The Rake Magazine

Month: May 2005

  • Can We All Just Agree…

    That if Dougie Baseball was still flashing the leather over at first and saving more runs than most first basemen produce with the bat we’d already be looking at the White Sox in our rearview mirror?

    Oh, and by the way, Justin Morneau’s slugging percentage (.780) is higher at the moment than Mientkiewicz’s on base-plus-slugging (.749).

    Also, doesn’t it strike you as sort of funny that if Gardenhire hadn’t inserted Morneau in the game yesterday as a defensive replacement (did you ever think you’d see the day?) he’d never have gotten the chance to hit that bomb off lefthander Trever Miller (who was, of course, brought in specifically to face him)?

  • Uncle Jumbo's Playground

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    –Illustration by James Dankert

    Last week was a mess all around, and Friday night was the capper. I guess I drank too much of something bad, and things got away from me. I swear, though, that I was determined to get something to Zellar, but my mother called me in the middle of the game and prattled on forever about how her new priest has all these tattoos and she’s sure he’s a card shark with a drinking problem. He’s an ex-Marine, she says, and “no spring chicken.” She claims this guy –it’s always “Father” with my mother, no matter how shady the character might be or how much of her money he mooches– hosts poker games damn near every night, and she says there are always motorcycles lined up outside the rectory “like it was a cathouse.” There was also an unnecessarily detailed monologue about her having to “digitally express” her ancient dachshund’s anal glands to “relieve impaction,” which as you might well imagine is something that will ruin a guy’s appetite for pizza rolls in a hurry.

    I was trying to watch the game while enduring my mother’s weekly torments, but between her breathless and severely unhinged rambling (which can sometimes continue unabated through three innings of a slugfest) and whatever cheap malt beverage I was swilling things sort of spiraled out of control. Then, to top off the evening, I had nothing but problems with the piece of shit Radio Shack computer Zellar gave me. I’m no computer expert, and never mind that I was admittedly a bit indisposed: I’m pretty sure it’s more than a little unreasonable for anyone to expect me to produce reliable work on a machine that some guy got for a high school graduation present twenty-five years ago.

    So, yeah, I punted last week, or rather I phoned it in, or at least tried to phone it in –go ahead and sue me, you bastards. I really didn’t have anything to say anyway. Like I said, it was a long week, and sometimes I just want to be able to go home at the end of the day on Friday and drink alone in front of the TV like any other normal guy who doesn’t have a single redeeming hobby or a friend in the world.

    Some of us, I try to tell Zellar, have real jobs. Granted, I don’t do anything, but that pretty much is my definition of a real job, and it’s exhausting. I also have to wear a dime-store security uniform that’s a couple sizes too small (the result of a laundry mishap; I guarantee you I’m holding steady at 265, give or take a few pounds), so there’s something of a humiliation component to my weariness as well.

    I don’t have squat to say about Juan Rincon’s piss scandal. It’s tough luck, I guess, but I’d trade my kidneys for cat food to have Rincon’s problems. Let him come and sit on my couch for a few days and let’s see how sorry he feels for himself. I mean, seriously, people, a ten-day suspension? Guys routinely miss more time from shower accidents.

    What I can say about the Twins right now is what I can say about the Twins pretty much all the time: I wish they were a whole hell-of-a-lot better. I have a hard time getting anything but frustrated with any team in April, and I’m not about to get excited about a club that’s five games over .500 and plays in the same division as the Kansas City Royals. The Twins eat up a lot of hours, which is all I ever really expect from them.

    I’m not saying, though, that I’ve never gotten excited about a baseball team. Because as much as it pains me to admit this I was as infected by the yahoo contagion in 1987 and 1991 as anybody else, and after game six of the ’91 Series I actually danced for the first time in my entire life. I was alone, of course, and the spasm of happiness didn’t last more than twenty seconds, but it was an unusual moment nonetheless, and I’ve been waiting fourteen years for a repeat performance.

