The Rake Magazine

Author: Tom Bartel

  • Before You Buy That Second Home in Arizona…

    You might want to read this from the NY Times. It seems that the states out west, where mostly Republican buffalo roam, are fighting among themselves for the little bit of water they have available.

    The funny part is that, except for California’s governor, that big actor, many of the pols out there aren’t big believers in global warming.

    Of course, we here in the land of 10,000 lakes can laugh. But as soon as they figure out a way to pipe our water over the Rockies, those pictures of the high and dry docks on Lake Superior will become just as common as the ones of those mud holes out west.

    You know how those western movies about the water rights wars between the cattlemen and the farmers always turned out bad for the farmers? We’re the sodbusters, I fear, and there’s no Shane in sight.

  • The Difference

    One could not ask for a clearer distinction between what newspapers should be and what they are becoming than today’s paper editions of the New York Times and the Star Tribune.

    The featured photos on the front page of The Times were a series of three which perfectly illustrated the frustration that is Iraq. A Sunni grandmother who had been threatened by Shiite men was shielded by American and Kurdish soldiers, and the Shiites were arrested and taken away by the Americans. The third photo was of the woman’s granddaughters crying because their grandmother had just been shot dead by Shiites after the Americans left. (Here is the entire NY Times slideshow.)

    The front page of the Strib featured a large movie still of the execrable Will Farrell in his latest assault on the intelligence of America, and a heart tugger of a man who wants to keep the memory of Jackie Robinson alive 60 years after he integrated Major League baseball.

    Both front pages made me ill.

  • Sex and Superheroes

    The blank page is an intimidating thing, especially for a writer who only manages to spew out a couple thousand words per month. Trying to write a significant eight-hundred-word piece every month seems harder than doing an essay two or three times a week, as most columnists do. The formula (take a bit of news, maybe make a few calls on the topic, then tell everyone what to think about it) doesn’t work so well when the news may be thirty days old by the time the column is read. At best, this will be eleven days old before the magazine hits the streets—and even older by the time readers make time for it.

    So, how do you remain fresh in the era of the Internet, when your “Use by:” date is already expired by the time you hit the streets? You don’t write about Alberto Gonzales or Anna Nicole Smith (OK, I wouldn’t write about Anna Nicole at any time), and you sure don’t discuss the weather. I’ve pored over the pages of random notes I took this month with the hope that something would pop out at me as worthy of a column, but the notes that did were clearly the scribblings of someone who was slogging toward the end of a long Minnesota winter.

    For example: “Only when the economic benefits become apparent will we do what we should have done all along”; or, “Paradise will not come to Minneapolis because of technological advances like Shot Spotter”; and, “A belief in rationality gives us hope when the reality of our savagery makes it unlikely a rational approach will work”; and finally, “Wash your car.”

    Clearly, I need a little more time under the full-spectrum lamp. And soon.

    But it will be spring before this writing hits the streets. And there are other notes in the little black book I carry around that aren’t so dreary.

    I was in New York a few weeks ago, and in addition to the Armory Show [see this story], I also took in another art event worth mentioning: Comic-Con, the national convention for comic books and all things related. The Javits Center was bursting with all sorts of comics-related booths, from the displays of classic comics dating to my youth, to new video games, to the work of contemporary artists and writers, many of whom were autographing and selling their original art.

    The sights were both amusing and poignant to someone like me who grew up learning to read from Superman and Batman comics. I saw familiar comics that I used to own, before my mother bundled them up with my baseball cards and tossed them the day after I left for college. The smiles those brought were exceeded only by those engendered as I watched people my age sort through the stacks—although the current motives were different. In place of the revelry of youth, there was the determination of the collector. “I’m looking for issue 222. I can’t find it anywhere,” moaned one searcher. “Is that the ‘Juggernaut’ issue?” another commiserated. “That’s a tough one.”

    Alongside these moneyed acquisitors were the young people who looked how you’d expect people to look after spending too much time in dusky basements playing Dungeons and Dragons. Comic-Con was their paradise, for not only were they surrounded with their obsessions—the games—but the gaming companies had hired people to demo the games. And these people were young women. And by young women, I mean pretty young women with gothic tattoos, medieval piercings, and T-shirts with cleavage approximating that displayed on the black-light posters that line the bedroom walls of such boys.

