Author: Brian Lambert

Just to give you an idea of the anxiety hanging over their weekend, Star Tribune employees left the building Friday hoping for the best, but expecting the worst from announcements scheduled for 3 pm Monday, (tomorrow).

Operating as per usual with little to no information, rumors were that new owners Avista Capital Partners, via their hirelings, editor Nancy Barnes and/or publisher Par Ridder, would reveal their need for new staff reductions, beyond those taken in the voluntary buy-outs of late February.

The most repeated rumor — rumor, I say — had Avista requiring 60 positions out of the newsroom and 200 company-wide. As draconian as that sounds, many other similar-sized papers have seen as much in recent weeks, as owners slash staff well ahead of revenue declines in order to assure investor profits through the near-term.

A second rumor had Avista fattening up the previous standard buy-out offer of two weeks for every year served up to a maximum of 40, up to a maximum of 52, with maybe some lingering medical benefits.

It is not known if Mr. Ridder will take the buy-out offer.

Thursday afternoon at the Star Tribune saw the paper’s four metro columnists, Doug Grow, Nick Coleman, Katherine Kersten and Cheryl “CJ” Johnson called in to separate meetings with editors Nancy Barnes and Scott Gillespie and told, in so many words, that the paper was looking to scale back the number of columnists and would any of them care to raise their hands and volunteer for reassignment to the paper’s suddenly thin — and getting thinner — ranks of street-level reporters?

There were, as far as I can tell, no immediate takers. Later it was learned that quasi-metro columnist, James Lileks, was also given the same message.

This sort of scale-back/down-sizing/gutting has been anticipated ever since the new owners, Avista Capital Partners took over and after the round of voluntary buy-outs that clipped 24 positions from the payroll two months ago. Widespread assumption in the Strib newsroom is that fewer columnists will soon be matched with fewer theater critics, fewer film critics and perhaps — all though this is very hard to imagine — fewer sports reporters. (Veteran NBA reporter, Steve Aschburner, has already left the paper.)

Meanwhile, newly-arrived publisher, Par Ridder, the target of a much-publicized lawsuit accusing him essentially of industrial espionage, remains secure in his position.

Every profession has its unwritten rules, among those in journalism, and/or the “news business” if you will, is the rule that says the sales end of the operation, be it a newspaper or TV station, never sticks its nose into the reporting end. (Actually, that may be written in some places.)

Another is that as a news person whose job involves asking people uncomfortable questions, when on the rare occasion you yourself are asked a question by some other journalist you deal with it yourself. It’s part professional courtesy and part common sense. Request anonymity if you must. Go off-record. Say, “no comment”. But do it yourself. What you don’t do is use the always suspicion-arousing corporate dodge of handing it off to a gate-keeping minion in the PR department.

It appears that KMSP/Fox 9 News’ news director, Bill Dallman, has blown by these quaint conventions and embraced a new journalistic orthodoxy.

The story begins a little over a week ago when veteran reporter Tom Lyden volunteered to run down a tip about someone who bought a car from a small Richfield car lot, Car Hop, only to be pulled over by the cops a few days later for driving a stolen vehicle. As Lyden checked it out it became clear that the problem rested with a paperwork screw up at the state level and the car dealer was blameless. But it was still an interesting little story, so Lyden assembled the piece for a report on that night’s Fox 9 news hour.

So far, so mundane. But then, about 90 minutes before the piece was to air, Lyden got a call from his boss, Mr. Dallman, asking whether there was any way to keep Car Hop’s name out of the story. Car Hop it turns out is a KMSP advertiser. Never mind that Lyden’s reporting would show Car Hop to be blameless in the episode.

Lyden resisted. The piece ran. Car Hop was mentioned. And the next morning Dallman addressed his staff, telling them that from now on he wanted a heads up any time one of their stories involved a station advertiser. According to those there that morning Dallman also mentioned that if the station lost advertising as a result of a story his job could be on the line. The clear inference to that order being that someone ELSE’S job would be on the line before his.

