Category: Blog Post

The gist of a recent meeting Star Tribune publisher Par Ridder had with what is left of his editorial page was essentially this, (not a direct quote), “Readers get enough opinion about national issues in other places, they don’t need it from us.”

Said one Op-Eddie, “His message, basically, was to write with more of an eye on the marketplace, and he sees that marketplace as being less interested in national issues, like Iraq, Scooter Libby, the U.S. attorneys story, than local issues. Essentially its another step in the transition from treating readers like citizens to treating them like customers.”

Another emphasized that Ridder wasn’t issuing a dictum, nor was there any sense that punitive action would be taken if the staff continued offering opinions on Presidential commutations, (which they did the next day), the success of the surge, the role of Dick Cheney or whatever. The pitch was rather another facet of Ridder’s “Business Literacy” shtick, which, as he has explained to staffs at both the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune, requires gathering the types of stories and reporting them in ways most appealing to customers, which means of course both readers and advertisers.

To anyone outside of journalism this sounds profoundly obvious. If you’re selling cars, lay on the chrome! Hype the MP3 gizmos! Give the people what they want, stupid! But customizing news to fit the tastes of the target market has not been the traditional role of big daily newspapers. Yeah, there’s all that sports coverage and funny pages and weather forecasts and TV review stuff. But the essential news end of the paper — of which the Op-Ed pages are an important facet — are supposed to be about telling people (citizens) what they need to know, whether it pleases them or not.

The most obvious example of playing to your customers and giving them exactly what they want to consume is of course Fox News, where every viewer truly is a customer. None of the Strib Op-Ed team with whom I communicated regarded Ridder’s “suggestion” as having any particular ideological tilt. Rather, it was strictly business. But that still isn’t much different than orchestrating a bread and circuses cable channel.

One of the two occasions I had the good fortune to listen to Mr. Ridder up close — prior to his court appearances, I mean — was a “Business Literacy”-Lite gathering he held for the staff of the Pioneer Press A&E section back in 2004. At one point he explained how he believed it was a good idea to steer the Pioneer Press Op-Ed page into “a conservative alternative to the Star Tribune”. This, as I understood it, made good business sense (to him) as the Pioneer Press trimmed staff and budgets and re-directed its meager resources toward more conservative suburban readers.

I was reminded of this strategy when I learned that as part of pulling away from editorializing on national issues, Par was explicit, I’m told, in seeing no good reason for the Star Tribune to continue making presidential endorsements. (For the record, Par’s “conservative alternate” editorial board at the Pioneer Press famously endorsed … George W. Bush for reelection later in 2004.) And why is is it so damned hard to find that classic on the web today?

Pulling back on local opinions on national issues would have, I can argue, the effect, de facto, of relieving public pressure on the Bush administration which at this moment in its term is under near constant siege as a result of an unprecedented set of blunders and scandals.

I’m sure the White House would be pleased to learn that the largest media voice in the Upper Midwest was taking itself out of the Scooter/Dick/Alberto/Iraq/Attorneys/Halliburton/Climate Change/Katrina/Rummy game and devoting itself instead to issues of more local interest like, nickel a gallon gas taxes, light rail, and “cat-beheadings”, as one Stribber suggested.

The dilemma, as actual journalists see it, (in contrast to Par Ridder, newspaper manager extraordinaire), is that reducing the number of editorials on national issues of very high interest — Iraq, Libby, etc. — would just as likely have the effect of giving avid newspaper readers (citizens) another reason to ignore the local paper in favor of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or — for you righties, the always satisfying NewsMax.

The day after Clear Channel whacked President and 20-plus year top dog, Mick Anselmo, most of the inside-industry talk around town turned to the crude and rude way they did it … and then quickly segued into what this shake-out means for the seven Clear Channel stations immediately and the Twin Cities radio market in the near term future.

First, the rude part. How pissed off does Clear Channel have to be to drop a guy into a city on a Monday morning and fire a long-term, heretofore successful/reliable/loyal manager … by phone? Anselmo has been quoted elsewhere saying he was taken by surprise. Supposedly he was fishing up north. Well, maybe. Anyone who knows Anselmo knows he’s canny in the extreme and not at all above concocting a self-serving web for a predator to tangle in. So, knowing the hammer was coming down Anselmo may have just decided to stay out on his boat and make Clear Channel corporate look like clods — never a difficult thing to do — by leaving them no option other than to can him long-distance, without proper opportunity for him to say farewell to his troops and bobos.

