has a “humorous tone,” with “a bit of a sarcasm element, a skepticism of power, an outsider kind of perspective,” inspired by local magazines, like City Pages as well as New Media giants like Deadspin and Gawker (which were called “blogs” back in the day).
Boller’s partners are Keith Harris, a music writer, Em Cassel, a food and travel writer, and Jesssica Armbrister, an arts and entertainment writer.
“I am kind of like the utility player” he says, saying that he will cover “just about everything.
Let’s take a look at some of the things he’s written.
1. His Bleak Day At A Megachurch Jesus Jamboree
This piece was tipped by a reader.
“I bought my $27 ticket and, drove out to Eden Prairie, which is a kind of a second ring suburb of the Twin Cities to one of the largest megachurches in the metro and had no idea what to expect,” says Boller.
“A reader actually tweeted at us saying ‘Racket has to cover this’, which is evidence of at least some people understanding the model and what we're trying to accomplish”
— Jay Boller for The Journalism Salute
What he saw was a “vile display of preying on people in a financial sense.”
He says that the vast majority of the speakers were “creepy salesmen” who used spirituality to promote their services.
“It was like, ‘And you can expect this much money trading stocks online because in Ecclesiastes 5:49, it says money is proof of God’ or something.”
“I took very detailed notes through the, I think, 10-hour presentation and at one point, after the mystery lunch had arrived and we were just getting more of this really cynical, hard-selling of complete hucksterism, I wrote in my notebook, purely for myself, ‘I WANT TO DIE,’ in all caps.”
“And this very sweet woman next to me — who is also taking diligent notes, but from like a real true believer perspective — leaned over and she said, ‘What did you write for that one? I missed it. And I didn't want to insult her. So I was like, ‘I missed it too.’”
2. There’s a Massive, Hidden Lake of Mining Residue Above the North Shore. It Might Grow.
A long-time Minneapolis resident, Boller has always enjoyed hiking along the North Shore with his wife. He noticed that every time he searched the lake on Google Map, he would see “a glowing oval that was hundreds of times larger than any town located along the shore.”
With some research, Boller discovered that the mysterious location is Milepost 7, a tailings basin, “which is where the polluted water from mining operations, in this case, taconite production, are stored in perpetuity in these concrete pools,” as he explains on the podcast.
If that isn’t concerning enough, the government has no plan on what to do with the polluted water.
“There's never a plan for any of them. They just are, you know, ‘ideally, we'll sit there without a crack ever forming without a rupture ever being caused.’”
“This piece ended up being [an] in-depth history of how the pool of toxic water formed and how the public is not necessarily being told the total story of what's going to happen to it,” says Boller.
The article also reveals the Minneapolis Department of Natural Resources has approved to expand another tailings basin right above Lake Superior.
Boller says that his Minnesotan readers weren’t aware of any of this. As a reporter, Boller says he gets the front row seat to the worst displays of corruption and ineptitude, and the most inspiring tales of courage and kindness, from people in his community.
“I think that those two dueling forces have illustrated a sort of totem in my mind where I'm more cynical and I'm more hopeful at the same time. And that might be mathematically incompatible, but it's kind of how I feel,”
— Jay Boller for The Journalism Salute
Thankfully, there is never a dull moment in Racket, and as you can see, Boller and his colleagues have a lot of fun writing stories.
3. Local Grocery Store Rotisserie Chickens, Ranked
The most viral piece on The Racket is a review of all of the rotisserie chickens available in supermarkets around the Twin Cities.
“And we were like, really, really, really mean to the worst ones. I'm sure a lot of that was reader interest in what kind of chicken they should buy around town but the other part is like the algorithmic mystery of Google and the social networks.”
“So that's kind of like the dragon we're chasing. Our dragon is just like a twirling bird.”
4. Review: New Dinkytown McDonald’s Is the Ugly, Black Heart of a Dying Empire
McDonald's may be a “soulless multinational corporation” he said, but the McDonalds at 407 15h Ave. SE in Dinkytown, dubbed ‘Drunk Donalds,’ was something else.
Located near University of Minnesota, Drunk Donalds was known for the “an old, campy 1970s style” and became an unexpected party location.
“During the day [it] just fed hungry students. But at nighttime, it became something known as Drunk Donald's because it would transform — it was open beyond bar closing — into, like, a de facto nightclub where just lewd and crazy and disgusting things would happen.”
“Etched in the memories of generations of U of M students,” Drunk Donald’s is something that Boller can bond with “fellow townies” over.
“So when it closed, I wrote kind of a weepy obituary that got quotes from folks who had frequented it. Some, as I alluded to, very, very lewd quotes about things that had happened in there,” he said.
“That's a fun little magic trick to have, which I think speaks to the kind of hyper-local nature of what we do. Would, would the Drunk Donald’s story play anywhere else in the country? Probably not. Cause you kind of had to be there, blind drunk at 2am eating a McChicken for it.”
— Jay Boller for The Journalism Salute
5. What the Hell Has Been Going On at MPR?
“So one of our first real big home run stories was I did an investigative piece into what's happening at Minnesota Public Radio,” said Boller.
“The ‘what's happening’ element was they couldn't retain jobs at all,” Boller tells Mark.
“There were that was a combination of layoffs happening, of people quitting, of people jumping ship to other outlets,” he explains. He says he ended up calling about 20 fellow journalists, current and former staffers at MPR and asked: “What the hell is going on over there?”
“And what was revealed to me in the reporting process was they operate much like a bloodthirsty for-profit corporation, even though they're this hand-holding feel-good, kumbaya, nonprofit public radio station.”
“But I had to send, of course, the perfunctory email to their management to say, ‘Hey, I talked to almost 20 people; they said a lot of bad things about how things are run over there. Care to comment?’ And I fully anticipated getting just a boilerplate, like PR letter back being like, ‘Oh, we value all employees and hope they all have a nice time or whatever,’”
But instead, the management invited them to talk to the two higher-ups at the institute. From there on, it only got worse.
"We have our own little Nepo empire of media executives here,” he said, noting that one of the executives is the daughter of the Star Tribune owner.
“In that conversation, they were incredibly defensive and dismissive and clearly insulted, and it just added, through no doing of my own, they added a lot of ammunition to this view of how they were being talked about by saying all of the wrong things, and I think that piece really resonated.”
Last fall, Boller also wrote an investigative piece on Pioneer Press, which is owned by Alden Global Capital, which he describe as being “the vampire killer of newspapers.”
“They've drained every resource; the newsroom has shrunk from 200 people to, like, I think 35 now and they're just running around like maniacs trying to keep this major daily paper afloat under the worst ownership kind of conceivable in the industry.”
“We think about and are asked a lot about the sort of Defector/Hellgate/404 Media/Racket model, which is a worker-owned, mostly reader supported, and whether that is the magic bullet, the secret sauce, the whatever.. the future of the industry,” he says, reflecting back at Racket’s success.
“If there's room for it, if there's space for it to breathe and kind of exist as as a value proposition, a thing that only you can get from this particular outlet and it's worth paying for.”
“We're a pro-union shop, and the next logical evolution of trade unionism is the workers owning the damn thing themselves, which is what we have, and we're very proud of that and happy about that,”
— Jay Boller for The Journalism Salute