Needless to say, that little speech became a “talker” around KMSP. Especially since, as it became clear, the advertiser in question … never even called to express concern with the story. Dallman apparently was free-lancing advertiser protection … from his own reporters.

Now THAT is what I call servicing an account.

After calling Car Hop, where the manager insisted he never talked to anyone from KMSP other than Lyden, and never registered any complaint, I left a message for Dallman. An hour or two later I got a call from a young woman in KMSP’s “media department”. (Wait, isn’t the whole building a “media department”?)

She asked what my interest was in talking to Mr. Dallman? My “interest” I explained, was in asking Mr. Dallman a few questions about the episode. She then explained that I would have to ask those questions of her instead, or at least first. At that point I realized the story had just fattened up a bit. A news director for a TV newsroom full of news reporters was having a PR department throw up flack? (Did I mention he is in the “news” business?) I told the young lady that although I have never met or previously spoken with Mr. Dallman, (he took the job a little over a year ago), I was assuming he was a big boy and could probably answer questions for himself, without the PR department’s protection/interference.

She reiterated that I would have to ask the questions of her first, because, “That’s the way we do things.”

I left it at Dallman could call me if he wanted to talk, otherwise I’d put him down as a “no comment”.

Dallman didn’t call back.

The young woman expressed some confusion over why anyone would have any interest in a story like this? To which I explained that if nothing else the detail of an automobile advertiser’s involvement in sales-to-news management carries unique resonance in the Twin Cities. She claimed not to understand what I was talking about.

Along with unwritten rules, there is the open secret that no newsroom, print or electronic ever treads on the automobile industry. Not on models, manufacturers or dealers. Not unless the story has grown so huge it has created a national-sized buffer, like the tires exploding on Ford Explorers a few years back. Never mind that automobiles are the second-largest purchase the average news-consuming family ever makes. The fact that local car dealers are so absolutely vital to every newspaper and TV station’s bottom line means you almost never read or see investigative stories about the industry, and the “news” holes in the car sections are filled only with lavish praise for the fabulous redesign of the latest hot model.

WCCO-TV, the last news operation that (very) briefly employed a spokeswoman for its news director, remembers both the infamous Silvia Gambardella consumer report of the early ’90s where she almost off-handedly reported the savings possible by buying used rental cars, a comment that resulted in a firestorm of protest from local dealers that soon found her gone from ‘CCO, and more recently, car advertisers pulling a rumored $1 million in ads over a Don Shelby, “In the Know” comment.

Point being, car advertisers know they have weight to throw around, and they throw it. But … back to KMSP … tiny Car Hop isn’t exactly Denny Hecker, and … they didn’t even complain! They thought Lyden’s piece was fair.

The stonewall thrown up by KMSP’s “media department” prompted a rare moment of investigative journalism on my part, which turned up this little gem, from very early in Dallman’s term at KMSP. By 2006 I think everyone in the country knew you don’t run Video News Releases (VNRs) — essentially feature length commercials produced by specific businesses, in this case a little organization known as General Motors — without at least disclosing the source. But, what do I know? I’m old school about this stuff.

The acutely aware may have already seen this Tom Tomorrow cartoon celebrating the 4th anniversary of, “Mission Accomplished” Day.

He attaches the following highly ironic quote from long-blindered/much-syndicated conservative columnist, Cal Thomas:
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“When the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Europe escaped from the shackles of communism, I wrote that we must not forget the enablers, apologists and other “fellow travelers” who helped sustain communism’s grip on a sizable portion of humanity for much of the 20th century. I suggested that a “cultural war crimes tribunal” be convened, at which people from academia, the media, government and the clergy who were wrong in their assessment of communism would be forced to confront their mistakes. While not wishing to deprive anyone of his or her right to be wrong, it wouldn’t hurt for these people to be held accountable.