    Before I sign off I have to acknowledge what was an obvious cheap shot on Zellar’s part. I’m referring to his bit yesterday about players with the worst ratio of RBIs to homeruns. I’m sure he thought he was delivering a purpose pitch, and I’ve no doubt he figured I’d duck.

    Fat chance. Here’s the deal: in both my years at Labette Junior College in Kansas I failed to crack the two-to-one ratio of RBIs to homers, but I obviously can’t be blamed for that. We played a forty-five game schedule (which included twenty-seven doubleheaders) in those days; the first season I hit nineteen homeruns and had twenty-six RBIs. The second year I finished at 23/31. Big deal. You can’t drive in non-existent runners, and is it my fault the guys who hit in front of me couldn’t get on base?

    I’m sure Zellar will try to strike back by throwing my doubles totals in my face (seven and three). Again I say, big deal; so I was born with a bum pair of wheels. I could have stretched more than a few singles into doubles, but for what? An extra base didn’t mean a damn thing on that team. And though I never hit a triple in my life, that was strictly a matter of principle. I always figured once I hit the bag at second my work was done.

    Triples are overrated, and are too often the result of an unnecessary risk. Even singles and walks were disappointing to me. I’d stand there at first and think about all that miserable running I was going to have to do to get around the bases, and it just pissed me off. No, sir, Jumbo’s job was to look for the number one and turn it around. I couldn’t run, but I never had a problem jogging.

  • Crit Fight!

    The last great spat among high-profile media folks was between James Woolcott and Kurt Andersen. Today, the sparks are flying between Jack Shafer and Michael Wolff.

    We don’t have strong preferences for a winner, although we have a couple of peanut-gallery-type observations to make. Shafer is by far the more thorough and accountable reporter, Wolff is the better writer. Neither is a particularly sympathetic character, and therefore neither can possibly come off very honorably in a clash of egos. To the credit of both, neither is afraid to take their whacks at sacred cows—and having undergone a slowish process of canonization themselves in the past five years, each is now mooing the protests of the whackee. (This is new territory for Shafer. Recall: he is the doyen of Slate, the would-be editor-in-chief who probably deserved Michael Kinsley’s job more than Jake Weisberg did, but probably had his fill of being management back in his Washington City Paper days; Wolff, who has received many well-deserved whacks over the years, inexplicably landed at a columnist’s desk at New York magazine. He is a writer who’s single victory in the meritocracy was a tepid, trendy book about his failure as an internet mogul… come to think of it, we can’t recall a better example of someone in media who has so dramatically failed upward his whole public career.)

    You can call a reporter or a media critic just about any name in the book, and he’ll take it as a compliment (something about being “old school,” or “hard-bitten” or a “stogie-smoking leathershoe” and all that nonsense), but don’t ever accuse him of being lazy. Aside from running violently against the nap of our perpetual martyr complex, it smacks of an ethical violation. And no one is more sensitive about ethical violations than a journalist.

  • Monkeys in suits

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    In God We Trust

    If you haven’t read the book “What’s the Matter with Kansas” by Thomas Frank yet, you can get a preview in today’s NY Times story on the Kansas Board of Education’s impending mandate that evolution be taught side by side with “intelligent design” in Kansas science classes.

    The irony hasn’t been lost on anyone that this year is the 80th anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. My friend from Kansas has already called to make chimp noises into the phone. Not, as she says, because Kansans are descended from apes, but because the Kansas Board of Education clearly hasn’t evolved yet.

    I’ve pissed off a few Christian conservatives here before when I suggested that the real problem with fundamentalists is that they are allowed to vote. My thinking on this is evolving, though. Keep reading.

    The first amendment clearly states that the government “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Now, the majority of the members of what shall now by known as the Kansas Ministry of Ministry Propaganda all unabashedly admit that they believe in creationism, and, yes, these hearings they are holding have a purpose. Here’s how one board member put it, according to the Times, “I was hoping these hearings would help me have some good hard evidence that I could repeat.” That is, I was hoping someone could come up with a logical explanation to refute the actual logical explanation of evolution. Her problem is that everyone who knows what the word logic or evidence means accepts the abundantly clear case for evolution.

