Author: Brian Lambert

Today is Thursday. Star Tribune guild employees who want to take advantage of a voluntary buy-out, triggered by the paper’s handover to Avista Capital Partners this past Monday, have until next Monday, March 12, to notify the powers that be. Most, presumably will wait until the last moment to return their company paper clips and stick pins. One who didn’t bother to wait until next week is Dane Smith, the paper’s dogged, deeply-sourced capitol reporter.

Like his competitor, Pat Sweeney, who exited the St. Paul Pioneer Press last Thanksgiving, Smith’s departure leaves a rather significant void in a beat that may not register much with “our younger readers”, (a stale mantra of modern newspaper managers — few of whom ever reported a story), but has always been a cornerstone of journalistic responsibility. As in, if you can’t cover, or aren’t willing to cover the state legislature and how the characters there spend taxpayers’ money, you really ought to just become a high school sports daily.

The Strib still has an entirely solid cast of reporters up on the Hill in Mark Brunswick, Pat Doyle and Pat Lopez. But Dane Smith is a major loss.

Echoing what he told Paul Schmelzer over at Minnesota Monitor, “This is not a big statement of protest. As much as anything its the fact that I’ve been here exactly 20 years. That’s the max on the buy-out, [40 weeks pay]. And I feel I’m young enough to explore something different.”

Smith has had preliminary chats with politicos around town. He’d like to “expand on teaching”, which he does down at Inver Grove Community College, “maybe do some public relations work, some government communications, or, who knows, maybe try my hand at academic policy wonkery. I’ve always wanted to be a wonk.”

The shame would be if he doesn’t write more about the stuff he knows best, the innards, skeletons, past histories, context and curiosities of Minnesota politics. The guy is a walking contemporary history of Minnesota government. But under modern newspaper “rules”, where 25″ has become some kind of major feature, very nearly too long for the “busy reader”, (more mantra), who wants only straight factoidal nuggets with their daily stew of criminal mayhem, sports and “people” coverage (ditto), Smith says he was constantly frustrated by his inability to get more of what he knew into the Star Tribune’s dead tree version.

“For years I’ve expressed my irritation with space limitations,” says Smith. Where 10 years ago a story filed from his beat might regularly run, “35, 45, 50 inches. Hell, even 70″ if it was a hot profile”, 25″ is now the norm. Worse, for whatever the combination of reasons, he says the Star Tribune’s website still hasn’t been tweaked and tooled to handle the detail-rich, “plus-sized” version of a story, with the speed-read nuggets going on to print. Smith openly laments what he sees as Minnesota Public Radio’s deeper and broader web-based political coverage. “I think MPR has maybe the best political page, don’t you?” (Yes, I do.)

Not that Smith is ripping his paper. He expresses pride in the work that is still being done there. He seemed genuinely moved by e-mails he was getting from long time Strib colleagues. “I still think the Star Tribune is going to be a very good paper for a very long time. I’ve always thought of it as an intelligent paper. There are still terrific people, terrific reporters over here. And I think that’ll continue under Avista.”

Is that wishful thinking?

“Maybe a little. But it is too early to say which way this is going to go.”

In a different world, the Star Tribune’s new publisher, Par Ridder, fresh aboard after leaping from the afterdeck of the Pioneer Press, would refuse to accept Smith’s resignation, offer him a new deal with written assurances that at minimum the current buy-out offer would apply whenever he might decide to leave and work out the kinks in the web site. But that’s asking pigs to fly.

Better for all concerned might be Smith hooking up with some new entity that simply wants everything he knows about Minnesota government and politics, day after day.

He says he’d be happy to keep coming to the capitol. “I think I’m like a horse, you know? Following the same path.”

Whether some new web or whatever concept can pay the bills remains to be seen. Which is why Smith is keeping all options on the table, as the Bushies like to say when they’re into sabre-rattling.

“I suppose I could always be a tobacco lobbyist,” he jokes.

Yeah, and last time I checked the methamphetamine crowd had no representation up on the Hill.