    There was also anime. For those of you who have missed the latest development in graphic novels, anime is the Japanese version that combines sex and swordplay into one heady fantasy for the American adolescent. You may have seen the iconic saucer-eyed schoolgirls as you flash by the cartoon channel on cable. At Comic-Con, the young men were attracted by live saucer-eyed anime dolls, who were dressed like Brooklyn Catholic school eighth graders, except for the fact that their Peter Pan-collared blouses were open to a point that would have made Sister Mary Catherine fatally apoplectic.

    At the Grimm Fairy Tales booth, there were a similarly sexy Alice in Wonderland and Little Miss Muffet. And, just down the aisle from them sat Tiffany Taylor, Playboy’s Miss November of 1998. Miss November has nothing to do with comics, but everything to do with fantasy. You could buy a personalized, autographed nude photo of her for twenty dollars, or just stand next to her for a photo with your own camera for five dollars.

    I might have gone for it if she had looked just a little bit more like Lois Lane.

  • Why We Fight

    In the remarkable mini-series Band of Brothers, the story of one company of the 101st Airborne Division in World War II, episode nine is titled “Why We Fight”. The episode is about how the company discovered a German concentration camp. If it hadn’t been clear up to that point why the Americans were fighting the Germans, it certainly was made so by the sight of the camp and the realization that the local Germans had acquiesced to this horror just outside their town.

    This came to mind today with the revelation that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had confessed to being the mastermind behind 9/11 and various other attacks and plots against the U.S. and other countries and leaders.

    Aside from having the effect of knocking the debacle at the Gonzales Justice Department off the front page for the moment, (one wonders if the release of the “confession” now was designed to do just that) it reminds us of why we fight, and the original rationale for war with Iraq.

    In case you need reminding, the Iraq war was fomented originally because the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvirate cynically blamed Iraq for 9/11. Only after that was proved false did they move on to Weapons of Mass Destruction. When that proved to be false, they came up with other reasons–and we are now in a situation in which we are losing the war we should have been fighting in Afghanistan against the minions of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden because we are squandering our resources on the war in Iraq.

    So, perhaps this confession by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed can stand as the real “Why We Fight” reminder, and let us turn our attention where it belongs.

  • WATCH THIS SPACE!

    Beginning Sunday night, Britt Robson, late of City Pages, will be bringing his Timberwolves blog to The Rake. Check back here for the latest, and best, Wolves coverage after every game.

  • Happy Birthday to Us

    A little more than five years ago a few of us sat down around my dining room table with some legal pads, a laptop computer, and a long list of ideas. Our starting point was an executive summary of an idea for a magazine that I’d written up three years earlier. The magazine had the working title The Village Idiot.

    Among the files in the computer’s “Idiot” folder were cash flow projections, printing cost estimates, rate cards, positioning statements, bios of prospective members of the founding team, lists of feature and department ideas, and a list of possible names. That last list was several pages long, and over the next few days, we added even more pages.

    Among the prospective names were The Natural, The Local, and The Regular. We spent a good deal of time thinking of all the reasons we couldn’t call it The Regular. We wanted to make a magazine that would be as personable as your buddies at the bar, and although we were certain that concept would eventually get across to the readers, we weren’t so sure we could weather the inevitable storm of potty jokes. I had also once participated in the founding of a newspaper called Sweet Potato, and that was enough to convince me that we should spend as much time as it took to get the right name.

    I had read an article about naming companies, which mentioned how George Eastman came up with the name Kodak. There was more to the story, of course, but the basic idea was that the name had the letter K in it, and the letter K made a strong, memorable sound, especially at the end of the word. We pored over the dictionary, the thesaurus, a book called Choose the Right Word, and eventually, after several more days of rejecting words like Crack, Smack, Clock, and Crock, we ended up with Rake, which doesn’t exactly end in a K, but is close enough for English majors.

    Now all we had to do was explain our choice. There are lots of definitions and connotations. Rake as in muckraking; rake as in the slant of a theater floor which allows everyone to get a better view; the eighteenth-century Rake’s Progress engravings by Hogarth; and, our favorite meaning: a person who likes to, shall we say, have amorous encounters with other peoples’ spouses. (We don’t do that, of course. We prefer to alter the meaning to “sticking our noses into other peoples’ affairs.”)