    I started thinking about this all again last week when I was reading a report on the problems with production of flu vaccines. The basic problem is that flu vaccines have to be made fresh and fast every year, after the current strain of flu virus makes itself apparent. As the immunologist said, “Our problem is the virus evolves all the time. It changes. So, we have to make a different vaccine every year.”

    So here’s my solution to the Kansas problem. Let’s let them vote. This will, I hope, appease my earlier critics.

    But, I say anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution doesn’t get to have the flu vaccine. They don’t believe in its underlying premise after all. Then when the epidemic hits, we’ll all get a lesson in what Darwin meant by “survival of the fittest.” The simians running Kansas are going to be in big trouble.

  • The Words Have Orders, And They Will March

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    I was put in this world to march, but one leg’s longer than the other, my boots are too tight, and I walk with a limp that gets more pronounced by the day.

    Still, those were my early orders: March. And I am a man who follows orders, if not instructions. Instructions, it seems to me, are a good deal more complicated than orders. I spend so much time thinking about my feet that I have a difficult time following instructions beyond the first few sketchy details, and the inevitable confusion that results often as not gets me a savage whipping.

    I’m one of the simple ones, a marcher plain and simple. Every once in a while they’ll ask me to carry something, or to lug something along as I march, but even these requests are best made in the form of a blunt, concise demand. I actually prefer if they just shove things into my arms or saddle me like a mule. I don’t need to know what it is I’m carrying or where it is I’m carrying it to.

    When they holler at me to stop, I stop, and when they relieve me of my burden I just assume we’ve arrived somewhere. It doesn’t pay to look around or get too curious in my line of work. Marching is hard enough work as it is, emotionally and physically taxing work, particularly with my infirmities, and I generally have my hands full with the dust and the complaints of my body.

    I also wouldn’t say we’re particularly well fed, although I don’t really have any frame of reference for that allegation, so perhaps I’m being unjust.

    When the day comes that you simply can’t march anymore –and it’s inevitable, of course, and can arrive unexpectedly– they whallop you over the head and leave you by the side of the road. I’ve seen it a thousand times, but I have no clear idea of what happens to you after that. Some of the marchers claim that Sisters come along the road with wagons and haul the survivors of the cudgeling back to the convent to work in the orchards. Others allege that the unfortunate wretches are carried away by body snatchers and sold to the vivisectionists for ale money. It’s also possible, I’ve had reason to imagine while I’m curled up on the soggy earth at night, that the fallen marchers are simply fed upon by black birds and wild dogs.

  • What A Day For A Day Game

    Turn that frown upside down Twins fans.

    I could, and should, just leave it that, because I really didn’t get much of a chance to pay attention to today’s game. I needed to roll a rock up a hill, so I had to take a pass on sneaking away to the Dome. I also felt like I needed a break, quite honestly. It’s been a tough several days in Twins Territory. And in a lot of ways, with Juan Rincon’s suspension, the stadium business, and the mini-skid on the playing field, it felt like the return of the old familiar Good News/Bad News Bears doppleganger Twins.

    Still, I seldom miss a game. I pretty much always find a way to either attend in person, listen on the radio, or watch on tv, but today, for only the second time this season, I had to make do with a half-assed attempt to follow the action on my computer at work. That’s not a very satisfying experience, quite honestly, and I never quite have the feeling that I’ve actually watched or listened to a game. It’s sort of like playing pull-tabs; every time the screen refreshes you sort of hold your breath, and as things unfold in maddening slow motion you often get the feeling that nothing ever happens in a baseball game. It certainly felt that way through the early innings today, and I thought, this is what my wife must feel like when I make her sit through a game.

    When I saw the line-up Ron Gardenhire was sending out there against C.C. Sabathia I have to admit I didn’t have much in the way of expectations. No Mauer or Morneau, no Jacque Jones. Luis Rivas back out at second. I’m sure they must have done it a few times last year, but I can’t remember the last time the Twins went with an entire line-up of right-handed hitters.