Smith replies, “I asked a tobacco lobbyist one time if there was anybody he couldn’t work for. And he said, ‘I would never work for pawn brokers’.”

So we can cross that off the list.

Jack Shafer poses a good question over at Slate today. Unfortunately, while the headline, “Our Ann Coulter Problem. Why the Press Won’t Just Ignore Her”, suggests he supplies an answer, he doesn’t. Other than the talk radio crowd who eerily echo the notorious line, “Coulter has some good ideas”, (Like what? Blowing up the New York Times?) — everyone else who has watched Coulter’s career arc has to have asked themselves, “Why?”

As in, “Why is this rude, unmodulated, and not particularly insightful shock-jock-style pundit given so much airtime?”

My old pal, David Carr, of the Times, had it as right as anyone when he suggested Coulter wouldn’t get past security at The Today Show and CNN if it weren’t for the blonde-in-a-cocktail dress bit. (The reverse logic there being that Matt Lauer and everyone else might have had a few more chats with, say, the late Molly Ivins, if Ivins lost 40 pounds, 20 years and made friendly wih a bottle of peroxide).

Let me suggest … again … (as in “yet again”) … that the media’s problem with Coulter is two-fold, maybe three-fold.

One: The mainstream media lives in a state of constant, palpable, dry-mouthed fear of being targeted by right-wing partisans. To be called out as a “liberal” is to be on a slippery slope to getting Dan “Rathered”, where a stupendous network of resources comes to bear on you with such constancy and virulence it becomes nearly impossible to do anything — like “normal journalism” — other than rebut crackpot criticism and invective. In order to blunt this very high potentiality, mainstream media news entities and performers make extraordinary concessions to personalities who embody the far-far-right ethos. It is a way of indemnifying themselves.

Two: Mainstream television and radio news — and I use the word “news” very advisedly in the context of commercial radio, since it barely exists anymore — is entertainment, first, second, third and foremost. That means glamour of a fairly cliched variety is a primary criteria for access to the network camera. With that in mind, rail thin blondes in short cocktail dresses — often at 8 in the morning(?) — are inherently more viable as guests than say some middle-aged gal like Ivins, or nerdy-looking wonky characters like, um, David Sirota or Glenn Greenwald, neither of whom I recall ever being asked on to chat up Lauer, Diane Sawyer or whoever is doing that CBS show these days.

Third: Coulter can be relied on to make “news”. She will, invariably insult, vilify and engage in reckless hyperbole. Its guaranteed. Its like booking a barking seal. Her willingness to spew over-the-top invective of a sort that were she a guy in a bar would get her nose broken, is fundamental to her appeal to mainstream infotainment. Its part of an unwritten contract. “We’ll have you on, and you say something — anything, we don’t care — just as long as it is ‘hot’ enough that every other network has to pick it up and run it. Cross-promotion, baby! Its how you play the game.”

The direct link between Coulter and the latest absurdist celebrity overreach — Anna Nicole Smith — is almost too obvious to note. (Carl Hiassen whacks his press colleagues for their Anna Nicole frenzy in his Miami Herald column.) Where Smith could be relied upon to behave like the siliconized trailer trash she was every time a camera turned in her direction, Coulter can be relied upon to give voice to the worst instincts of the country’s most angry, ill-informed yet active media watchdogs … and be blonde the whole time she is doing it.

The solution? As an old altar boy, I place great faith in the cumulative power of shame. Enough citizen-viewers e-mailing the Matt Lauers or Charlie Gibsons of the world, or standing up during one of their barnstorming tours and asking, “the Ann Coulter question”, will eventually diminish her appeal. Cable news, even more desperate than network morning shows for sick-to-dead blondes to hold their audience, will take a lot longer to shame. And even then Coulter will be replaced … probably by something worse.

My God! What if Coulter used her book royalties to buy herself an Anna Nicole boob job? MSNBC would give her her own show.

After picking their jaws up from the floor, staffs at both the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press began analyzing and contemplating what Par Ridder leaving the latter to publish the former really means. Ridder is the 38 year-old scion of the once renown newspaper family. A family whose dance with Wall St. devils proved fatal, to many of their employees, if not to them.

