The Rake Magazine

Tag: Joel Kramer

  • Mr. Smith Goes to Kenwood

    Dane Smith is back, and he’s back with
    the panache that only serious money can sustain. Is this a good thing?
    As per Rupert Murdoch’s Pravda West, you decide!

    When last we saw our hometown hero, March of 2007, Dane Smith was walking the plank at the Newsreel of the Twin Cities,
    where the new spew of hard-edged gossiping, gay-bashing,
    Muslim-bashing, Kersten-style investigative journalism has dragged
    Strib reader’s average IQ down yet another 20 or 30 points. (When IQ
    approaches zero it’s a basic math problem; check out renormalization. If you find this stuff difficult, you’re reading too much Strib).

    Back
    to our story, shouldn’t we feel sorry for Smith, who coughed up a
    20-plus-year career of determinedly non-partisan political reporting in
    favor of getting out "while a good buyout offer was available"?

    No, we shouldn’t. Smith quickly re-invented himself, jumping the shark
    onto the career path of a politician who’s been around long enough to
    know what principles to sacrifice, and when. He followed the money.

    A
    mere month from his Strib swanbyline, Smith was "found" for the
    self-identified "progressive economic think tank" Growth and Justice in a "search" conducted by DFL mover and perennial candidate Rebecca Yanisch. This hookup paired Smith with ex-Strib crony and DFL candidate (do I sense a trend?) Joel Kramer, in a deal which looks chummier than a Wild night in the penalty box.

    Politicians
    leaving office are inclined to tap their Rolodexes, those arteries
    through which political influence and big money run fastest, for
    whatever purposes motivate them. Smith is now the poster boy for an epidemic of similar vascular incursions by exiting political journalists.

    What
    brings this all to mind is that, on Wednesday past, Smith and his pals,
    self-appointed keepers of Minnesota’s moral and electoral rectitude,
    treated us to a gloriously righteous fit of profitable indignation, the
    Worst Political Advertising in America Awards Ceremony. The event was, more or less, the political set’s version of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. Or something.

    Smith’s pre-event spiel
    touted an "Academy Awards style event," but admitted the content was
    just the baddest stuff of a few intern-hours’ search on YouTube. He
    proposed "marketing it as a way for people to blow off steam" in a
    "non-partisan, multi-partisan setting," but that’s where it gets even
    harder to believe.

    What it is, really is, is a feel good dollar hook for Growth and Justice, Smith’s we’re-not-very-partisan lobby. Smith’s real message is "send me money!"

    Growth and Justice has only one identifiable BOD Republican (Arlen Erdahl). The case makes itself that G&J is "nothing more than a front group for the DFL."
    Nevertheless, Smith, like most partisan Democrats, has handed over to
    the right the right to be openly partisan about anything. Like Dems in
    general, he’s scared to death of the word.

    Wednesday,
    in exchange for the paper-thin political cover of having kicked-out
    (Ron Erhardt) and forgotten (Charlie Weaver) Republicans,
    self-promoters (Mitch Pearlstein) desperate for their thoughts to be
    remembered, and US Senators (some guy named Coleman) desperate for
    their acts to be forgot, all act as award co-presenters, along with a
    bevy of the DFL’s Kenwood elite, Smith and G&J happily conceded Democratic ads to be just as stupid, dishonest, and downright evil as Republicans’.

    Irony
    the First is that Smith’s methods, indeed his very position, are those
    he so recently decried. His portentously perverse parting proposition
    for a Strib successor: "Always pay attention to who’s getting what and
    why    . I’ve always liked the old saw about comforting the afflicted and
    afflicting the comfortable." Today no powerful or desirous Minnesota politician is too comfortable to sit in the shade of the G&J umbrella.

    And let’s not mention that, as an entrenched media elitist, Smith has no trouble convincing MSM (see here, and here) to spring for free space ("earned media," in political parlance) to promote his fund raising activities.