    After Radke got out of the first couple innings without giving up a run I got sidetracked and didn’t get a chance to check back until the sixth inning, when the Twins were suddenly up 6-0 and Sabathia was long gone. I pieced together what had happened as best I could, and then sort of forgot about it again. When I finally took another look it was over. A nice, tidy two hour and twenty-six minute baseball game.

    Just looking over the boxscore, though, it looks like it was a much more interesting contest in real time. Radke obviously pitched well –complete game, three hits, eight strikeouts and no walks. I don’t feel like figuring out his game score, but that’s certainly the best pitching performance by a Twins starter so far this year, and after the first couple games of the series I thought this Cleveland line-up might whack the ball all over the yard against Radke.

    It’s weird to see that the Twins scored nine runs, yet still managed to strand ten runners. That’s a lot of guys on base: thirteen hits, five walks, and two hit batters. It’s also curious that Rivas, batting in the ninth slot, walked twice; and Jason Bartlett, despite going 2-5 with two RBIs and two runs, still managed to strand five runners.

    I see as well that Gardenhire got ejected, and Matthew LeCroy demonstrated why he deserves a spot on the roster. The bullpen got a breather. And Terry Tiffee did more at the plate in one game than Corky Miller is likely to ever do in a complete season.

    I guess the only bad news on the day is that the White Sox eeked out another one-run game against the Royals. With the ridiculous unbalanced schedule, before it’s all said and done that woebegone team of curs in Kansas City might well end up handing the division to somebody.

    ON AN UNRELATED     note, John Garry –a scion of one of my hometown’s legendary masculine dynasties– and I have been kicking emails back and forth for the last couple weeks trying to figure out which player in Major League history has managed to hit the most homeruns with the fewest RBIs. John, I’ll confess, has done most of the leg work to date (okay, all of the leg work), although most of his findings so far have confirmed many of my own suspicions.

    Specifically, we –or, once again, rather John– were looking for full-time players with a roughly one-to-two ratio of homers to RBIs. I’ve pored through Total Baseball trying with no success to find anybody in the modern era who has managed to slip below that ratio. I also sort of thought that for the sake of integrity the player in question should have hit at least ten homeruns. John figured the likely candidates had to be either power hitters who played on truly lousy teams, or leadoff hitters with some power.

    Here were some of John’s early findings:

    Harmon Killebrew, 1963: 45 HRs/95 RBIs (and only 18 doubles)

    Dave Kingman, 1973: 24 HRS/55 RBIs

    Steve Balboni, 1990: 17 HRS/34 RBIS (John: “The key to his success was a .192 batting average. He had 51 hits and 17 of them were homers.”)

    Interestingly enough, the only other guy John found with a one-to-two HR/RBI ratio played on the same team –the 1990 Yankees– with Balboni. That year, Kevin Maas had 21 homers and 41 RBIs, and the Yankees lost 95 games. (John: “They were fourth in the league in homeruns and last in runs scored.”)

  • Kill The Messenger's Funding

    Jack Shafer has been banging on about how terrible he thinks PBS news is—in particular, we recall his cheap shots at Lehrer’s News Hour. His main problem seems to be that it makes him sleepy. There’s no pleasing Shafer, apparently—because if it’s not a spectacular ethical lapse in the showers with Biill O’Reilly, then its the transgression of being too tweedy and unsexy. For our part, we like the thoughtful, civilized, literate News Hour. It is the efforts to update the program salaciously—particularly by employing blowhards like Brooks and Shields—that ultimately are the weakest elements in the program. Maybe it could stand an infusion of quirkiness—God knows, a show like Almanac is spilling over with little else—but this is hardly a deal-breaker. We like News Hour just fine the way it is; it’s the only TV news we can stomach, even if we have to shut our eyes when Ray Suarez is onscreen (to believe its really him).

