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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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, … Read more
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, … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
One way or another every local television news outfit hypes itself as Your News Leader. What they mean by this, of course, since only one station can be the actual leader, is that the kids in their PR departments have found creative ways to twist Nielsen numbers to make it appear as though they have … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more