Author: Brian Lambert

(UPDATED) I can’t decide if I want this to be true or not, but by all indications on May 14 Star Tribune publisher, Par Ridder, currently busy hacking the livelihoods out from under 150 or so of his employees, closed a deal to buy former KARE anchor Paul Magers’ rather, shall we say, grand-to-ostentatious Lake…

I love a good rip job, and commenter “lttl” gets off a terrific stream of rips while responding to Strib Guild officer Pam Miller’s post lamenting the loss of so much talent from her newsroom. Clearly “lttl” places far less value on the Twin Cities’ primary news source. Here’s a sample: “Ford, NWA, local govt,…

A little good news for a change. My erstwhile radio partner/combatant, Sarah Janecek, editor of Politics in Minnesota and close pal of Kevyn Burger says word direct from the treating physicians is that Burger’s cancer is Stage 2 and therefore completely treatable. She will undergo the usual draining chemotherapy but prospects for a full recovery,…

This is just released by Nancy Barnes, Star Tribune editor … >>> Nancy Barnes 6/5/2007 5:24 PM >>> Dear Staff: Since Monday, we have accepted 40 people into the voluntary buyout program, for a total of 44 approved buyouts to date. We have also had one resignation in the last month, which brings us very…

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.…

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…