As foul as the air is over the Star Tribune these days, (and it isn’t any better across the river), the soon-to-be-“right-sized” staff might feel the slightest bit better if they were being given any reason — ANY REASON — to believe the end result of all the slashing, cutting, out-sourcing, etc. was going to be a better product. They aren’t being given such reason for optimism. And if there is someone who believes they have, I haven’t met them.
One story has a member of the sports department interrupting a presentation from editors Nancy Barnes and Scott Gillespie recently to tell them, “You know, you’re insulting our intelligence here,” with the by now long-since-stale talking points of adjusting to demanding times, properly orienting resources, blah, blah, blah.
It would have been far better for Strib managers to have told their staff, i.e. the professional skeptics whose respect is vital to a cohesive, productive newsroom, that, “None of this has a damn thing to do with creating a better newspaper. We know it and you know it. Yes, classified advertising is down, and kids aren’t reading the paper. But this whole thing wouldn’t be nearly as bad as it is if we didn’t have to guarantee investors who don’t give a damn about any of us, the quality of this paper, or even the Twin Cities for that matter, implausibly fat profits for the three or four years they’re paying any attention to us at all.”
If the Strib’s new “plan”, which is really a forced march to the past, before the Star Tribune acquired regional and national influence, included even one concept that signaled “investment” by Avista Capital Partners, the grumbling wretches would be marginally less wretched.
Last week former Strib publisher, Roger Parkinson, took a quick stroll through the building, saying hello to old employees and compadres. I finally got him on the phone this morning, before he flew off to Vienna to meet up with his book club. (They read a book, in this case something about Sigmund Freud, and then gather in the appropriate location to soak up the vibe. “The Brothers Karamazov” took them to St. Petersburg. Dante and Galileo to Italy. Meanwhile, my book club makes it no further than Stillwater.)
Parkinson, a bona fide curious intellect – unlike “the current occupant”, as Garrison Keillor says of George W. Bush — had a ready litany of the pressures creating turbulence around his old industry. (Parkinson is currently chairman of the board of the University of Toronto Press, which probably means he gets his book club books at a discount.) He pointedly declined to criticize current Strib management, but has a significantly more forward-looking view of journalism than anything coming out of the Strib’s executive suites today.
I’ll tuck away most of what Parkinson had to say for another time and move to one specific point of agreement, namely that ownership genuinely interested in investing in its product and maneuvering for survival into the on-line, post-print world would get serious right now about creating television out its abundant assets.
Certainly within three years the union of the television screen and the internet will be a fact of American life, and considering the boggling range of material available on the ‘net, the steady drop in the price of digital televisions and the February 17, 2009 deadline for fully converting to all-digital transmission, this union of TV and internet will likely come at us a lot faster than anyone is expecting now. But when it does, StarTribune.com, (or StribTV), instantly becomes a video competitor to WCCO-TV, KSTP-TV, KARE-TV and everything else offering “news” and infotainment.
The difference between TV news as it exists and a newspaper, in terms of value as a news source, is obvious. Even after the forced attrition going on now, the Star Tribune will still have seven or eight times the staff of a major affiliate TV newsroom like KARE. Moreover, when you factor in how much of TV news is sports and weather, and how much of TV news has been acquired after reading the morning newspaper and sending a truck across town for pictures and 30 seconds of “reportage”, there’s a looming “no-contest” to a head-to-head competition. Anything TV news can do newspapers can do as well and with several times the breadth.
Were Avista in the newspaper game for any reason other than to strip present assets as close to the bone as possible and still make claim to being a daily newspaper, they, like the New York Times, the Washington Post and several others, would have already commenced the “television-ation” of the Strib newsroom.
This of course would require a personnel strategy radically different from the one Par Ridder and Avista are currently following. For better and for worse TV runs on personalities and character. The upside to the Star Tribune is that while their personalities may not exactly sport consultant-approved haircuts and orthodontia, the best known of them are authoritative, deeply-sourced, know what they are talking about and, assuming they are allowed to be themselves, long ago acquired an internet-ready attitudes.
Whether it were field pieces with say, Nick Coleman, talking up witnesses and cops at the scene of the latest shooting, a Linda Mack feature on the new MacPhail building, Randy Salas spinning through off-beat new web sites or special features on the latest DVDs, Dan Browning and super-intern Brady Averill discussing and taking viewer questions on the US Attorneys scandal, Katherine Kersten slashing away again at the Flying Imams, Mark Brunswick, Pat Doyle and Pat Lopez giving updates from the legislative session, Sara Glassman showing and explaining fashion trends, or even, hell, James Lileks “quirk”-ing from a Linden Hills coffee shop, all the elements are there in terms of both established brand and abundance that TV stations — with their own “right-sized” newsrooms and rapacious, short-sighted ownership groups– can’t/won’t be able to approach.
And that’s all before you even get to the daily grit of covering fires, sports and the Op-Ed page.
Parkinson jokes that in his experience, first in newspapers and later in academia, “Newspapers and faculties are the least susceptible to change of any cultures I’ve ever known. But, as loathe as newspaper journalists often are to doing television, once they try it they realize they enjoy it.”
Among the many consequences of Ridder and Avista not giving one goddam about investing in a truly vital news source large and sufficiently connected to both cover and explain the Twin Cities is that their current attrition process is shoving out and/or marginalizing exactly the sort of next generation-ready journalists the Star Tribune needs most.
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