Hans Eisenbeis As Mike Mosedale mentions here, not everything is tea, sugar, and circulation growth over at the Newspaper of the Twin Cities. For the cilvilian, the finer points of newspaper Guild-speak are often hard to understand. (You mean professional writers have actually stopped sniping at each other long enough to form a working labor union? My … Read more
We adore David Carr, one of our own who left the Twin Cities Reader to edit Washington City Paper in the midst of a long boom of greatness there that produced folks like Jack Shafer and Brett Anderson. Carr now writes sober and precise media stories for the New York Times, although he is no … Read more
If you missed us on MPR this morning, you could probably catch us in their audio archives. One thing we wanted to talk about, when we were on the topic of media credibility, was this: This morning, the Strib broke the news early that undercover officer Gerald Vick was legally drunk (well, he was loaded, … Read more
Tim McGuire, ever the genteel former editor of the Star Tribune, weighs in today from the chitlins circuit of academic punditry with yet another defense of the newspaper industry’s prospects for the future. (Yes, officially everyone now has had his or her say; no, newspapers will not die. They have survived TV, radio, telephones, palm … Read more
John Tierney’s op-ed earlier this week suggested that news organizations are playing into the hands of terrorists by reporting, or at least overreporting and sensationalizing, their terrorist acts. We’ve been saying the same thing for months now. It’s not a comfortable thing to say—that too much information is a bad thing—but we must acknowledge that … Read more
In this populist age, it is always assumed that scientific polls of the public should automatically gainsay the wonks and policy-makers. The poll is the modern media’s Torah—the numbers are scripture, and everything else is commentary. The implication of today’s “Minnesota Poll” at the Star Tribune seems to be that, since most Minnesotans do not … Read more
The last great spat among high-profile media folks was between James Woolcott and Kurt Andersen. Today, the sparks are flying between Jack Shafer and Michael Wolff. We don’t have strong preferences for a winner, although we have a couple of peanut-gallery-type observations to make. Shafer is by far the more thorough and accountable reporter, Wolff … Read more
Jack Shafer has been banging on about how terrible he thinks PBS news is—in particular, we recall his cheap shots at Lehrer’s News Hour. His main problem seems to be that it makes him sleepy. There’s no pleasing Shafer, apparently—because if it’s not a spectacular ethical lapse in the showers with Biill O’Reilly, then its … Read more
Apropos of Monday’s article in the Times that “print is here to stay”: We would rather read a magazine or a book on paper. The quality of most newspapers (and, to be fair, a good many magazines) resonates well with the populist qualities of the internet. In our experience, most newspaper articles do not demand … Read more
Can you build circulation and still sell a readership to advertisers? That would seem to be what newspapers are trying to do more and more these days, as circ money is slowly laundered into advertising revenue. That means old-guard dailies like the Star Tribune are caught between two worlds—the mass audience and the niche enthusiast. … Read more