I see a string of legitimate questions piling up in the “comments” area, about the latest Strib carnage and other topics, and I vow to generate a post dedicated entirely to answering them in the very near future.
But among recent comments was this one:
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“As one who’s felt the sting of “dynamic change,” I fully empathize with the Strib staffers now on the receiving end of the same corporate lock-step speak. I’m especially sad to hear about the treatment of colleague Neal Justin. Newspaper potentates are idiots when it comes to understanding the value of a TV critic in the marketplace.
Anyway, I’ve had my own web site, unclebarky.com, since two days after leaving The Dallas Morning News on Sept. 15. It’s a totally homegrown site that allows me to write about local and national television in the way that the gods of independent journalism intended.
I wish everybody the best at the Strib. But as one who’s been there, it won’t be the end of your worlds.”
Ed Bark
former TV critic of 26 years standing at The Dallas Morning News
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I’m not over-gilding the lily here when I say that Ed Bark was (and is) something like the dean of the nation’s TV critics. Deeply sourced, respected by the whole vertical structure of today’s television culture, from the heads of network news and entertainment divisions to anchors to fledgling sitcom divas, the self-effacing Bark is a bona fide wise man, precisely the kind of professional journalist whose word, in person or print, is well-considered, fair and often quite entertaining. The guy is a walking encyclopedia of television lore with a sly Texas lawyer’s way with a provocative question. Ed is every bit the equivalent of Pat Reusse, a trusted expert on his beat with a voice as unique and familiar as your favorite uncle.
And the owners of the Dallas Morning News squeezed HIM out. (Ed has written about it.)
Though it may not seem possible to believe at this moment here in Minnesota, but the Morning News’ owners, the Belo Corporation, are actually more thoughtless vulgarians than the Par Ridder/Avista Capital Partners crowd.
Ed’s e-mail was followed not long after by this one:.
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“The broadband revolution has brought into focus that there are indeed two types of newspaper readers, (there are actually more, but let these two stand for now).
One is a group of people who are interested in issues, national and world politics, and events, and who bemoan the parochiality of a newspaper that covers zoning boards.
The other is a group of people who pick up the paper to find out: Did they rezone that piece of property? Why are they putting all this silly stuff about Sarkozy and Putin in the paper?
The groups, alas, exist in mutual incomprehensibility.”
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The two intersected in my alleged mind at the point of trying to understand the financial value in the de-flavorized, de-voiced and dessicated journalism model now inflicted on BOTH Twin Cities newspapers, thanks in no small part to Par Ridder, (although he is clearly just the callow front man for other, far more influential forces).
There are a lot of examples at the Strib of this counter-effective process of excising beats and voices that provide the PLEASURE and ENJOYMENT of reading a newspaper and replacing/reassigning them to the cheapskate “localism” of suburban city council meetings, high school sports and re-phrasing police blotters. Architecture critic Linda Mack comes to mind. But I don’t know Linda.
As his former competitor though, I do know Justin. (I don’t think “full disclosure” requires me to go into a lot of detail about those night caps at the Liquid Kitty in West L.A.)
Our running joke was that I was the TV critic who never watched TV, and who could just barely tell Geena Davis from Wayne Knight, while he was the guy who, any day, was going to bust the searing, no-holds-barred expose of the Minnesota connection to the LA porn industry. (A few more months of research and he’d have it, by God. Then it was just a matter of getting it past the copy desk.)
More realistically, our debate was over what kind of TV coverage readers most wanted to read?
Since I took the elitist view that adding local coverage to the latest “hot” show, the “Joe Millionare” of the moment, was both redundant, given the bales of copy available on the wires as well as professionally embarrassing, (since the implicit expectation from editors was that I was to avoid my usual acerbic take on the genre in favor of reflecting the giddy excitement of the show’s lovelorn teenage fans), I would tell Justin there was fun to be had in playing with local TV and radio characters. Over-sized egos. Craven capitulation to corporate dictums. Each and every one, God’s gift to journalism. The whole package. Day after day.
The key, I always said, was whether the paper allowed you to apply the same voice to the beat as say a sports columnist has to his.
Justin, who is a very entertaining character, would slam his glass on the bar top and say, mostly facetiously, “Yeah. But nobody wants to read that shit.” This was his way of reminding me that he had a much stronger stomach than I did for prime-time programming.
And he may have been right. In telling Justin that their interest is in “straight reporting” on TV, as opposed to any kind of sports-like amalgamation of reporting/opinion and analysis, Strib management is asserting the same drab standard Ridder brought to the Pioneer Press.
But my immediate point is that Neal, like Linda Mack and others getting shuffled away from any semblance of learned analysis, personal voice and writerly prose, delivered
copy that was pleasurable to read and, since it doesn’t get much more local than a box blaring in your own living room, his TV stories had metro-wide relevance far beyond 10″ on a housefire in Inver Grove Heights.
The truest description about what’s going on here in the Twin Cities, first to the Pioneer Press and now to the Star Tribune, (with worse to come as each paper enters into negotiations for new contracts, starting this month in St. Paul and next year in Minneapolis), is that
none of this is about “saving” the newspaper, and all of it is about “selling” the newspaper.
I’ll spare you my screed on how the recently-fired “sweet old ladies” at the Star Tribune switchboard are a prime example of the berserk redistribution of wealth going on in this country, as their meager salaries are yanked away and redirected into the already plump portfolios of Avista Capital Partners. But I will tell you I don’t understand how anybody, even a bunch of hedge fund-style sharks like Ridder and Avista, (whoever they really are), would see more bottom-line value in the monotonous, rote reporting of suburban minutiae than a “product” dusted with at least an occasional glimmer of wit, analysis based on long-term exposure to a topic or industry, and style.
Who looks at the “broadband revolution” and says, “The secret to making money in this environment is to get duller and more homogenized, fast”?
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