That advice was not taken – but today we are presented with another opportunity in the form of scores of false media prophets who predicted disaster should the U.S. military confront and seek to oust the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein. The purpose of a cultural war crimes tribunal would be to remind the public of journalism’s many mistakes, as well as the errors of certain politicians and retired generals, and allow it to properly judge their words the next time they feel the urge to prophesy…

All of the printed and voiced prophecies should be saved in an archive. When these false prophets again appear, they can be reminded of the error of their previous ways and at least be offered an opportunity to recant and repent.”
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There are at least two remarkable aspects of the pre-war media punditry.

One: The vast majority of the regular pundit have been proven not just wrong, but deliriously wrong. So wrong the proverbial room full of monkeys would have produced a higher success rate than … the pundits allowed to offer comment on network and cable television. (Forget about talk radio, which at least is unabashed in its unwavering commitment to wrongheadedness.)

As Bill Moyers reminded us last week, the choice of “expert” pre-war punditry was heavily influenced by networks — and newspapers — tilting coverage to remain in step with perceived popular opinion, thereby avoiding charges of unpatriotism, which to nervous “objective” editors is a little like being accused of pedophilia, that is to say, an accusation from which you never fully recover.

Two: Virtually all of the worst offenders, the “experts” now proven so completely, ghastly wrong — the kind wrong that would get a standard beat reporter reassigned to the loading dock — continue to gas on as though nothing has changed and their expertise hasn’t been proven not just faulty but, on many levels, corrupt.

More to the point, no real attempt has been made to rotate in pundits who accurately predicted the catastrophe we see before us today. None of the cast of, for example, “The Nation”, contribute any more frequently than they did before the war. And voices who have established their bona-fides since May 1, 2003 — people like Glen Greenwald, Eric Alterman, Kevin Drum, Brad DeLong — are largely unknown even to the better-than-average informed because of their absence from the standard punditry chairs on the “Hardballs” and “Scarborough Countries” of the world, much less the Sunday morning DC chat shows and “Nightline.”

With audience levels off 30-40% and more for your average Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio act, compared to 5/1/03, and Bush’s job approval pretty much resting on the marrow of the country’s most reactionary and implacable conservatives, common business sense would tell you that unless you are in the business of just nakedly cooking “facts”, like Fox News, time and events have evolved an audience interested in something both new … and a hell of a lot smarter and more intuitive than the same discredited cast of characters of yore.

As a “Mission Accomplished” Day kicker, here is a little bitter dessert, thanks to Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher.

I realize I’m running dangerously close to being a two-trick nag on the Star Tribune’s problems with; (1) Charges that publisher Par Ridder plotted abandoning the Pioneer Press for his primary business/financial rival for months before he actually did, allegedly cooking/absconding with executive non-compete contracts in the process, and (2) The paper’s startlingly weak pursuit of provocative local angles on the US Attorneys scandal.

I really should spend more time watching the sweeps months features lining up on 4, 5, 9, 10 and 11. But damn, these two items are so juicy.

Anyway, a couple quick observations before I move on … for a while.

While it was mildly gratifying to see the Strib’s reader rep, Kate Parry, finally address The Ridder Problem in her Sunday column, I’m not sure the difficulty of covering an in-house scandal is the essence of the issue facing her. I don’t doubt it is damn tough to get Ridder to discuss the accusations thrown against him, and I don’t doubt the accusers have been more forthcoming. Nor do I doubt that reporter Matt McKinney, who was handed the assignment is a resourceful pro. And likewise, I’m not at all surprised the Ridder matter hasn’t generated public interest.

From the public’s perspective, why should they care about Ridder? He’s a faceless executive. Unless there are other boots to drop, Ridder isn’t sucking money out of the public’s pocket and the whole thing is as inside corporate baseball as it is snicker-worthy and soapy.

