Year: 2007

Eric Black, the Star Tribune’s Talmudic analyst of things political and media has already plotted his next move, announcing that he will begin an association with Minnesota Monitor a fledgling website with a strong progressive political attitude. Black has taken the recent buy-out, and expects to be fully separated from the Strib by June 15.

For the past year or so Black has been writing, “The Big Question”, easily the Strib’s most-visited blog. A few months back he brought in the paper’s erudite but libertarian political editor, Doug Tice, for a little counter-point. It wasn’t exactly, “Jane, you ignorant slut”, but it had potential – more in my opinion if each gentleman loosened the foundation garments a bit and applied a little showmanship. But that’s just me.

I caught Black on the way into the office this morning to clear up a few details of his arrangement with MnMonitor.

“It will be an independent blog,” he explained. “I control it. MnMonitor can use all or as little as they please. Ideally, material will flow back and forth freely. But is is my blog. I don’t have a name for it yet. [“The Big Question” apparently is the Strib’s “intellectual property”]. The Center [for Independent Media, MnMonitor’s parent organization] is helping me set it up.”

And the compensation, considering Black is an established name bringing valuable credibility to a young organization with sober ambitions? “Well, they are definitely paying me for it. I won’t disclose the terms. It is not a full-time job with benefits. But when you leave your old employer with a year’s pay, some things are possible.”

Black and I have discussed the evolution from newspapers to blogging, and he has confessed there are attitudinal and stylistic adjustments he will need to make.

“But,” he says, “it would be unfair and untrue to suggest the Star Tribune in any way restricted what I wrote on the blog. But as you and I have discussed, there are cultural aspects of the newspaper environment. There certainly are norms and limitations you buy in to. In that way I’ve already found [The Big Question”] very liberating. It may take years though to stop the kind of self-censoring all newspaper reporters do. I’ve said I have a lot of unlearning to do. But I think I’ll adapt.”

The relationship with Tice, one of the better conservative writers in town, is on indefinite hiatus. That’s too bad. As Black notes, one of the serious downsides to the web is the segregation of ideologies, with each camp having little-to-no interaction with the other, “except in derision,” as Black says.

“I’ve been doing a lot of brain-storming, and will continue to look into ways to create some kind of civil discourse.”

While the powers that be at the Star Tribune mull who among their employees to keep and who to kick on to “new opportunities”, I talked to my former competitor, Deborah Caulfield Rybak, about one of the stranger ironies of the Strib and so many newspapers’ “hyper-local” business stratagem. (I say “business” because it has everything to do with short-term business and almost nothing to do with relevant journalism, and “stratagem” because it is more contrivance than well-considered “strategy.”) Namely, the irony of desperate newspaper managers with a tin ear for what core readers are interested in reading.

This may sound more than a little self-serving, since both Rybak — who decided Friday to take the latest Star Tribune buy-out (after the paper eliminated the media reporting job) — and myself worked the media beat for daily newspapers. But I assert relevance in the context of “localism” and readership — factors that allegedly matter, even within the “right-sizing” template Par Ridder has now dropped on both papers here in the Twin Cities.

Our beef: Rybak and I were well aware (and proud) of the traffic our work generated for our papers’ website. According to the geeks in IT, traffic is good. To some extent it connotes readership, and readership is supposedly still important, even amid The Great Newspaper Revenue Collapse. Moreover, all those “hits” are the only regular, reliable accounting of traffic either of us, or management, could ever grab on to.

Nevertheless, both Rybak and I have now experienced the, uh, “sobering” experience of getting the word that contrary to all that “traffic” and “readership” numbers jibberish, local (and national) media coverage is all but entirely expendable when managers need to sling a few bodies overboard. What gives?

I know. Poor, poor pitiful us. If we ever get a real job you’ll cry for us.

A seasoned reporter long before coming to the Star Tribune — she worked at the LA Times and had a successful free-lance career for almost a decade before landing at the Strib — Rybak migrated into media reporting from the Strib’s business desk, and her business reporting sensibility was the hook to her coverage of the usual shenanigans of local TV and radio stations, i.e. Minnesota’s local “celebrities”.

Pre-Ridder and Avista her primary internal conflict was with gossip columnist Cheryl Johnson, a.k.a. CJ, whose beat is at least 40% dependent on telling tales out of local newsrooms. Rather than resolve the conflict in the overlap of the two beats sensibly — let CJ cover after hours hijinx and Rybak the on-the-job stuff — the Strib’s managers let it fester in CJ’s favor. CJ retained her columnist’s license, while Rybak was pointedly told there would be no column and no undue attitude in her stories.

It was not exactly an acute reading of where “celebrity”-oriented journalism was going. Sports is an entertainment business and no one would ever think of printing a paper without a sports columnist making merry with the hometown team.

Says Rybak, “That was Anders (Gyllenhaal, the Strib’s editor at the time until leaving his past February for the Miami Herald). Anders did not want any more columnists. Columnists meant opinions and opinions meant conflict for him, and Anders hated conflict.”

