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I gotta tell ya, it is a real, “Where to begin?” situation following the no-ups and all-downs of the Star Tribune lately.

Indecision over where to begin may explain why what follows is even more scatter-shot and incoherent than usual.

1. As expected, Guild employees of the Star Tribune voted overwhelmingly yesterday to accept the paper’s terms for a buy-out offer that commences this Friday and closes at 5 p.m. June 1. (I was in error when I said yesterday that the “window” would open today. My apologies.) The company then has until the end of business on June 8 to post a list of those who are walking away.

2. A supreme irony of this latest round of “right-sizing” is the trashing or marginalizing of significant elements of the paper’s very expensive, (over seven figures) and absurdly protracted “redesign” which it unveiled in October in 2005. Don’t get me going on “re-designs”.

The joke at the Pioneer Press when I was there was that preparing for and working on the next re-design was every management regime’s best excuse for avoiding dealing with garden variety problems like under-performing beats, redirecting assets to better effect, yadda yadda. The standard response to any suggestion/complaint was, “We can’t get to that until we finish the re-design.” Then, once it was finished, the next one began.

But I think it is safe to say now, after 17 months, that the Strib’s 2005 re-design added little if any value to the paper. Circulation has dropped steadily if not precipitously in its aftermath. I know my first reaction to seeing it was a shrug. “All that time and money for this?” It was pretty much one, “Big whoop”.

But the Strib’s features section played a prominent role in the grand design. Yes, it came with the usual mantra of “shorter, shorter, shorter”. (Modern, design-driven managers are convinced all readers are averse to “long” stories, i.e. 20 inches or more. But they see the supposedly younger and more female audience for features sections being even more impatient and having almost no tolerance for words. Any picture and any list trumps every “wordy” story.) But under the re-design the Strib’s feature section was key to that other mantra, the preeminent, “local, local, local” babble.

(I don’t know which image is more appropriate to newspaper managers chanting, “local, local, local”, a sprawling turkey farm or a radical, head-bobbing madrassa.)

Anyway, the excising of what were once key locally produced components of the Strib’s Arts and Entertainment; TV, classical music, architecture, some percentage of theater, Randy Salas’s eminently readable “Web Search” and DVD columns, along with talk of folding in, cutting or “right-sizing” the whole jumble of “Scene”, “To Go” and all those other barely identifiable sub-sections effectively confirms suspicions that the vaunted re-design has proven a non-asset, at best.

For the record, the Strib is planning to continue TV coverage via syndication, classical music looks likely to move to some kind of free-lance status, architecture will get added atop a visual arts beat and while both theater critics, Graydon Royce and Rohan Preston will stay on, Royce will devote some yet-to-be-determined percentage of his time to editing.

The very ironic overall effect: However it is cut, the new post re-design Strib will be less “local” than previously.

3. A recurring theme from meetings Stribbers are having with bosses Nancy Barnes and Scott Gillespie is the two editors telling reporters they are making tough cuts in features because they simply have a “hard news” orientation. (Several staffers have expressed notes of sympathy for the two, quoting Barnes and Gillespie subtly pleading for understanding, saying, “We have bosses, too.”)

To be fair, Barnes and Gillespie are only following a tread-worn strategy first laid out by publisher Par Ridder’s father, Tony, across the entire Knight-Ridder empire through the 1990s. It was a re-organization plan that when matched with Ridder’s deal with Wall St. devils seriously undermined the quality of every Knight Ridder newspaper and eventually led to the entire chain’s abrupt sell-off. (I’m broad-stroking there. But the Tony Ridder survival strategy is an object lesson in how NOT to enhance the value of your product.)

There’s no point belaboring my opinion that regular, sustained coverage of suburban community minutiae is anything but, “hard news”, or that the Strib is open to serious criticism over how “hard” it has been on several very high profile, relevant stories in recent years. My point is only to suggest that Barnes and Gillespie might want to dial back the “hard news” talking point if they want to maintain credibility with their staff.

Based on my conversations with Stribbers there isn’t a person in the newsroom who believes these latest cuts (or the buy-outs before them) have anything whatsoever to do with improving the paper’s production of news, “hard” or otherwise. More to the point, if there is anyone in the newsroom who thinks Ridder and Avista are committed to producing a better, healthier, more relevant product, those people have no business or future in journalism.

Finally, 4. I have the utmost respect for reporters who take on Guild steward jobs. I was far too lazy and misanthropic to volunteer for anything of the sort. In the current situation at the Strib, Guild stewards are like exhausted, under-equipped smoke-jumpers mashing down forest fires with shovels. Forget about getting your day job done. It’s everything you can do to answer dozens of frantic, anxious questions from colleagues in between attending and holding meetings.