The issue is credibility and the higher standard for recognizing and rectifying appearance problems to which newspapers regularly claim to hold themselves. When it comes to the grunt classes of newspapers — the wretched pecking scribes — there is no end of hand-wringing concern over the slightest appearance issues, with management regularly admonishing writers to step back from proximity to any perception of ethical dilemma.

So why not demand the same — if not more — from the publisher? You can certainly make the argument that his reputation puts a heavier stamp on the credibility of the paper than say, a sports writer who lets a player buy him a couple drinks. (Like THAT ever happens.)

Ridder dodges Parry’s questions on the law suit with the stale ploy of respecting “the legal process”, a process that, as every reporter knows, regularly obfuscates more than it clarifies. If that’s what Ridder wants to say, fine. But at this point OUR reader’s rep owes us at least a paragraph explaining how this dodge reflects rather badly on the paper’s reputation for transparency and why much more — a lot more — is needed to avoid months of lingering suspicions.

One other thing: Parry is big on the rough and tumble competition between the two papers. But the Par Ridder matter has NOTHING to do with the competitive fire of the two newsrooms. This is an executive suite-to-executive suite affair, with the two staffs as bystanders. Far from being competitive, the two newsrooms are unified in preferring complete and satisfying answers to what in the hell has been going on behind the mahogany doors. (The two staffs are also unified in suspecting/knowing that the greatest threat to their continued survival is upstairs in their own buildings, not the reporters across the river.)

On Trick 2: I’m running out of expressions of righteous amazement. Late last week it was revealed that former US Attorney Tom Heffelfinger was in fact on a list of prosecutors … someone in DC wanted fired. You’d think this would be the long-awaited green light for the Strib to put the pedal to the metal and start catching up on this story. Until now the Strib has been running like a soccer mom’s mini-van in the NASCAR race that is the US Attorneys story. A race where its former McClatchy DC bureau has been playing Tony Stewart, denting bumpers and fenders.

So … I fail to understand the value in constantly returning to Heffelfinger for yet another discussion of what he doesn’t know. As I’ve said before, even if Heffelfinger knows something more, he isn’t obligated — yet — to tell anyone, much less a reporter about it. More to the point, the scandal is such a godawful circus of incompetence and arrogance that any sane adult would want to keep a healthy distance from it.

Although by now, the prosecutors who were fired and/or were on a list to be fired are the ones assuming badges of honor. Suspicion is turning to those who MET with Bush administration approval and kept their jobs.

So here’s a word of advice. Tom Heffelfinger’s repeated expressions of surprise and annoyance are not the story. Nor, for that matter, are former Minnesota Supreme Court Chief Justice Sandy Keith’s testimonials for Heffelfinger’s replacement, Rachel Paulose.

It comes as a surprise to absolutely no one that newspaper circulation took another dive in the spring numbers released today by Audit Bureau of Circulations. Locally, the Star Tribune registering a somewhat worse than average decline — -4.8% on weekdays and 5.1% on Sundays. Last week the Pioneer Press claimed its daily circulation had increased .3%, with Sunday up .1%

The Strib can take hollow consolation by looking at the once respectable Dallas Morning News, where gruesome gutting by the Belo Corporation hasn’t exactly blunted a circulation meltdown that reached 14.2% daily and 13.3% on Sundays.

Another sign of the apocalypse can be seen in the INCREASE of the New York Post, 7.6% daily and 6.5% Sundays.

The question I’ve always had about George Tenet — seen this evening on “60 Minutes” getting feisty with Scott Pelley — is this: How exactly did he, a Clinton-appointee running the goddam CIA, pass muster with Dick Cheney and hang on into the Bush 43 administration? I mean, here was a crowd gone obsessional with doing everything the opposite of Bill Clinton. North Korea? No talking and no deals! Measured fiscal prudence? Gargantuan tax cuts for the Top 1%! And every disposable FOB anywhere in Washington … overboard! But they leave Clinton’s guy running the CIA? The Coast Guard, maybe. But the CIA is one job where you want an unequivocal Kool-Aid partisan, like, uh, Porter Goss.

