I was wrong.
Well, I certainly stepped in it last Friday when I wrote that the Strib had been scooped by Salon in announcing Al Franken’s return to Minnesota. It turns out that Salon was guilty of the follow-on, and the Star Tribune deserves the credit for the earlier story. Deborah Caulfield Rybak had the scoop. We’re told there was an earlier story, too.
It’s been periodically reported that Franken was entertaining the idea of a run for senate—it just wasn’t clear whether he’d run to take the place of retiring Sen. Mark Dayton, or wait to take on Sen. Norm Coleman. It also wasn’t clear whether he was planning to continue his Air America show from the Twin Cities or not, until Caulfield Rybak said so—as far as I have been able to determine.
The Star Tibune deserves all the credit for having this story—although I’m a little surprised they didn’t trumpet it a bit louder. It was buried in a nice little Variety article about “Left of the Dial.” the documentary film about the founding of Air America. This, incidentally, made it hard to find the story in their public search engine. In fact, it still doesn’t show up under any search term that I can think of, including the author’s name, the headline of the story, “Air America,” or “Al Franken.” As near as I can tell, the story was never published online, and I have to confess that’s where I read the Star Tribune each day. That being the case, I’ll take the liberty of quoting the salient part here (kindly forwarded to me by one of Deborah’s many enthusiastic fans:
“The next year may bring other changes. Franken, who has said he plans a U.S. Senate run from Minnesota, confirmed Tuesday that he’d purchased a house in Minneapolis and plans to start broadcasting his show from the Twin Cities as early as January. In a separate interview, co-host Lanpher was mum about a potential return to the Twin Cities – but that appears unlikely, since she’s working on a new project for the network. ” (3/31/05)
I guess the question in my mind now is why the Star Tribune isn’t archiving the articles of one of their best reporters and writers—especially in a scoop that ought to be at least a 1E story, if not a 1A one?
But, again, this is not an excuse for getting the story wrong last Friday—and I regret the error.
UPDATE: With a little assistance, I was able to find Caulfield Rybak’s article. It is in the Star Tribune’s paid-only archive, and can be found either by typing the headline of the story or the words “Al Franken” (but not “Al Franken Moves,” “Al Franken Minneapolis,” or “Al Franken Home”). This leads to a results page giving the first several grafs of the story, but not the excerpt I included above. The point being, I guess, that the article is there if you know it’s there.
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