The concern here is that the Strib Guild not be played like the pre-Rahm Emanuel Democrats, who got flattened in every big game by ruthless operators focused solely on the bottom line. The Guild really ought to reach out beyond its usual legal representation/advisors to some aggressive local labor law firm for advice on a strategy that considers how best to play several key elements in the current situation, not the least of which is the impatience of Avista Capital Partners with a worse-than-expected financial performance of the Star Tribune and an expensive and an embarrassing civil law suit thrown at their publisher, Par Ridder.

Like everyone else in the world the Guild needs leverage, and there may be some to be had in toying with Avista’s impatience and their fear of discovery, if some kind of legal action can be mounted.
Guilds have been accused of playing easy on personnel disputes relative to their effect on the next contract negotiation. But in the current situation it would seem prudent to apply a worst case scenario mindset to that next (2008) contract and assume Avista will be even more insistent on guaranteeing return on investor dollar via truly draconian cuts in employee compensation and staffing levels.

Ten years ago laid-off newspaper people had some hope of sliding into another paper in another town. That ain’t happenin’ no more. At the risk of sounding hysterical, now is good time to approach all events leading to next year as though they were part of an end-game for an industry as we once knew it.

Pressured by a small group of colleagues inclined to take the buy-out offer presently on the table, Guild employees at the Star Tribune are expected to accept company terms in a 4 p.m. meeting/vote today. A similar vote yesterday fizzled when Guild members had too many unanswered questions to vote.

The offer from Avista Capital Partners offers an additional three months pay to the maximum, plus six extra months of COBRA coverage on health insurance. The Guild had asked for a year on the latter, along with several other small concessions, like staggering pay-offs to diminish tax implications, but the paper rejected those requests.

If the buy-out is accepted today, Guild employees will have two weeks, starting tomorrow if accepted, to make their decision to leave or stay, and another 45 days after that to rescind a decision to leave.

The company is looking to cut 50 positions out of the present newsroom. Best guess-timates at the moment believe the buy-out offer will get something less than 20 takers, leaving the company and union poised to battle over the remainder.

If laid-off, a Strib Guild member would get essentially the same compensation package as 24 former colleagues took in early March.

Being a fellow of modest dreams some days all I want to be is the Readers’ Representative for a big city newspaper, like the Star Tribune. If my dream came true I’d write something like this:
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Hi, everyone. By now you’ve probably heard of big changes at this paper you’re reading.

It is all true. There will be a lot more lay-offs, and they follow the firing of some very pleasant ladies at our switchboard who have lived in the Twin Cities for decades and knew everyone in the building and provided a nice human touch to our customers’ first interaction with the paper. In the newsroom people will be getting switched from beats they’ve worked and studied for years and know very well to beats they don’t know much if anything about. And that’s THIS YEAR. Next year we’ll have to duke out a new contract, and I’m telling now that that’ll be bloody.

Then there is our publisher, the one who is being sued for plotting his switch from our major competitor across the river to this paper while he was still in a position to do significant competitive damage to the paper over there. (And yes, to put a point on it, that very same fellow is currently charged with assessing the return-on-investment needs of HIS employers here and if that means depriving 150 middle class Minnesota families of a very large portion of their livelihood in order assure those investors that they will not have to find cheaper dockage for their yachts in Naples this coming season.)

Obviously I won’t being saying anything about our publisher’s problems, ever. Nor will I comment on the propriety of someone under such a cloud inflicting the kind of financial and emotional damage he is on Minnesota working families. Why? Well, because that would be pretty incautious and imprudent of me, wouldn’t it? A lot of us in newspapers are just trying to run out the clock to the reasonable, modest retirement we had planned for ourselves before our new owners decided our retirement incomes would look better in their pockets.

But that said … the way I look at a Readers’ Rep’s job is this: My job is to observe and analyze the performance of all levels of this newspaper without fear or favor. If the influence of newspapers depends on our reputation for being reliable truth-seekers and truth-tellers, my job is to be transparently candid as to whether my colleagues and superiors are living up to what is, let’s face it, a critical social responsibility. I mean, look around, we seem to be living in a time when every other news source except maybe Bill Moyers is playing back and at half speed to avoid taking the kind of criticism that is supposed to come with the territory.

One criteria for being a really good newspaper is the desire and ability to go after stories that effect the largest number of citizens. That’s why it is extremely important that we always follow the money. When lots of money starts piling up in one corner of the city or another you have to be able to depend on us to snoop around and ask the kind of annoying questions that always make really rich people speed dial the publisher and complain about our impertinence and threaten to pull advertising if we don’t knock it off.