From what I’ve read Tenet plays the man’s man game pretty well. He is cocksure and smokes a good cigar. But someone like Cheney had to have some kind of deep assurance that Tenet was not going to be a problem, either with him or with the Richard Perle-Paul Wolfowitz crowd squeezing the Iraq alarm even before 9/11, to survive the Clinton cauterizing going on everywhere else in the federal bureaucracy.

But here is Tenet now selling his version of history. Granted, it is a version pretty much lacking in surprise and neatly in step with everything else we’ve learned — and Condoleeza Rice, Cheney and Bush continue to deny, to their further utter marginalization.

I’m all for public officials stepping up and admitting they screwed up — even if they do it by way of fulfilling a $4 million book contract — but the primary strike against Tenet, which maybe he’ll answer better when he testifies before Congress, is why he didn’t step up and scream, “Bullshit!” two years ago, when he realized that either Cheney, Bush, Rice or Andy Card had sold him out to Bob Woodward.

If he stays as combative as he was with Pelley it’ll be one of the more interesting book tours in recent years. (Must check to see if he’s doing Stewart).

One of the mustier traditions of newspaper writing is the amount of group-think involved in crafting the first paragraph of a story — in journalism jargon known as “the lede”. Tradition says that the first paragraph should contain the essence of all the information to follow. Tradition also implies that that first paragraph represent the newspaper’s institutional attitude toward the story.

Despite abundant evidence that modern readers value a little punch and style as much as a, uh, “fair and balanced” recitation of facts, when you read a story like this morning’s Star Tribune piece titled, “Concerns over Heffelfinger reportedly raised at Justice”, you can smell the hands of nervous, second-guessing, group-thinking editors all over it.

As I and many others having been saying for weeks now — including the Strib’s editorial page and, most prominently, columnist Nick Coleman — the Strib, there’s no kind way to put this, has flat-out failed to properly (i.e. adequately) explore the high likelihood that the abrupt departure of US Attorney Tom Heffelfinger may in some way be related to the rather large, politically and ethically significant firing of eight other US Attorneys that erupted into a national scandal five months ago and is still building.

A group-think lede, with handful of editors re-re-re-re-crafting that all-important first paragraph to properly assert the paper’s institutional thinking/position on a given story gives you a contrast like we see today between the original reporting from D.C. and the Strib’s massaging for local consumption.

Here, first, is the lede paragraph in the latest story from the Strib’s former D.C. bureau, McClatchy Newspapers.
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WASHINGTON – The Bush administration considered firing the former U.S. attorney in Minnesota, but he left his job voluntarily before the list of attorneys to be ousted was completed, two congressional aides said Thursday.
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(The entire piece is here).

Not a lot of style. But punchy and direct to the key point … that thanks to new testimony by a former Justice Department official with knowledge of the whole affair — Kyle Sampson — the story has now taken a leap well beyond “presumption” vis a vis Mr. Heffelfinger.

Cut now to the Strib’s “crafting” of the same news:
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WASHINGTON – Senior Justice Department officials raised concerns about then-U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger sometime after October 2005, according to a congressional aide familiar with what a former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told House and Senate staff members last week.
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Never mind the complete absence of style and the convoluted splatter of dulling bureaucratic verbiage like “senior”, “aides”,”officials” and “staff members”, how about the complete avoidance of the rather essential and connective word, “fire”? Note also how the McClatchy report — the latest in a series of precisely the sort of professional, skeptical reporting newspapers normally expect of their DC bureaus and that the Strib has declined to re-print — distills the essence of the whole business into THE FIRST SENTENCE.

Namely, “The Bush administration considered firing the former U.S. Attorney in Minnesota … ,” while the Strib committee prefers instead, “Senior Justice Department officials raised concerns … ” yadda yadda. (Other recent MCClatchy reports here, here and here.