    We disagree with Shafer’s thoughtful piece at Slate this week on defunding and decommissioning the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. His is a cogent and pursuasive argument (although seemingly designed to steer me into a late morning nap—hey, live by the sword, die by the sword, Jack) that politicians tampering with media is a bad thing. And yet, at the same time, he claims that the partisan lens is as good as any through which to view the world. By way of example, Shafer writes:

    “Now under Moyers polled conservatives for their views, while the Editorial Report mostly reiterates the Wall Street Journal editorial-page line. Yet editorial “balance” is not what either show needs—both benefit from looking at current events through ideological lenses. I’d rather watch a Miele soak cycle than view either program sanitized to CPB charter standards.”

    Aside from Shafer here revealing himself to be a domestic snob (Miele? Good God, man, that’s no way to curry populist outrage), this strikes on a growing consciousness among readers, editors, and media critics that the whole conceit of “balance” in reporting is silly and itself has a skewing effect. One fine Times letter-writer described equal-opportunity journalism as “pitting a saint against a horse thief and saying ‘only time will tell,’” which is the neatest metaphor we’ve heard in connection with this issue of tit-for-tat sourcing.) This all sounds like a red herring, as far as we’re concerned. Sure there are egregious examples, but it is hardly a trend, and we figure that when it does happen, it probably happens for all the right reasons.

    We think the CPB provides for a constant, annual checking mechanism each time funding comes up—resulting in the usual articles in publications like the Times and Slate. Ultimately, funding is nonpartisan—or at least bi-partisan. Yes, in contentionous times where there is a tyranny of the majority, there are good reasons to worry that “balance” is merely a federal bludgeon to bang PBS programming firmly to the right of center, but the government’s involvement is a guarantee of a certain amount of transparency that does not exist in the commercial media world.

    It is no accident that the whole world outside US borders (and much of it within US borders) still considers the gold standard of news not ABC, NBC, or CBS—but the publicly funded BBC. What is the closest thing Americans have to the BBC, not in terms of funding, but in terms of quality, balance, authoritativeness, and substance—the American standard by which all others are measured, every time someone grinds out a study of journalism standards and practices? It is NPR and PBS.

    We think Lehrer is a fine example of high-quality journalism and we feel confident that the News Hour can be entrusted to weigh balance against fairness. Part of the job of broadcasting the news is the wisdom to lay out the facts and analysis in a considered way which clearly points to the truth while ackowledging any lingering, legitimate doubts—not from the flat-earthers or the creationists but from thoughtful, serious dissenters with substantive evidence for a contrary interpretation of the facts.

  • Post No Bills

    Apropos of Monday’s article in the Times that “print is here to stay”: We would rather read a magazine or a book on paper. The quality of most newspapers (and, to be fair, a good many magazines) resonates well with the populist qualities of the internet. In our experience, most newspaper articles do not demand a deep read, where the reading experience would be enhanced by a premium medium. Companies that produce a lot of low-quality print—simple, dumbed-down narratives, quick-hit info-blurbs, ads for sexual services, the general infantilization of mass print media—had better worry about the internet. Raw information, service journalism, even broad-band advertising campaigns are infinitely reproducible, and they work fine in an infinite-reproduction medium like the internet. This sort of information gains or loses nothing by being on a web page, pasted into an email, or even queued to the color laser printer. This is as close to raw text as language can be, and there is no reason why the medium should have a significant impact on the reading experience. The instant, low-cost, low-impact world of the web is the perfect vehicle for this kind of reading.

    Conversely, high-quality print has nothing to worry about. Hardcover novels aren’t going anywhere, for the simple reason that no one wants to read them on a computer screen. Alternatively, plenty of people are reading newspapers solely online (this sometimes gets us into trouble!)—the better to avoid the hassle of recycling a lot of paper that lives and dies without a living human being ever setting eyes on it.

    In other words, the old cliche that no one likes to read a lot of text online is only partially true. If it’s good text that you really want to wrap your mind and your lap around, you want to see it on paper, freed from its delivery device. If you want to get in and get out with some useful information, the web is your medium. Or you can read standing up in the bookstore.