Conflict aversion has become my best explanation for why so many newspapers avoid local media reporting entirely. (In most newsrooms a TV critic — basically a movie reviewer for TV — suffices). Those papers that do cover local media keep a very tight rein on the amount of voice and analysis their reporters are allowed. Why? Clearly there is readership for the plucking in the aggressive pursuit of the locally famous.

Back in the Pleistocene Era Nick Coleman wrote a local media column for the Star Tribune. (That’s a joke.) It was great stuff, with Nick, never mistaken for being reverential to fame, goosing up solid reporting with frequently and hilariously acid wordplay describing the craven, anything-for-a-buck grandstanding of local TV “stars.” (It got worse/better when he’d go out to L.A. and slash up Michael Landon, aka “Jesus of Malibu”.)

“Yeah, but one reason I walked away from it,” he says today, “is because I could feel my editors pulling back their support for me. If you’re doing it the way it is supposed to be done, [reporting and analyzing editorial decision-making in radio and TV], quite often what you’re writing is also reflecting badly on them. Chickenshit is chickenshit. So what makes it worse is that at the same time this stuff is reflecting badly on them they’re also taking shit from the people they think of as peers. There’s a kind of class distinction issue involved.”

In other words, almost as a professional courtesy, media managers understand to keep their minions under control. Only “facts”, the drier the better, please. Never mind that a straight report of some station’s cratering ratings without informed analysis is arguably misinformative.

Among these obvious ironies — the steady supply of “local” coverage along with easily-proven reader appeal — the shame about the Strib whacking media reporting, (someone may yet get tossed the occasional ratings or anchor-hit-by-bus story), and losing Rybak, is that the Strib is shuffling out an extraordinarily well-networked and aggressive reporter, someone with deep memory of this market and plenty residual memory from her previous work covering Hollywood and straight business.

Of course, the same claim could be made for a dozen or more Stribbers getting pushed toward the door.

But my point here is that Rybak’s value in an a less-fettered, interactive on-line environment, toward which newspapers will evolve sooner or later, is immediately obvious. Put simply, she gets the electronic “thing”.

The value just isn’t obvious to current Strib management, which, as I’ve said before, seems to be pursuing the same uninspired reorganizational template that daddy Ridder applied across the country through the late Nineties, and young Par dropped on the PiPress during his brief stopever/training-wheels assignment there. It is a moribund template that offers no vision for enhancing brand value.

One argument, espoused by former Strib publisher Joel Kramer, is that the fundamental newspaper business model has already passed the tipping point and is plunging rapidly toward unsustainability. Interviewed on TPT’s “Almanac” Friday night, Kramer disclosed his interest in creating an on-line newspaper here in the Twin Cities, an all-electronic entity without the gruesome overhead of print media.

We’ll see what he decides after he finishes doing all the math. But if Kramer, or someone, is prepared to suck up a little editorial risk — and let established, well-sourced reporters write the kind of stories a public, (maybe not the Great Mass public) wants to read — they will probably find revenue following readership.

Anyone who tries will have an ample talent pool from which to choose and substantial readership prepared to take it for a test drive.

*Version 3.121* Copyright © 2001-2004 Six Apart. All Rights Reserved.

Without further comment … this from Pamela Miller, Star Tribune Guild officer and the paper’s Faith & Values reporter.

“Brian’s coverage of the misery at the Strib has been accurate and intelligent. I appreciate that.

“But I wonder if you, the blog- and media-reading public, really care what happens to a bunch of middle-class journalists who will probably land on their feet. The real tragedy is not for journalists, but for you citizen consumers of news, who now will find less of it, written more hurriedly by fewer people, in their local paper AND at that paper’s website.

“Like most of my counterparts, I wrack my brain day and night for a way to save my beloved craft, and hope that we’re all wrong and that this terrible time is just a dip in, not the death throes of, mainstream journalism. I believe journalism won’t die, but just evolve somehow. But how, in a way that preserves accurate, cool-headed reporting?

“Like Brandt, I am among the lucky ones at the Strib — the religion beat will survive, whether it’s covered by me or not. But I never forget that a few years ago, when the first symptoms of shrinkage appeared, an equally important beat, Science, was killed. And now I look around and see talented folks like Warren Wolfe scrambling for a gig after his growing-in-importance topical beat, Aging, is unplugged. And I look at Doug Grow, whose trademark hearty laugh sounds almost sad these days — here’s a guy who in the past would have had a retirement party that would have filled a stadium; now he tells me he’d rather we didn’t even have cheese, crackers and beer at Jax for the 50 departing folks “because it would feel too sad; no one will wanna come.” And I look at wonderful support staff folks like Patricia Grice and Brian Leehan, who contribute deeply to our paper’s intelligence and humanity, and feel angry that they may be forced to walk the plank so an oil-drilling company can have its big bucks.

“I have a teenage son who is co-editor of The Quill, the student newspaper at Robbinsdale Cooper High School, and for years he dreamed of being a journalist. Now he’s not so sure.

“We have a great union contract, but even the best contract can’t prevent layoffs and buyouts. We union officers feel like hospice workers, treating symptoms and holding hands. But in this grievous time, we also feel strong stirrings of solidarity and stubbornness in those of us left. Avista can expect to face a savvy, strong union when negotiations open next spring. We’re not rolling over — far from it. We’re going to have some things to talk about.