Can we agree that by now all arrows are pointing well past and beyond the hapless Alberto Gonzales and directly at, “The Bush administration”? Note to Strib political editor group: I think it is now … safe … to say that the “Bush administration” had something to do with this.

Also note that despite the appearance of a long-awaited link — courtesy of “a congressional aide familiar with … [zzzzz]”, the Strib plays the revelation inside on A4. (On the front page — breaking news on eating disorders). As I say, Strib group-thinkers have consistently decided against re-printing their former colleagues’ work on this story, preferring instead to either ignore McClatchy reports entirely or re-craft them into something more, shall we say, “appropriate” for their institutional voice. (Shades of punching up those New York Times pieces they run every so often.)

At this point in the US Attorneys-Heffelfinger-Paulose story, with Monica Goodling, Paulose’s close-personal friend, having been granted immunity in exchange for her testimony on the matter, with Gonzales being asked to prepare, you know, actual answers to all the questions he could not “recall” last week and with subpoenas approved for Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, I’m guessing the Strib’s group-thinkers are praying for an asteroid impact to distract public attention from the bizzare lack of editorial judgment they’ve displayed in this significant, substantive matter.

And while I’m at it, yes, if it weren’t for Nick Coleman pushing and prodding and writing on this story, the Strib would have as much relevance on the Heffelfinger angle as the Excelsior-Shorewood Sun Sailor. Coleman hit it again this morning with a “lede” that plays like this:

“Minnesota’s U.S. attorney, Rachel K. Paulose, has waged a public relations campaign to salvage her position since allegations were raised that her appointment was part of the Bush administration’s efforts to place political loyalists in U.S. attorney offices, especially in states expected to be “battlegrounds” in the 2008 election.” The whole column is here.

I’ve read more style out of the boy, but that lede gets directly to the heart of the story — a significant local angle on a major national scandal — that the Strib’s group-thinkers have chosen instead to minimize/suppress/downplay/ignore/hope will go away … take your pick.

Glenn Greenwald talks with the Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage about his reporting that won him a Pulitzer for National Reporting a couple weeks back. Savage got into and continued writing on President Bush’s use of “signing statements”, an arcane and complicated issue with no sex appeal and very little in the way of guaranteed instant response from the average reader. Never mind, as he says in this interview, that the abuse of signing statements reveals a unifying theme in many of this administration’s most serious blunders.

Talking about why the Globe kept on running the signing-statement stories when so many other papers ignored it — it did light up the lefty blogosphere, which Savage notes — he says this:
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The Associated Press article reporting on the Pulitzer awards quoted you as follows: “The Globe for a while was throwing it out on the front page when a lot of people were ignoring it, and that took a lot of courage.”.

Can you elaborate on that? Who was ignoring it? And why do you believe it took “courage” for The Globe to continue to publish your articles on signing statements?

“The Globe, unlike some regional papers, has made a decision to continue doing its own enterprise reporting in Washington. This means that the Globe can highlight its own stories rather than taking the safer route of joining in a single national agenda set in consensus with others. I think it took courage on the part of editors to keep putting the paper’s reputation behind a very complex story that was not being echoed on the front pages of other publications. I believe this experience shows why it is very important to maintain a diversity of journalistic thought in Washington.”
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The issue of “consensus” coverage, (the truly snide have been known to call it “pack journalism”), has always been troublesome, leaving huge voids in coverage of stories with less of that “readers want to know” appeal. That trouble has been aggravated as regional papers have either done away with Washington bureaus entirely, or reduced them in size to, say, a single, industrious intern, who, unless they’re a fledgling Charlie Savage are in no position to dispute their silverback editors’ notion of “the story of the day”.

Since writing his Pulitzer-winning series on the signing statements Savage has popped a couple excellent pieces on the background of Alberto Gonzales’ acolytes in the present, uh, Justice department. Click the link for one of them.