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My ingestion of Hurricane Charleys (vodka, mint leaves, some blue stuff, some green stuff) was rudely interrupted around 7:30 EDT last night by the first phone calls from home bringing news of the 35W bridge collapse.

Within the first hour of coverage the familiar patterns of tragedy-reporting, both good and bad, were playing … incessantly.

The good:

The pictures. Chopper coverage via Twin Cities affiliates on CNN, MSNBC, and CNN Headline provided the visual basics, which pretty much amounted to one extended, “Holy shit!” This is the essential value of TV news. As in, “Let me see what has happened and I’ll figure out half the story all by myself.”

But within the first hour the repetition — always necessary for viewers tuning in late — produced the usual unintentionally iconic images — like the big, bald, shirtless guy with a bandaged abdomen being led — apparently back and forth by first responders. Footage of the guy ran so often on cable you’d be forgiven for thinking he was the single most important survivor. (A corollary was footage of a very beefy Virginia cop running across a lawn after the Virginia Tech shootings. It ran every three minutes for hours in the early reporting.)

With all the footage pouring in from their local “partners” you wonder why the cable channels re-re-re-run loops of the same rather more mundane stuff?

More to that point, with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Dan Abrams, anchoring non-stop coverage, the cable news bible says the anchors must maintain high levels of screen time, even if, in the interest of getting a fuller first impression of the event they might be better off parceling more time to the affiliates.

The bad:

The inability of phone-in witnesses and experts to answer a basic question. Never mind the mistake of saying the bridge “Connects Minneapolis to St. Paul,” which CNN had up way past the point somebody could have told them otherwise. How about local news types’ inability to even offer a reasonable guesstimate of the river’s depth, a question likely on every viewer’s mind. My guess was 25-30 feet. I’ve since read a 9′ minimum channel is maintained. But when asked on CNN, one local news man instead wandered off into the design of the damn thing, about which he also knew nothing.

Blitzer, who can flail to fill as badly as anyone, also allowed himself to be held captive by a caller who admitted he had driven over the thing 10 MINUTES before it collapsed and was buying a sandwich when it actually dropped. Who vets those calls? Why was he even on the air? Didn’t WCCO or KARE have anything fresher than that?

One shining light of news basics was my good buddy, Jim Leinfelder, an MSNBC freelancer working the story. Jim maintained enough presence of mind to give Olbermann direct, succinct answers to questions. Thank you, my man.

Being out of town I can’t say much about local coverage, although early e-mail and phone flow this morning is giving KSTP, Channel 5, the nod for best coverage, never mind being largely shut out from the CNN-MSNBC coverage. (KSTP’s ratings problems have never had much to do with their reporting performance.)

Despite attempts by the usual nutballs to insinuate some kind of terror meme, the cable(rs) accepted the word of local officials that it was what it appeared to be, a structural failure. (My curiosity: What has been the effect of 40 years of de-icing chemicals on the support girders?)

Even from the coast of SW Florida I get the feeling of KG overkill in Twin Cities media. Nothing like a blockbuster sports deal in the dog days.

I count myself among the “fans” who pretty much ignored the Timberwolves start to finish last season. I don’t recall (TM … Albert Gonzales, Dick Cheney) listening to one turn-over of a Woofies game on radio and caught only fractions of TV games. Boredom. Ennui. Fatigue. Indifference. It’s all kind of the same thing. Even with Garnett the team wasn’t doing anything but taking a steady drift downward, and worse, they we’re taking that downward drift with what seemed to a part-time fan like me to be minimum intensity.

I did, however, read a lot of Steve Aschburner’s stuff as the Strib’s pro basketball guy. Tight, punchy, well-sourced. Aschburner’s copy was better than any Woofies offense.

As some of you may know Aschburner accepted a Strib buy-out offer while on a Woofes roadtrip in early March, then quickly pulled it back, only to have Strib management insist on “honoring” his original request.