    We think this truth is demonstrable on a simple, mechanical level. As computers and desktop publishing have advanced, the letter form itself has gotten better, clearer, and stronger—on the printed page. Isn’t it interesting that the gold standard for resolution on paper has risen into the stratosphere—say a minimum of 300 DPI, but why not shoot for 1000?—while the tools for creating that sort of photo-realistic resolution have stayed the same? In other words, computers are still operating in a paradigm of print: If the ultimate output is going to be on paper, then it had better look as close as possible to the real thing (i.e. letter press, or plate printer.) This is a bit like using a sharp chisel to do work that looks as if it were done with a razor blade, because the basic resolution of the CRT screen (and its flat-screen equivalents) has not changed. It is still woefully low, at 72 dots per inch. Newer operating systems like Mac OS X have tried to anti-alias the edges of letter forms—the better to make letters and words on your screen look as if they are the resolution of a printed (even letter-pressed) word, but without actually increasing the resolution of the hardware itself. So no matter what trickery is used to amp up their appearance online and onscreen, they cannot have the same look and feel as printed words on paper until there are some dramatic breakthroughs in screens and screen resolution.

    It’s like audio. If all you want is a phone number, hearing a prerecorded message over the phone is just fine. If you want to hear Beethoven’s Seventh, you might prefer a CD, a stereo, and some good speakers.

  • Okay, I'm Over It

    It’s amazing how quickly a breaking story can be covered from every conceivable angle. Early yesterday the reaction to Juan Rincon’s suspension was a mixture of shock, incredulity, and outrage. The details in the initial press release were sketchy, at best. It wasn’t clear what exactly Rincon might have ingested to merit the suspension, but it quickly became apparent –based on the immediate suspension– that it was something included on the list of banned performance enhancing drugs.

    It sucks to the tenth degree that MLB doesn’t release information on what chemical is detected in the dirty piss of violaters of its policy, because the secrecy ultimately raises as many questions as it answers. I’ve looked at that list of banned substances, and there are all sorts of things on there I couldn’t pronounce and which I wouldn’t recognize on a cold medicine label, let alone within the fine-print catalog of multi-syllabic nonsense that accompanies the average nutritional supplement.

    We can presume, at any rate, that Rincon fucked up, and I’m not going to excuse his mistake, whether it was committed in ignorance or calculation. There’s been plenty of talk and analysis of the whole issue already, and though I’ll admit that I was initially shocked by the news, I’m not quite sure why.

    But maybe that’s not quite true. I was shocked because Rincon is such a soft, mild-mannered, and physically unimposing character. None of those facts, of course, precludes the possibility that he used some sort of PED. Maybe, as some people have speculated, he used a little something to help his recovery time between appearances. Maybe he took something that he picked up somewhere, assuming because it came from a seemingly innocuous source that it was safe.

    Whatever the case, I sure would like to know what that little something was, and whether, in fact, it was a little something or a big something. I’d also be interested in hearing how long these banned substances supposedly stay in a player’s system. Does Rincon’s result mean he ingested or injected something in the last two weeks? The last month? The last three months? Maybe none of that matters. I don’t really know, and I’m not sure I care.

    I do wonder whether the team’s doctors or trainers might bear some share of the blame for the Rincon fiasco. Over the years there have been a number of occasions where I’ve had reason to wonder what’s up with the medical staff of the Twins. I wondered about it most recently during Grant Balfour’s sore arm saga, which, it sure seems to me, was allowed to drag out far too long, to the point where there was open suspicion that Balfour was a malingerer. We went through a similar situation with Joe Mauer’s knee last year, and if you want to go back even further (to Joe Mays and Eric Milton, for instance, or Scott Erickson) I think you’d notice a sort of disturbing pattern.

    Don’t you think it’s kind of strange that when push comes to shove the agents of players tend to send them elsewhere –to the physicians of other teams– for a second (or third, or fourth) opinion? If Balfour hadn’t gone to Cincinnati would we all still be wondering about the source of his lingering forearm pain? Now, though, we know that he’s facing season-ending Tommy John surgery, and we’ve heard that just such lingering forearm pain should be a red flag for significant elbow damage.

