A generally reliable voice from within the Star Tribune’s reporting ranks defends Ms. Moses in the previously-posted back and forth e-mail spat with City Pages’ Steve Perry. Reliable Voice defends her on the grounds that she may actually be making a defensible argument. Voice argues that Moses probably saw that she was the only one among the Strib’s current managers willing to defend the tattered ship, but that she feared corporate repercussions because she does not have authority to speak for her peers and superiors.
“The real problem here,” said Reliable Voice, “is that there’s no one running the place. What she said is probably true, as far as we know. But she’s not in the position of being able to say so publicly.”
The tiff left me bemused, because of years of listening to newspaper managers parrot the high-minded virtues of transparency … as in “we are a public institution”, “let the public see how we function” and “FOR PUBLICATION”. If Moses, by all accounts a McClatchy corporate climber,is confident enough in her argument and as passionate about the Star Tribune as she says she is, she ought to do the virtuous thing and say what she believes is right and proper and corrective in a transparent, public way, McClatchy bureaucracy be damned. If she can’t summon the courage to go public, well then, maybe she ought to just CALL Perry … or put a sock in it.
But the idea that you have this snippy back-and-forth and CC a bunch of reporters — OK, five not a dozen, sheesh — and think somehow no one will disclose anything to anyone beyond the perimeter is, uh, naive. McClatchy has pretty much torched the “loyalty” card in Minneapolis, and Moses ought to be smart enough to realize that.
Any professional newspaper manager who thinks the wretches are unconditionally sympathetic to the McClatchy corporate predicament might want to buy a few rounds of drinks and see what they’re really thinking.
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