    So we got all that preliminary stuff out of the way, and, since our spreadsheets told us that it would be easy to make a profit, we made the financial commitment to start the magazine. By early in September, we had hired our first two employees, bought some furniture and computers, and signed an agreement with a web site developer. On September 10, 2001 we signed a five year lease on office space.
    The next day, of course, changed the nation’s business climate. But since it hadn’t directly changed the numbers on the budget spreadsheets, we decided to go ahead and publish the first issue of The Rake in March 2002. It turned out that our Rake’s progress wasn’t as easily predicable as Hogarth’s, and there have been some hiccups on the way.

    For instance, we still have trouble explaining the name, and what it says about what we do—and more to the point, how we fit into the local media scene. Since we started, we’ve received semi-regular encouragement in the trade press; they’ve recognized how The Rake is a groundbreaking addition to the magazine world. We’re one of very few glossy mags that are distributed free. We’re one of the only regional magazines that doesn’t compile incessant lists of best doctors, lawyers, colleges, restaurants and babysitters. We don’t produce “special sections” that are designed exclusively to sell advertising. (Though we like to sell advertising as much as the next guy, and we wish all of you readers would visit one of our advertisers today and say, “I want to buy that thing you advertised in The Rake, and by the way, thank you for supporting my favorite magazine.” Go ahead, you can do it.)

    First and foremost, as I wrote in this space five years ago, we are story tellers. The fun for us in The Rake is to share all sorts of tales that are fascinating in the telling, and rewarding in the response. There’s a simple logic to how this works. Because you readers connect with us on an emotional level, you provide value to our advertisers. It’s gratifying to be told, again and again, that someone loved some story we published, admires our art direction, enjoys our ads, and, as one reader mentioned last week, because of our Rakish coverage, appreciates all the Twin Cities has to offer. Those are the best birthday greetings we could receive.

  • No Comment Department

    In the Strib this morning was a photo of a Marine outpost in Iraq. On an interior wall was hand written the following: “America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war. America is at the Mall.” (Sorry, photo is not online that I can find.)

    Also, on the Strib’s website today, The Most Read and Emailed Story top spot is held by: “Anna Nicole Smith’s death a ‘medical puzzle’”.

  • Corporate Journalism Wins One, For Now…

    There’s a story on CNN/Fortune today that perfectly illustrates one of the main problems with American journalism.

    A little background: the New York Times Company has two classes of stock. One is owned by whoever wants to buy one; the other is owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family. Only the Ochs-Sulzberger shares have an effective vote.

    The upshot of this, of course, is that the family can run the Times any damn way they please, which means they don’t have to kow tow to shareholders and Wall Street, which distinguishes them from McClatchy and Knight Ridder, the once family controlled companies who now no longer own our local dailies.

    The CNN/Fortune story is about the Ochs-Sulzberger family’s reaction to a Morgan Stanley fund manager who is trying to force them to run the Times in a fashion that will be more pleasing to shareholders (read himself.) The family responded by pulling all their holdings out of Morgan Stanley.

    Last I looked, nobody was hiding the fact that NY Times public shares were non voting and nobody was holding a gun to anyone’s head forcing you to buy them. Anyone with half a brain and who had done a tiny bit of research into the Times would know that the public shares were probably a lousy investment…in everything except good journalism.

    In other news, another name writer has left a New Times paper on less-than-friendly terms. Rebecca Schoenkopf, who wrote the Commie Girl column for the Orange County (CA) weekly, was shown the door immediately after offering her two-week notice. Schoenkopf was last year’s winner for best political column from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.

  • Robert Drinan

    Robert Drinan was a Jesuit priest and law professor at Georgetown who served in Congress during the seventies and was the first member of Congress to call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. He died today.

    He argued that Nixon should be impeached for the secret bombing of Cambodia, not for the secret break in to the Watergate offices of the Democratic Party.

    In 1998, he testified at the Clinton impeachment hearings and gave then judiciary chairman Henry Hyde both a law and a morality lesson. I couldn’t find the exact quotes on line, but I remember one exchange that went something like this: Drinan told Hyde that he would be judged, too, for what he did regarding impeachment. Hyde sensed Drinan wasn’t talking about politics and shot back, “Do you mean God will judge me.” Drinan said, pointing his finger, “That’s exactly what I mean.”