Knight-Ridder’s bungle led, first, to the evisceration in terms of staffing and quality of its’ papers across the country, including the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In the Twin Cities it led to a sale last spring of the Pioneer Press to Star Tribune owner McClatchy to satisfy private equity investors. That move was followed by another sale of the Pioneer Press, this to cutthroat media owner, MediaNews. What significant publishing experience the young Mr. Ridder has gained in his short career came from overseeing the execution of rigorous downsizing in St. Paul. (Ridder was quoted only last week telling Pioneer Press employees they’d be better off without a union.) He will bring that expertise to Minneapolis.

Ridder was introduced at a hastily-called 9:15 AM meeting, (a company-wide e-mail went out at 8:29 AM, almost as though someone preferred most reporter-types were NOT on hand for the Ridder-era curtain-raising). His introduction coincides with the first day of Avista Capital Partner’s ownership of the Star Tribune, following McClatchy’s startling Dec. 26 fire-sale of the paper to avoid capital gains tax penalties.

Ridder’s tenure at the Pioneer Press, overseeing draconian cutbacks in staffing and depth of coverage, is not the sort of thing that should reassur either Star Tribune newsroom employees or, if it cares, the community at large. A brief Q&A at the early morning introduction apparently did not get into specifics of the Avista game plan, which has most of the staff on edge, presuming cutbacks and lay-offs a la what Ridder supervised at the Pioneer Press.

Pioneer Press staffers were in a different state of shock. Ridder may have been regarded as a rich kid in a largely empty suit, but no one I talked with ever considered he’d leave … for the Star Tribune. While the Pioneer Press “playbook” may be a thin, rudimentary text these days, Avista may — “may”, I say — see an advantage in having a guy who knows how all the revenue deals are managed on board their ship, if getting ruthless and sinking the Pioneer Press once and for all is part of their profit-making strategy.

More to follow.

Having made a point — an “appointment” — to watch all but one episode of the highly-anticipated and now by all appearances canceled “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” I am not the least bit surprised it got whacked. And I am not engaging in schadenfreude. I was genuinely eager for another Aaron Sorkin series, even a post 12-step Aaron Sorkin series, and I hope he learns something from this and comes back with another.

I never revered “The West Wing” like some. When interviewing Sorkin with other critics during that series’ Clinton-era glory days I asked him, repeatedly, why he was so consciously writing away from the ripest, juiciest, most crowd-grabbing story lines? As in anything resembling the epic manipulations of public attitude and congressional authority, not to mention the potboiler sexcapades of those innocent Bubba times of yore. If you were doing a top-of-the-line network TV series about the Oval Office, why, for God’s sake, would you avoid the titanic clash of interests — cynical, reckless and butting up against the weight of the Constitution — going on outside our door?

Every time I asked, whether on the “West Wing” set or at some cocktail schmooze, Sorkin would give the slightest little sigh of exasperation — (as though network bosses were wondering the same thing?) — and repeat that he was not interested in the dark and mendacious aspects of government. Rather, he said, he wanted to do a show about the nobler impulses of government.

That never satisfied me. Good God man, pit nobler impulses against the forces of dark mendacity! There’s a long history of that concept working very well. Especially at a moment when the entire country was endlessly analyzing everything from stained blue dresses to, as I say, the naked corruption of Congressional authority.

Frankly, I thought “The West Wing” became more watchable after Sorkin checked in for treatment. True, those three or four classic Sorkin lines of dialogue were suddenly gone from the new episodes, but pesky details like plots and storylines were elevated to a higher priority.

So last spring, about the time of the May “up-fronts” in New York, the buzz started early and heavy about “Studio 60”. A smart insider’s look at network television from the perspective of a very savvy survivor. Terrific! I’m in. And never mind the come-down in gravitas from the internal dynamics of the Oval Office. In pop-culture addled 21st century America, the attitudes and role-modeling of Hollywood are a supremely valid point of dramatic departure. The people most addicted to “pop” entertainment and information have little to no idea how it works, or who is working it. Add the possibility of topical satire and parody inherent in a show set behind-the-scenes of a live, weekly comedy skit show and we should have been talking a steady flow of 80 mile an hour fastballs into Sorkin’s wheelhouse.

