Red Lake Net News is born

“But in this day and age these types of businesses require a lot of start up capital, extensive labor, and a great deal of time,” Barrett said. “And if no one buys your newspaper or advertises in it, you will go bankrupt in a very short time.”

Before you even start such a business there are other factors to consider such as the newspaper’s content, who will publish it (a web press was about $100,000 and good smaller presses were half of that), how many copies needed to be produced, how it will be distributed, and a long list of other tasks.

One person would have a tough time doing it on their own, not that it couldn’t be done. The newspaper or magazine business is also very competitive.

With more and more people owning home computer systems and having access to the Internet–estimated to be over a third of the Red Lake Reservation–the idea to publish a newspaper type of service in that form came to mind.

On the Internet one didn’t need to worry about an actual ‘paper’ version either, since there wouldn’t be a printed copy unless a reader wanted to print their own. And if a news service costs a reader nothing to log on and read, it becomes sort of a trade-off. By not printing a full color version of a newspaper or magazine–which has a much better appearance than black and white–that would save an enormous amount of money.

To print anything in color is a very expensive process. In printing the Red Lake Nation news (the Red Lake Tribe’s bi-weekly report to its membership), the costs in producing a color edition pretty much doubles from the original cost (about $2000 for B&W per edition). And when you have more pages, those printing costs increase.

On the Internet there is no change in the costs of producing black and white or color, and literally there is no limit to how many photographs one can have on the space they utilize. So far, with over 600 photographs within the pages of Red Lake Net News (rlnn.com), they are using just a little over a fourth of the space allowed.

Using that as an estimate, they could post about 2400 photographs before they would have to purchase more space from the Internet service provider. The costs associated with producing that much content on the Internet runs about $50.00 per month. Should they reach their limit, a decision will be made to start deleting past articles and information.

The other costs associated with Red Lake Net News (rlnn.com) are the people visiting the site. The only way those costs would increase are if more data transfer was needed. If less than 50,000 people log on to rlnn.com per day, more data transfer would not be needed.

So what did it cost to produce rlnn.com? With the help of a Red Lake Tribal Venture Grant in the amount of $5000, Barrett purchased a new computer system with the capabilities of expanding for even more high tech features, purchased a second video camera for use of video transfer on the Internet in the future, some additional software, office supplies, and set aside $1000 for advertising and promotional costs associated with the site’s development stage.

Early projections are that Red Lake Net News will not be generating any income until January 2004. The reasons for that are simple–the site has to be completed, fully functional, and out there for a good 60 days so potential advertisers and contributors have a chance to view it.

“When I started building the site I had to basically start from scratch,” Barrett said. “In other words, I had to learn this entire process. It was very time consuming, not as easy as I had originally thought, and there were several occasions I contemplated giving up.”

He said he had thought about just paying back to the Tribe the Venture Fund grant.

‘Then all of a sudden while burning the midnight oil at 3 a.m. one morning, things started to fall into place,” he said. “Instead of working on a page for a good ten hours and then losing it and having all that hard work turn out nothing, it just happened. All of a sudden there were workable pages, the formats were the way they should be, and when it was published to its domain, everything worked the way it was programmed to work.”

He said he saw why people that created websites charged so much–$2000-30000 for a site–because there was a great deal of work involved in one, time consuming work that at times was somewhat tedious, yet necessary.

“I thought about having a website developer create a site for rlnn.com also,” he added. “But since I figured I would be the one making entries on a day to day basis, doing all the uploading and downloading and anything else to do with html language and programming, it would have been a waste of limited funding. Paying $3000 to have a site built would have cut into other planned expenses.”

So it was well worth those 15 hour days in learning about html language, programming, site development, and a long list of other things needed for the project, he said.

“Not that I feel I am a professional Web Developer now, but I do know how to build a website,” he stated. “Of course I still have a lot to learn and I plan on learning even more if time allows. Once I have rlnn.com up and running the way it should be, plans in the future include video files and incorporating some new features to the site.”

One of those plans includes some interactive technology dealing with the Ojibwe language, as well as streamlining video so rather than read about something, a person could actually see and hear it instead. Red Lake’s very own television station created with minimal costs on the Internet. RLTV is a remote possibility.

Of course that’s in the future, but very possible with today’s technology.

“We may be Indians living on a Reservation with limited resources, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use high technology to better ourselves.”

Red Lake Net News is now online and fully functional and can be accessed at www.rlnn.com.