Rybak Officially Departs Star Tribune

Deborah Caulfield Rybak, the Star Tribune’s media reporter officially resigned Tuesday after months of deliberations. Rybak took on the media beat in 2004, after coming to the paper in 2001. Earlier in her career she spent 10 years at the Los Angeles Times.

When the Strib announced its most recent round of buy-outs this past May, Rybak was on family leave in California. To be euphemistic in the extreme, “confusion” ensued as to whether the paper was offering her job back, putting it up for grabs or eliminating it.

Nominated by the Strib for a Pulitzer for her work with Dave Phelps on how the state’s tobacco money was being spent, Rybak has a pretty good idea of who is zooming who. She felt frustrated by the previous Strib administration and, in the end, couldn’t see her situation improving with the steadily thinning Strib of today.

“In the end,” she said Wednesday, “I decided to reassign myself out of management’s reach.”

It is no secret she has been approached by incipient on-line news sites and other local periodicals.

“I’m like a prisoner who has just been released from the Gulag,” she said. “I want to be a spectator for a while before I jump back in with another work crew.”

Having been admonished to always stay above the self-pitying fray, I will leave it to others to note the de-flavorizing and red-lining of local media coverage at Par Ridder-run newspapers.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.