Eric Black's New Gig

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.”