Baby Boomers’ Opportunity to Reinvent Things

About half of baby boomers told us in our Age Wave Study that their retirement isn’t going to mean that they stop working. Many plan to do work that they enjoy in retirement. As baby boomers have more time, America will have a wealth of experience and expertise that should shape some pretty valuable innovations and change in this country. It’s baby boomers who will transform senior housing and aging services, and a number of other professions, too, perhaps even newspapers.In Minnesota, a group of baby boomers see that traditional print newspapers haven’t figured this internet thing out yet, and they see huge opportunity. Yesterday former Minneapolis Star Tribune publisher and editor Joel Kramer announced that he and a bunch of other boomers are starting an online newspaper called MinnPost. It looks to go beyond simple, quick hit, slash and burn journalism and provide much deeper insight and analysis. You can read the full MinnPost reporter roster to date here. It’s an impressive list. And MinnPost will be a welcome addition and, hopefully, a model for other communities.While other papers are dropping their aging beats, MinnPost has snagged Kay Harvey, formerly of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, who will cover aging, demographics, gender and psychology. A lot of interesting fodder out there when it comes to the age wave and future of Minnesota and the country.Here’s an interview that Joel Kramer did with Leonard Witt, former Minnesota journalist and now professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. (Leonard, love your blog, but please, please drop the word ‘geezers’ out of your vocabulary … thank you.)