But instead of exercising the opportunity for cultural commentary — nobler or more crass — Sorkin headed off into the not at all interesting emotional travails of people — TV writers, producers and executives — almost none of us have ever been inclined to worry about. Worse, what ripe character conflicts Sorkin created, he studiously managed to avoid picking for their juice. Matthew Perry’s character can’t resolve his obsession with a Christian cast member. Cool, you think. But other than a few good Sorkin lines about the hypocrisy of the religious right, the Matt & Harriet relationship was pretty much one of constant aggravation, bickering and tease. Swell. Who can ever get enough of that?

Basically, every episode of the show to the point of its’ cancellation felt like throat-clearing, scene after scene, episode after episode preparing the audience for something truly significant and substantial … that never came.

Obviously you don’t usually associate “significant” and “substantial” with a TV show about a TV show. But Sorkin nattered around with the fitful romance of Matt (Perry) and Harriet (Sarah Paulson), then introduced another one between Danny (Bradley Whitford) and network boss Jordan (Amanda Peet). I just didn’t care. Whether any of them ever got together and raised plump babies in a gated Pacific Palisades estate just didn’t matter to me. I was making an appointment with an Aaron Sorkin inside-the-industry-he-knows-best drama for fresh, lucid insights and observations on the network/Hollywood/show biz culture. The creation and marketing of pop iconography, even. It was something he could have done with the cast he had but chose not to.

I could go on, but let me wrap it here, by saying that both of the key women were badly mis-cast. I never got the visceral allure of Harriet on Matt. Harriet was a study in cool restraint. (Wouldn’t spontaneity be a criteria for working on a skit show … and winning the heart of a comedy writer?) And Amanda Peet, usually a vivacious free-spirit in other roles, was flat-out unbelievable as a network boss — all allusions to former ABC chief, Jamie Tarses, withstanding.

I understand the need for high-profile executives to project a flat affect and never let the bastards see them sweat, but Peet’s character never seemed affected by anything. Not the machinations and threats of her boss, played by Steven Weber, her pregnancy … nothing. Come on! Having chatted up network bosses being microwaved by bad publicity, bad ratings, upper management pressure and desertion by former friends, believe me, you can read the stress on their faces. Its that kind of job. More to the point, there is fascinating behind-the-scenes drama in watching a clever, resourceful, highly competitive character put on the public face required to handle such situations.

Finally — and this time I mean it — “Studio 60”, like “The West Wing” badly needed to get off its’ lavish, expensive set and breathe. As a viewer I felt entombed. Didn’t this hot and trendy cast and crew ever get out, hit the town, gather at parties in the Hollywood Hills and enjoy their notoriety? Would some strategic location shooting – a la “Curb Your Enthusiasm” been such a sacrifice?

I remember asking both Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme, who directed a lot of “West Wing” episodes, if maybe a show about the President of the United States might need a bit more sense of scale — motorcades, Air Force One, foreign trips, political rallies, conventions — venues that conveyed the rarefied ambience of the world’s highest office? Their response was on the order of, “You’re talking about the #1 show in the country. Go away.”

Obviously, despite this failure, Sorkin will work again. He’s one of those people I’ve never worried about. But I’d like to encourage him to take one more shot at a show set behind-the-scenes of modern media. There’s plenty to be explored and said. How about for example, an HBO series, (for language and adult situation license), behind the camera of some particularly pernicious cable news channel?

I see Bradley Whitford as Bill O’Reilly, and Amanda Peet can play Greta Van Susteren.

With only five days to go before the McClatchy newspaper corporation flips the keys to its’ once flagship property, the Star Tribune, to the Avista immediate-return-on-investment corporation, a terrible virus has infected the newspaper’s connections to the internet. Something wormed into the Strib system Wednesday cutting off access to the net, and by Thursday it still hadn’t been completely knocked back. “Its still running really slow, kind of like being connected to AOL,” said one Stribber.