    A Jesuit priest and one of the country’s most respected constituional lawyers–Hyde was out of his depth.

  • Go Down Moses

    A recent intercepted email exchange between Monica Moses, executive director of product innovation at the Star Tribune, and Steve Perry, editor of City Pages, provided both a good laugh and good fodder for online discussion of “What the hell are newspapers and why are they seemingly dying?” 

    The exchange (posted on The Rake’s media blog) was precipitated by City Pages’ extensive coverage in January of the fire sale of the Strib by its parent company, McClatchy. In particular, Perry laid blame for the Strib’s recent circulation declines squarely at the feet of Moses, who had been the prime mover behind last year’s “redesign” of the Minneapolis daily. To summarize the emails, Moses thought Perry was full of crap, and vice versa.

    Reading between the lines of the emails, though, it was possible to see much more than an internecine spat between journalists. (Of course, extending the title “journalist” to Moses would be a stretch, even though her title during the redesign was “deputy managing editor for visuals.”) What became clear was the vast chasm that has grown between today’s corporate-newspaper person and an old-styler like Perry, who operates under the quaint notion that newspapers are something other than a means to deliver demographics to advertisers.

    If you need further evidence of the abyss, have a look at the statement McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt made to the Wall Street Journal at the time of the Strib’s redesign in 2005: “The Star Tribune … is about to take the wraps off a redesign that we hope will make it a model for a Twenty-first Century newspaper.” That’s exactly the worldview Moses was defending: A modern “model newspaper” is defined by its design rather than its actual content. And as soon as the reporters who grew up on Watergate realize that, nowadays, their job duty is to “attract eyeballs” rather than “report stories,” they’ll be much happier. That the “model newspaper” is now worth about half of what McClatchy paid for it in 1998 should help to drive the point home, too.

    To be fair, though, the paper’s pretty visual presentation, which takes up so much space that used to go to words, is perhaps a logical response to the falling circulation numbers at newspapers nationwide. If you want a newspaper to be more attractive to more people, make it more like the things they are attracted to: the pretty visuals and superficial content of TV and the Internet. (The smart youth-oriented television show Veronica Mars sent up this attitude perfectly a couple of weeks ago. When teen detective Veronica was shown a controversial newspaper story accompanied by slick visuals, her comment was, “Colored ink! It must be true.”)

    So, while you are rethinking your newspaper in terms of colored ink, don’t forget to further transfigure your “readers” into “viewers” by shortening all stories. Don’t stop there, though. Where there is some room for words among the illustrations, fifteen-word summaries, and huge section titles, you can add features and columnists who are transparently chosen to appeal to a niche readership—one defined by its age or religion or politics.

    The perfect example of the latter two criteria is columnist Katherine Kersten, who is profiled by Brian Lambert in this issue. No honest observer would deny that she was added to the Strib’s lineup as part of a package intended to appeal to political and religious conservatives. (She came on board around the same time several syndicated conservative writers began to appear regularly on the opinion pages.)

    The fact that she’s conservative is not remarkable, per se. The fact that she’s so utterly predictable in her “family-values” brand of conservatism, and so consistently trite in her expression of it (her last two columns were about, respectively, the gentle old couple who met at Bible school and founded the Minnesota Family Council, and the evils of pervasive television violence) tells me that Strib editors have as little respect for the intelligence of their conservative readership as they do for the rest of us.

    The reporters and editors who create whatever value remains inherent in the Star Tribune are nearly unanimously discouraged. They know the fate that chopped at the hamstrings of the Pioneer Press after its sale also awaits them. The Pioneer Press’ managers professed surprise when so many veteran reporters gladly took the offered buyouts. They clearly underestimated the acrimony they had created. And now it’s happened on the other side of the river, too.

    Most reporters and editors believe, perhaps naively, that the essence of a newspaper is the news, not the packaging of the news. Increasingly, this puts them in conflict with their owners, who have no patience for idealistic notions about the crucial role a vigorous press plays in our culture, and no empathy for a work force that actually begs to do its job better.

    Maybe what Pruitt really meant when he called the Strib a model newspaper was that it’s a poor excuse for a real one.