    To
    be fair (must I?), Smith and his cronies are emulating a right wing
    strategy of years’ proven effectiveness. For as long as memory, the
    Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute and
    other unabashed cash laundries have ecstatically catapulted Republican
    candidates and causes upon us from behind the invisible shield of non-profit tax deductions. Left-wingers are finally catching on, and G&J is but one of a rapidly flocking coterie of port side dollar decoys.

    But the impartiality illusion must be maintained.

    G&J’s
    complaints about Dem ads are fatuous at best. Growth and Justice
    cheerily Swift-boats national Democrats, declaring the DNC’s smooth,
    smart Valentine’s Day 2008 "Sweetheart Deal" to be the bad ad equal to North Carolina lunatic fringer Vernon Robinson’s 2004 "Twilight Zone v. Leave It To Beaver." "Sweetheart Deal," tapped as a "guilt by association" ad, wins G&J’s Daisy Award for Dems bashing Republicans, while "Twilight Zone" wins the Willie Award for the reverse. But there’s a qualitative difference between the two.

    Robinson,
    who has lost Republican primaries in multiple NC Congressional districts,
    takes on Islamic extremists, homosexuals, lesbians, feminists, liberal
    judges, burning American flags, killing a million babies, the ten
    commandments, God, black children born out of wedlock, Jesse Jackson,
    Al Sharpton, racial quotas, aliens (with and without spaceships) and
    the unguarded Mexican border, in 59 seconds flat. He’s an avenging
    angel, and there are a lot of us on his hit list. McCain and Bush may
    not be peas in every issue’s pod, as "Sweetheart Deal" hints, but
    they’re from adjacent rows of the same vegetable garden, and the ad
    uses McCain’s own audio to make that point. The DNC MO isn’t guilt by
    association; it’s association by guilt. Don’t bother trying to decode
    this one. It’s tautological.

    Smith’s
    supreme intellectual insult, though, for those whose IQ numbers still
    require sock removal (see paragraph 2), doesn’t even have a
    (non-)partisan point. It’s a shame shame about using sex to sell
    politics. Smith/G&J cite a clever tongue and cheek (sic) show by porn actress and political opportunist Mary Carey,
    demonstrating her qualifications to command the office of Governor of
    California, and whatever else might arise. How opportune! Mr. Smith, to
    lure us to your very own fund raiser by flashing a hint of porn. C’mon,
    Dane, who’s zoomin’ who?

    To
    entertain a rumsfeldian dialogue, is the growth of Growth and Justice
    justifiable? No. Is it necessary to balance the political equation?
    Yes. Will American politics improve, as Democrats catch up with
    Republicans in the Think Tank Wars? I doubt it. Is there a better
    way? You tell me!

     

  • All the News That Fits—and Then Some

    There’s an awful lot of talk about the news lately, but not, unfortunately, the sort of constructive conversation that promotes critical thinking and engages people with their neighborhoods, their country, or their world. No, what people are talking about is the media, or, more specifically, and more onerously, the business of media. The Star Tribune is losing readers, pages, and staff. (Did that venture-capital firm buy it just for its prime downtown real estate?) The Pioneer Press is facing the same challenges, and rumors have been circulating for over a year that it will cease to exist altogether. The corporate hijacking of local “alt weekly” City Pages seems finally to have succeeded, at least in a manner of speaking. (New Times indeed—just who the hell is this Hoffman character, anyway?) And it’s not just with these outlets. Almost everywhere you turn the quality of news is being questioned as resources and profits continue to dwindle. It’s just too expensive, it seems, to chase meaningful stories these days, and the competition has never been fiercer for advertising dollars.

    Enter the internet, the longtime boogeyman and sworn enemy of print media everywhere. As it turns out, it just might be the best tool any news reporter, storyteller, or publisher ever dreamed of. With more than half the U.S. now online—and two-thirds of them getting their news online—the web is suddenly a sexy proposition for all sorts of formerly hidebound print junkies. The venture capitalists are intrigued as well—you’d have to suppose that in a recessive industry, not having to pay for ink, paper, press operators, and distribution would bode well for the bottom line.