Pamela Miller
Faith & Values reporter
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Media reporter Deborah Rybak has decided to take the buy-out and leave the Star Tribune. She joins the likes of Eric Black, Doug Grow, Stormi Greener, Sharon Schmickle and 40-plus more Star Tribune newsroom employees who have/had until 5 pm today to officially notify the paper of their intentions. The paper has decided to deep six the media reporting beat.

Every departure has its elements of skullduggery and drama and Rybak’s certainly is no different. Working half time for the past six months as she dealt with family issues in California Rybak has been out of the newsroom maelstrom, but hardly immune to the effects of the tentacles of of misinformation, calculated or clueless, that have added to the anxiety dripping off the walls of the building these past few months — really ever since the day after Christmas when McClatchy announced it was selling out to Avista Capital Partners.

Rybak had no intention of leaving as of even a week ago. In fact, she has a May 14 e-mail from managing editor Scott Gillespie assuring her that, “Our agreement is airtight,” plainly meaning that he understood she intended to return to the media job and that he had agreed to that.

Still, to give you an idea of how screwy (and worse) these last couple weeks have been, Rybak, following the action from California, watched in a combination of puzzlement and horror as Gillespie nevertheless posted her job — meaning it was technically available for other reporters to choose — and then faded off into a veil of incommunicado-ness, sliding decision-making up and down the management pecking order. This left Rybak asking repeatedly, and long-distance, for clarification on what in the hell was going on — as in how she could declare her intentions to keep the job, based on the paper asking her to declare that she wanted it, then watching them first post the beat to all-comers, before eventually dumping the job entirely.

UPDATE: Some of you have asked when the full, final and official list of buy-outs will be released. Guild officer Pam Miller explains that Strib management has some kind of a June 6 deadline, “But I expect they’ll announce it before that.”

Complicating the situation is the paper’s stated (to the Guild) intention to get rid of “about” (says Miller) 10 of the 35 or so newsroom support staff, meaning news aides, librarians, etc. As Miller explains it the paper has said it will not accept more than 50 reporters, if it doesn’t get the minimum number of support staff. That could have the effect of some people who chose to take the buy-out being told their request has not been accepted.

Or, put another way, the situation really is miserable.

Miller, who writes for the Strib’s Faith and Valuyes section, described, “an eerily quiet scene” after today’s 5 p.m. deadline passed. Many had gone home early, perhaps seeing no purpose in ruining a perfectly good spring weekend with an extra hour of the spirit-sapping vibe of the Star Tribune building.

“You know,” says Miller, who by the way plans on staying, “I think of myself as a happy person. I’ve liked almost all the jobs I’ve ever had, and I like this one. I look forward to coming in in the morning. But I am very concerned about what this has done to this place. The way this has been handled has made everyone more suspicious of our managers, more suspicious of Par Ridder. It has become an unhealthy, toxic environment.”

Based on Ridder’s history and current ethical challenges I wonder if there is anyone who believes he and his current management team even have the skill set to restore their own credibility, much less a semblance of productive collegiality to the building?

Miller adds that it isn’t as though she and her colleagues don’t understand the profound problems of the newspaper business. Rather it’s that they detect no vision at all for moving their paper into something better.

I mentioned a memo from LA Times publisher, David Hiller, that was picked up on LAObserved yesterday.

The LA Times is beset by at least as many problems as the Star Tribune, and may or may not be better off with the smoke and mirrors purchase by Chicago tycoon Sam Zell. But the Times at least understands, and constantly reminds its staff that it intends to survive the transition to all digital news, and at the very least it isn’t going to go down without a fight.

Said Hiller, “We are adding technology and online product development resources. A little later today, we are announcing that Scott Sullivan has joined latimes.com as chief technology officer and will be building the teams to speed our development and rollout of new interactive products in the second half of 2007 and 2008. High on the priority list will be new local entertainment and listings products, building off the current calendarlive.com offering. We’ve also made initial investments in the camera and editing equipment necessary for our developing video strategy and continue to address our multimedia editorial training and staffing needs.”

The Avista owned, Par-operated Strib maybe be giving lip-service to such ideas, but there isn’t anyone in the Strib newsroom who thinks they’re going to take any serious risks to achieve anything like what the Times is attempting. And THAT is demoralizing.

Hiller added, “The recent [reduction] program was a difficult but important part of how we are changing – reducing expenses in the core and investing for growth. As part of this, we are both eliminating some positions and adding back some positions. We eliminated approximately 170 positions, mostly through the voluntary buyouts; we are planning to hire back approximately 50 positions in the core paper to strengthen talent in multi-media, local coverage, marketing and sales. In addition, we will be adding likely more than 30 additional staff in interactive before the end of the year. We are a living, changing organization and this all part of how we adapt.”

I’ve said it before, the current Avista “team”, and I say that sardonically, betrays far more interest in “harvesting” than “investing” in the Star Tribune. Cornball chatter about, “leaner and meaner” is, frankly, an insult to the intelligence of the average reporter. Money talks, and what Avista’s money is saying is, “Every man for himself.”