The thought of some nasty cyber toxin prowling the tubes of the Stribs’ internets goosed the already high levels of profane gallows humor affecting the building. (The imagery of The Strib infected with an STD, as a result of a quick, tawdry union of McClatchy and Avista was amusing.) As noted here several times earlier, since no one has a clue what Avista is really all about, every professional skeptic in the place presumes the worst. And with good reason. There simply is no available precedent that encourages high hopes in the current situation. Private equity companies typically want to mine their downward-trending old media companies for profits, usually by rigorous cost-cutting … I mean, “localizing”.

Comments over the weekend by new top editor, Nancy Barnes, essentially confirming the prevailing view that Avista is a strip-and-flip squad intent on getting acceptable profits out of the Star Tribune in “three to six years”, wasn’t anyone’s idea of a comforting bedside manner.

Point being that next week will be a big one in the lives of dozens of Strib employees, who have seven days, until March 12, to decide to take the contractual voluntary buy-out, or hang on and hope they aren’t reassigned to covering feral cats in Woodbury stories. (A rumor working the Strib today was that Avista was planning to summarily whack all merit pay, sending veteran employees back to union scale salaries they haven’t seen in decades. By the end of the day consensus was that there was language in the current contract prohibiting such an action, or at least most of it.)

One other move of interest, the Star Tribune’s D.C.-based reporters, Rob Hotakainen and Kevin Diaz, were formally reassigned away from the Star Tribune, Hotakainen to the Kansas City Star and Diaz to McClatchy papers serving Alaska and Idaho. Both will remain in D.C. Among a host of mysteries is whether Avista plans to build its’ own D.C. bureau. The presumption is they won’t.

My apologies for the paucity of posts. I’ve been out of town since Saturday. But I’ve returned with a head full of savagely deep thoughts. Until one bites me there is this …

I am not pretending that many will notice or care, but my alma mater, KTLK, (noted in previous posts for its’ gruesome ratings performance to date), has terminated morning host, Andrew Colton, as of this morning, Feb. 28. No further details at this time other than a comment from a KTLK insider describing, “a dramatic scaleback of news operations”. Odd,I wasn’t aware there was a news operation at KTLK. Don’t you need reporters for that? Maybe the source means KTLK missed a payment for access to all those Fox News rip ‘n reads.

To the surprise of no one who can read a ratings book, my former employers at KTLK have at long last spared Twin Cities radio listeners a third hour of Sean Hannity. The downside of course is that that same audience will get a third hour of Jason Lewis. … Oh, come on. That’s a joke.

As has been reported previously, based on the most recent Arbitron ratings, Clear Channel’s expensive, heavily promoted experiment with FM talk in the Twin Cities has not been going well. Explanations for the station’s brutal under-performance all fall under the heading of, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

The Top Three: (1). On Day One the idiots put Lambert on the air. (2). The underlying psychology of right-wing talk is heavily dependent on associations with a “winning team”. Team Conservative has badly screwed the pooch over the past six years, and as a consequence fewer and fewer listeners are eager for its’ company. (3). The KTLK line-up was monotonous. The same talking points at the same pitch hour after hour.

The “Hannity factor” plays big in that last one. No one cares if I call Hannity a dim bulb. But, to put it kindly, the guy brings nothing new to the table. Ever. Worse, he really is a performer who appears to have no concern at all for the accuracy of his “information”. Nevertheless, Clear Channel and KTLK were stuck with him via his syndication deal. (They made Hannity and Hannity’s people big promises to run him both live and at full length when they yanked him away from KSTP-AM.)

Like most businesses radio runs on leverage, so the assumption is that Hannity’s godawful performance meant leverage slipped from him to KTLK’s management, and in turn they felt brave enough to screw him.

It is known that Lewis has been campaigning for that third hour, the 4 to 5 p.m. slot — a warm-up before prime-time drive-time. Now, beginning March 5, he has it.

Interesting piece today from former Rake writer Al Eisele on The Huffington Post.