At any rate, his peers around the market (off-record) regard the treatment he got as extraordinarily tacky. “I don’t care if he didn’t hit his numbers or whatever the reason. That is no way to treat someone who has given you that many years of service,” said one rival.

None of them, interestingly enough, think Anselmo will be out of work for long. The guy is very well connected to the national country music scene, knows Minnesota sports broadcast rights negotiations inside and out and, knowing what he knows about how Clear Channel can and will react to competition, he would be invaluable to any local radio group looking to exploit Clear Channel’s latest round of cost-cutting.

The most logical landing pad for Anselmo to land — after his non-compete expires, (and unlike Par Ridder he won’t be calling a rich daddy for advice on how to get out of one) — is the local CBS group — WCCO-AM, WLTE-FM and “Jack” FM. The Good Neighbor is long overdue for an infusion of direction and energy and, as a couple Clear Channel rivals pointed out, with all of Anselmo’s country music connections, it’d be a no-brainer for him to “blow-up” “Jack”, (radio jargon for “change formats”) and go head to head with one of Clear Channel’s premier cash machines, K102. He might even try slipping K102’s programming architect, Gregg Swedberg, out a side door when no one was looking.

Meanwhile, Anselmo leaves behind at least two sad sack stations out of the seven he ran. First is KTLK, the hard-right talk station, (where I worked briefly, until they realized they had a total whack-job, blithering lefty on their hands and tossed me out the door), and KOOL 108, the so-called “oldies” station.

As I’ve collected the thinking of best available minds over the last 24 hours, the emerging consensus is that KOOL 108’s problems are still in the “tweakable” range. Fuss with the damned playlist until you find the right number of aging Luddites who don’t own an iPod and think 25 minutes of commercials every hour is normal, fine and unavoidable.

KTLK is a whole different beast, and some think, key to Anselmo’s firing. While the idea of FM talk came out of Clear Channel corporate, (the idea’s parent is long gone and FM talk has few supporters inside Clear Channel corporate anymore), it was Anselmo who assembled the talent For KTLK, (or in my case, “lack thereof”), most specifically a very, VERY big annual pay check for Jason Lewis, which by any standard other than Anselmo’s and Lewis’s has not paid off in either ratings or revenue. The station continues to flounder despite, as I’ve said before, the aggregation of the biggest names in wing nut talk — Limbaugh, Hannity, etc. — and an unprecedented 20-month billboard campaign. No one interested in talk could NOT have known where to find Rush and the rest of the echo chamber. KTLK’s struggles are related to something other than “a start-up station”, as Anselmo’s team has tried to explain it.

Most likely Clear Channel will hang with right-wing talk, at least through the ’08 election cycle. They will bet that the few remaining hardcore Bush supporters will continue to linger — against all reality and logic — and KTLK can maybe — possibly — draw in a fraction of the old mid-’90s talk crowd. It is a rebound that becomes far more likely if Hillary Clinton gets the Democratic nomination. (A Hillary-Obama ticket would be every right-wing radio programmer’s dream come true. Then it’d be them against HER and Barack HUSSEIN … who just happens to also be black, with a heavy dose of Bubba redux thrown in for a kicker. An angry white guy trifecta! Perfect!)

Beyond the two problem stations, there is plenty of curiosity over what Anselmo’s replacement, Mike Crusham, a former sales manager will think of what he sees here in Minnesota. For the last two years Crusham has been barnstorming the country “cleaning up” Clear Channel properties. (That usually means “cutting costs to create profit”). If he is, as one Clear Channel rival put it, “A hit man with no real experience or aptitude for talk”, how long will he listen to KFAN and before he says, “WTF?”

From noon until 7 your average sports yob listening to KFAN can often go days without hearing a single extended rant about the opening of Vikings’ training camp, Matt Garza’s acne or A-Rod’s wife’s t-shirts. A talk generalist and corporate journeyman like Crusham may meddle with something that isn’t broken just because he — like the Clear Channel consultants with whom I’ve spoken — preach the Great Template sermon that the Twin Cities are “just like every other market, no difference”.

(Oddly, none of them ever had an explanation for why we here in Houston-North have a public radio news station with an audience three times the size of their megawattage know-nothing talkers. But then no Clear Channel consultant ever struck me as caring enough to look into why that is so.)

Point being. This Anselmo kacking will have blowback. Mark my words.