Aschburner, who was President of the Pro Basketball Writers Association when the Strib made sure he left the paper, has a piece on the Garnett deal up on sportsillustrated.cnn.co. . And this morning, another on AOL Sports.

Says Aschburner of KG: “He was the pearl among swine, so goes the popular perception, a silk purse among sows’ ears (and other butcher cuts)… .”

That’s about right.

Keep it coming, Steve.

I feel like the guy sweeping up after the elephants. Only I’m also the elephant.

My lovely bride and I are enjoying a little beach time with family in sweltering, blustery Florida this week: Captiva Island — where, before you start building, a quarter acre of limestone gravel with no view of either the Gulf or Pine Island Sound — and even less breeze — will set you back $1.3 million.

Anyway, in my Sunday evening post about reporter Matt Peiken leaving the Pioneer Press I both dropped it and stepped in it.

CORRECTIONS!! As Peiken himself hurriedly corrected, the name of his proposed video project on northern tier suburbs was Suburban Safari. “SAFARI,” not “Satanic” — which is what my aging ears, calloused from a minimum of 40 Who concerts, thought they heard him say, and what my hand wrote down as my brain thought, “Peiken, you audacious, in-your-face [bleeper]!”

Anyway, “satanic” was some inner voice speaking … to me, not Peiken, who obviously has a much better sense of what the PiPress’s internal market will bear than I do, or ever did.

So, my apologies to Mr. Peiken. (Although, now that he’s out of the grey, mainstream world of daily newspapers, he ought to consider, “Suburban Satanic” for a new video project. I mean, tell me there isn’t an audience for something like that?)

Next up … the Star Tribune’s Burnsville bureau. I said neither the Strib nor the PiPress had any brick and mortar bureaus in any suburb. Wrong. The Strib has one in Burnsville.

This, of course, has me wondering how many staffers are aware of this, since I must have grazed past the topic a dozen times in recent months in conversations with Strib reporters, as the Bloomington-Bloomington-Bloomington hysteria ratcheted up, and never did anyone say, “Well, we do have that one in Burnsville.”

Oh, well. Wrong is wrong. So my apologies to visionary Strib management for actually putting staff WHERE THE BEAT IS, so they can interact regularly … FACE-TO-FACE … with local shopkeepers, business people, school officials, etc. Now, when they and the PiPress also set up shop in say, Eden Prairie, Maple Grove, Blaine, Forest Lake, Stillwater, and Cottage Grove, deploying a full complement of writers and photographers to each, as the Strib has done in Burnsville (since last winter), I’ll be inclined to take both papers’ much hyped “commitment” to the suburban audience far more seriously.

Finally, former PiPress colleague Dave Hanners takes me to task for suggesting that creativity is waning at the paper.

Dave is probably right that as the staff and the operating budget diminish, those left have to be more and more creative just to deliver the basic goods of a daily newspaper. But I don’t know that the equivalent of a duct tape and bailing wire job on a sputtering engine is the same thing as creating a news product for the fully-converged 21st century.

Frankly, on the level of group psychology, I’m often struck by what borders on every denial when it comes to those surviving these now regular purges. In my experience, with each budget slashing and forced exodus of staff, managers … insist … upon the hoary old “leaner and meaner” attitude from their underlings — an attitude that not only ignores the losses but emphasizes the belief that the paper is going to be “even better” — in other words, an implausible half-time pep talk to a team trailing by four touchdowns.

I always thought that sort of thing was a tough sell to a group of trained, professional skeptics. But it is something that mid-level managers are under strict orders to sell.

Dave accuses me of “demeaning” those who remain at the PiPress by suggesting that creativity is waning. I suppose I could argue that I’m not demeaning those people. But it is more accurate to say I’m not intending to demean them. That said, I stand by my view that there is simply no way that either newspaper can be as creative — in terms of seeking out, testing, and offering new types of stories with new technologies — as they were able to be when they had 30%-40% more staff and newsroom budget.

It’s the difference between realpolitik and wishfully whistling past the graveyard.