He’s entirely correct in citing another terrific piece of work by the upper echelon of mainstream journalism. But do keep on reading, as Eisele’s readers rip HIM for giving the MSM a nano-second’s break from the hellstorm over their far more egregious failures. Common theme: A cut-’em-a-new-a**hole story on something like the treatment of returning vets should NOT feel like an exception that proves the rule.

And do check out this link to a chat between PBS’ “Frontline’s”: Lowell Bergman and Steve Talbott on issues related to their excellent, four-part … MSM … series, “News War”. Part 3 premieres next Tuesday.

I don’t currently subscribe to either XM or Sirius satellite radio. But there have been times I would have sold my mother to the Arabs, (to quote Woody Allen), for anything that offered relief from the unmitigated crap that qualifies as “local broadcasting” across huge swaths of the continental USA. I mean, westbound out of Minnesota you can get maybe as far as Pierre S.D. before the “charm” of the voices of colloquial America have you pounding your head on the steering wheel.

One big reason is that “local broadcasting” in the heavily-consolidated, Clear Channel-take all, post-TeleCom Act of 1996 age means there are very few actual locals on “local radio”. Instead you get a hell of a lot of Rush Limbaugh, regional Rush Limbaugh-wannabes and syndicated Christian/bigot preachers inveighing against homosexuals and the U.N. All that and soulless, whitebread “radio-country” crap. (Would it kill these alleged country stations to play Hank Williams and Lucinda Williams? The Drive By Truckers? Come on!)

The long-predicted announcement that XM and Sirius are planning to merge gives Congress an opportunity to right a few of the big time wrongs that followed the TeleCom ’96 Act. As Cong. Ed Markey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, told the Wall Street Journal yesterday, “In light of the dramatic consolidation of radio ownership in the U.S. terrestial radio marketplace in the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, I believe the merger of the only two satellite radio companies must be assessed with an eye toward ensuring that it does not have a similar deleterious effect on diversity on the dial and localism in radio coverage and reporting.”

“Deleterious effect” Well, amen to that, Congressman. Markey is probably just blowing brave smoke, but he seems to understand the bland, monopolized and, I dare say, politicized mess that 11 years of unchecked consolidation has brought. More to the point, what with the new, Democratic-controlled Congress having oversight over approval of this proposed merger, it is possible to re-think 21st century radio.

The trick, it seems to me is creating a legal template that assures true(r) diversity — not just different call letters for programming that all comes out of some New York or San Antonio studio. The best way, it seems to me is by finding a way to keep satellite subscriptions low-to-non-existent, and using that competition to force stagnated, ad-choked terrestial radio to clean up its act.

One proposal worth exploring seriously is a la carte programming. As in, let me pick 20 satellite channels for a buck, or 50 for $5, or something like that, instead of insisting on $13 for everything, and see what happens. Like many of you, I’m maxed out on monthly subscription fees. But ask yourself, wouldn’t you pop for satellite radio if it only cost you the price of a couple espressos a month?

The other is squeezing local stations onto the one big satellite system. Don’t get me started on the way Congress and the FCC never get tough with terrestial broadcasters — WHO PAY NO MONEY, EVER, FOR THEIR LICENSES. I think it’d being amusing to watch {the parent companies) of big local stations, like, say, WCCO, KSTP or KFAN, bidding for a priority spot on a satellite, if each Top 50 metro area was only going to get one, or two. (Clear Channel of course owns a fat chunk of XM).

Since terrestial broadcasters haven’t paid Dime One for the right to print money from the public airwaves, maybe they could pay cash straight to the government kitty for spots on a bird — required of XM/Sirius as a condition of approval.

I haven’t bought into satellite to this point because, A: I’m a cheap bastard. B: It hasn’t been portable enough, yet. (but its getting there.) C: I’ve got hundreds of CDs that’ll get me from here to there just fine, and without 30 minutes of commercials every hour, and finally, D: Some of the best hours of road-tripping I’ve ever enjoyed came with a serenade no more expensive than a sunroof open to the whistling wind.