    And so, with (undoubtedly) noble thoughts and high aspirations, many Twin Cities newsies have been turning to the web as a panacea for a host of the ailments currently bedeviling the news media. Former Strib publisher and editor Joel Kramer got the attention of media insiders across the country when he launched MinnPost, his long-anticipated online news site, in November. At about the same time, erstwhile City Pages editor Steve Perry debuted his own site, The Daily Mole, which he mothballed last month after a frustrating three-month run; now he is taking the reins at the Minnesota Monitor. Perry’s new employer, like a number of other local sites (including Twin Cities Daily Planet, the Minnesota Monitor, Cursor, and MNSpeak), had been up and running on the web long before that pair of high-profile upstarts made their splash at the tail end of 2007.

    It turns out that the web, with its atmosphere of almost unbridled democracy (a sort of anarchic egalitarian free-for-all, if such a thing is possible), has breathed new life into the moribund American Dream. Freedom of speech. Free exchange of ideas. Anybody can play. People with a little bit (or a lot) of hubris can barge their way online and plant their flags. Every citizen (or non-) can put his (or her) voice out there. And anyone can hit the jackpot, which is, of course, measured in mouse clicks. (You can be sure even the gal blogging about what she had for breakfast is watching her numbers.) In the online world, clicks mean dollars.

    The trouble, of course, comes in setting up a new online economy. How many clicks for how many dollars? What’s the rate of exchange? In a world where Britney has been the top search term for six of the past seven years, and where information is expected to be free, how can anyone make news financially viable?


    Making a play with traditional journalism

    Determined to uphold professional distinction above all else (presumed translation: no Britney stories), Joel Kramer latched on to a stable of reporters cast off in the recent newsroom purges on both sides of the river and set out to create a quality local news source. With the exception of a few videos and slideshows, MinnPost’s editorial model is little more than traditional newspaper journalism distributed online (in fact, until a few weeks ago, Kramer insisted on distributing fifteen-hundred Xeroxed printouts for those committed to words on paper).

    While web-based businesses across the globe save on rent by having staff work from home, Kramer resists this as well. He is proud of MinnPost’s old-school newsroom, which features open space to encourage dialogue, an office for the business staff, and conference rooms and workstations around the perimeter. Just as newspaper reporters rush to meet an evening deadline, MinnPost contributors—drawn from a pool of fifty-six freelancers—submit stories each morning so that web editor Corey Anderson can post them online at 11 a.m. This also runs counter to standard web protocol, where news is live twenty-four-hours and reporters bypass editors by posting their stories directly on the website. “Our goal is not to exploit the web,” explained Kramer, “but to provide quality journalism.”

    Can MinnPost make profitable use of an online medium without fully engaging its resources? Nora Paul, Director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the U of M, says no. “[Kramer] hasn’t embraced what’s interesting about online,” she argued, “which is the ability to create packages with a shelf-life, and that will have utility for a long time.” According to Paul, online news organizations need to find new and compelling ways to tell stories, and develop creative ways to pull together data. While most local online news sources have not availed themselves of Paul’s expertise, newspapers across the country are turning to her for the winning formula. Last month, eleven top newspapers, including The New York Times and the Washington Post, met with Paul (and five graduate students) to formulate questions they want answered about offering news on the web. What’s the best way to display video? Do news crawlers attract more clicks than breaking news digests? What’s the most engaging way to tell a story?

    Above all, the web offers flexibility. “Online, the walls should be much more porous,” explained Paul, “so that you have an evolving story-telling space.” In other words, there’s no excuse for anything static. Online news is more a process than a product; it’s created through interaction and various points of view, so stories build up almost organically, with varied perspectives, in varied forms, from varied arenas. Ideally, the end result is a much broader picture, and arguably a more compelling story than we’ve been reading on paper for centuries.