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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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: ‘ ‘ “When the Berlin Wall fell and Eastern Europe escaped from the shackles of communism, I wrote that we must not forget … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
There are two things I’ve learned from reading and talking about the decline of modern newspapers: The average consumer doesn’t give a damn, and a key survival strategy of those who remain in mainstream newspapers is denying the self-inflicted wounds of compromised news judgment. To the first, there isn’t much I or any other ex-newspaper … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more