We sure screwed up on UnitedHealth in all those years leading up to Bill McGuire’s back-dated stock option scandal didn’t we? It was pretty embarrassing to watch the Wall Street Journal dig that story out of our backyard, start a national reexamination of executive pay “techniques” and win a Pulitzer Prize for it, no less.

But, to be honest, we can’t get into that kind of thing.

I’d like to be able to promise you that we learned a lesson on the UnitedHealth story. But the fact is we’re playing a much different game than the half-dozen or so real newspapers left in the country — the Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times and — well, maybe there aren’t a half dozen anymore. Papers like that still see the whole country and the world as part of their beat and they still assign their own people to cover it. A paper like we are today, with investors demanding pre-internet levels of profit — through attrition, not growth — all we can do is pick up what they write a day or so later. Sure, most of you who are really interested in that kind of reporting have already read it on line or in the paper edition the Journal and the Times deliver to your door at the same time as ours. But, I’m trying to be honest here, that’s just where we’re at. We can’t play with the big boys anymore. The best we can do is pretend.

Just as we gave up on reporting from overseas years ago, and just as we have now pretty much given up on reporting on anything national … other than sporting events, which of course doesn’t make any sense since only Paris Hilton’s breast augmentation and suspended driver license gets more coverage than big sporting events … we are now pretty much getting out of the kind of “enterprise” reporting that might upset very influential local companies and people.

It’s been years since we had enough people for that kind of thing, and after our investors take this latest round of cuts, we’re going to have even less for the kind of stories that take longer than a day or two to report, because we’re reassigning a 100 or so reporters to the suburbs.

Some of you keep asking, “What’s with this suburbs deal? Who cares what’s going on in the Bloomington school district. Don’t they have their own Sun newspapers to cover that stuff.” Well, of course they do, and those Sun papers do a fine job. But, with Macy’s and other advertisers starting to slide dollars over to the internet, the fact is we need to poach the Sun papers’ advertisers more than ever.

We need the mom and pop stores in Bloomington and Eagan and Woodbury and Blaine, and in order to get them we’re sending reporters out to write stuff about class sizes in Bloomington, etc. and the stars of the Bloomington Jefferson track team and the Blaine tennis program, etc. Nothing too critical, you understand, because then we’d just have a smaller version of the same problem we get into with the UnitedHealths of the world. But, still something we can call “coverage”, you know. By that I mean, “facts”. How many votes for. How many votes against. No snarky “analysis”.

We’re also getting rid of our TV critic and our architecture critic. Because, well, we can get stories about TV shows from the Associated Press or a hundred other places, and we know they’ll be timely and positive and fun and that the people who wrote them won’t go howling to the copy desk when we cut them from 30 inches to 6 to fit around a really cute picture of Lindsay Lohan fresh out of treatment and promoting her new movie.

We will continue “coverage” of local media. But again, the snarky tone you read on websites and blogs is nothing but a real pain in the tuckus when you have to make small talk with radio and TV people at luncheons and seminars. They don’t like us telling our readers they screwed up. Who would? Not us. So we’re going to just stick with “reporting” who got hired and the latest ratings. We don’t think you’re interested in anything more than that.

Again, I’m just being honest with you, here. I could say something like how all our reporters are looking forward to the “challenge” of “covering” the Shakopee Planning Commission meeting and that research shows a tremendous hunger among readers to find out if Shakopee really is going to approve that 48-unit Skunk Guano development … but who’d believe something as transparently false as that?

Oh yeah, the architecture critic? Well, again, we know you’re interested in what’s going on with big building projects you see all the time. But frankly, like a lot of this stuff, we’re betting you won’t complain about what is not in the newspaper, and after a while you’ll stop caring it’s gone. Besides, we need one more reporter to cover the Lakeville gymnastics team.

Finally, it is true we haven’t even explained to our own reporters who exactly owns us and what they intend to do with this newspaper. We should be covering the hell out of it, since it’s another “follow the money” story with relevance to hundreds of thousands of local citizens, but we won’t. And I’m not going to demand it. It’s just too risky. I mean, people are getting laid off left and right.

We are however hoping the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times sends some reporters out here and finds out what in the hell is going on. Once they do, we might run a heavily-edited version of their story. That is if there’s any room left in the news hole after the update on re-paving Hwy. 101 through Minnetonka.

I repeat though, I’m just trying to be honest here.

Your Readers’ Rep-for-a-Day.