    Ultimately, I suppose, there’s no getting around the fact that Rincon’s to blame, even if he made a mistake of ignorance. It’s his career, his reputation, and his money that’s on the line, and the final responsibility is his.

    What’s sort of disturbing about all this –for me, certainly, and I’m sure for most fans of the team– is that the obvious implication is that if Rincon is doing this shit, then so could literally anybody else on this team, or any other team.

    The bottom line, though, is that it’s a ten-day suspension, and Rincon will be back in the fold soon enough. How people respond or what his suspension does to his reputation doesn’t particularly concern me, although I’ve no doubt the people in the organization are plenty worried about those angles. It does strike me as kind of pathetic that Juan Rincon is the most high profile player to be affected to date, but if this turns out to be merely an ugly blip in the season and the rest of the Twins pass their piss tests with flying colors, I hardly see how this can be the sort of thing to damage the team’s reputation in the long term.

  • Chasing Readers

    Can you build circulation and still sell a readership to advertisers? That would seem to be what newspapers are trying to do more and more these days, as circ money is slowly laundered into advertising revenue. That means old-guard dailies like the Star Tribune are caught between two worlds—the mass audience and the niche enthusiast. On the one hand, you like to believe that everyone in the greater metropolitan region should be interested in reading “The Newspaper of the Twin Cities” regardless of age, sex, political pursuasion, or high school hockey team. On the other hand, there seems to be a strong compulsion to change the newspaper itself to appeal to certain “underserved” readerships—presumably in an effort to add raw numbers to the circulation line, while improving the complexion of your readership. (More women! More suburban Republicans! More disposable income! More soft-focus enterprise stories about relationships and eating disorders!)

    One could certainly make the argument that to capture those coveted exurban readers, you’re going to lose your core city readers. More than one person has identified this as the dread disease afflicting the Pioneer Press at present. While the Strib is one of the very few dailies in the country to actually grow in circulation in the past year, all of their other numbers are down—suggesting that they may be reaching a point of diminishing returns in stretching the rate base and aspiring to attractive new readerships.

    Last Sunday, we were interested to read the Strib’s new ombud, Kate Parry, who feels very strongly that editors should get out of the building and meet some readers. She’s of the energetic opinion that the Strib must evolve in order to better reflect the values and needs of the community, and to comport with certain scientific studies about readers. In other words, she is very interested in how the Strib can grow its business. (Which makes her sound less like a reader advocate, and more like a stooge for the advertising department, but that’s probably just our bad attidude talking.) That all may sound good in theory, of course—what could be wrong with “interfacing” with the public? Building trust? Establishing credibility? But rather than worry about directly servicing the “needs” of readers, why not focus on the simple values of traditional newsgathering? For example, reporting hard truths tends to build credibility. Fully reasoned, civilized, and well-written opinion tends to build trust. Why are traditional newspapering values not enough to establish what is needed by newspaper readers today?

    We were especially interested to read the comments of Anoka-area readers as expressed in a little get-together organized by Parry. She writes, “Eleven very frank, funny, smart readers had accepted my invitation to have supper and talk about their lives to help this newspaper improve its coverage.” In particular, we were compelled by the words of Kate Lasota, a junior at Spring Lake Park High School. According to Parry, Lasota “explained how urgent it was for editors to think about readers her age. ‘You’re going to want to hook my age group right now by directing a few things towards me, some things I want to hear and read about. Because as I go off to college it’s going to be, “Which do I want to read?” I have that choice and you want my business.’”

    Now what could the Star Tribune do to capture that elusive, desirable business—the powerful, demanding, well-fed, chic, center-of-the-universe, eighteen year-old, suburban high-school student? In other words, how can the Star Tribune conform the news of the day to appeal to more young people who have such a clear view of themselves in their thrones high atop the attention economy? (Or is it the bottom?)

    Perhaps this is precisely the problem—chasing a reader instead of chasing the news. Perhaps Kate Parry could hold another seminar in which she returns the favor to her Anoka readership by empanelling a group of editors and reporters who can describe what news is and why it is important and why all intelligent members of a civil society should value it—precisely for its refusal to pander to any particular reader.