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.
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