The Rake Magazine

Tag: journalism

  • Sexy Librarian Makes Me Stupid

    A few days ago I had an allergic reaction to Obama’s acceptance speech. I have not changed my mind about Obama, but I have also quickly learned the perils of speaking out of my butt too fast–which is essentially the origin of most political commentary offered without the baptism of time and experience.

    I should have waited a day.

    I don’t need to know much about Sarah Palin to understand where she is coming from. My first reaction was a devil in a blue dress with sexy librarian shades and a social conservative that will tell me what to do.

    While I have not changed my mind about Obama, the timing of my comments and the central reason why he freaks me out may now be coming from the other side of the political spectrum–and as time may show, it could be cloaked in overtly religious terms.

    Let me tell you what to do, sinner.

    So call me stupid–(and this re-link is by design)

    At least I’ll be smart enough to vote in a way that favors one candidate without actually voting for their ticket. It’s cynical, but I’ve done it before. Politics is not my religion nor is religion my politics.

    I am going back to cars.  

     

     

     

  • Brain Food: Lost in the Details

    If you missed Barak Obama’s speech earlier today, see it here, and get back to this post when you’re done. I’m not backing any presidential candidates, but the speech can’t be missed. Besides, then you can take part in the fun — brain food fun, that is.

    I received an email from MoveOn this afternoon (don’t worry, I get "righty" emails, too), and in addition to letting me know that it’s "one of the most honest, courageous, and thoughtful speeches" they’ve ever seen, they commented that the media had totally missed the point — "reducing
    the whole thing to a few soundbites and hashing over whether he ‘did enough to condemn his pastor.’"

    Surprisingly, this had not been my experience throughout the day. Granted, I was too busy to read much of anything all day, but from what little I could gauge, the consensus was awe — simple, uncomplicated awe.

    Hmmm…

    Of course, I checked my media sources after receiving the aforementioned email. I got online — bullshit, I was already online — and went to The New York Times website, where I found "Obama Urges U.S. to Grapple With Racial Issue." Ok. True. Very appropriate title. That’s exactly what he did. But the first half does focus on the pastor — of course, his speech did as well. Perhaps it’s not how I would have led the story, but it’s fair enough.

    I move on. I check other news sources. I’m not really seeing it. They’re journalists, right? They’re supposed to be reporting the facts, after all. They can’t express awe. Is that the problem?

    When something beautiful or gruesome enough happens, it seems, we need to have it expressed to us somehow. Perhaps we’ve become lazy or weak, or even dumb, but we no longer seem capable of reacting on our own. The facts just aren’t enough anymore. It’s unfortunate; and one could definitely argue that for that very reason, we need to force the issue — that we can’t give up. But we’ve hardened to facts over time. It’s only natural.

    Enter the blog. Why are we suddenly reaching out like desperate fools, poking people in Facebook, amassing "friends" in MySpace, concocting new Google groups, reconnecting with grade-school aquaintance, and checking our email 542 times a day? Oh — and writing and reading about navel explorations. Oh, my.

    We want more than facts. We need more than facts. We need reaction. We need connection. We need context.

    Enter the blog.

    Clearly now, the little information I had received throughout the day was from blogs. Of course, it was awe. Some say it isn’t journalism. Frankly, I don’t care what it’s called. It is.

    So, what then? Certainly we need facts. But do mere facts accurately paint a full picture? Do they offer vision, truth? Or in getting caught in the facts, do we miss the big picture?

    Journalism, as we know it today, isn’t the origin of everything. It isn’t a seed for everything that follows. It’s just one of the things that follows and precedes — a part of the chain. Maybe we’re a little closer to our story-telling origins now. Who knows? But isn’t it all part of a progression, an evolution?

    Who ever said facts have to be dry? Who ever said anyone should be anything less than subjective?

    (I get it. I get it. Tomorrow I’ll rant about the importance of journalistic integrity. But today I’m enjoying the ride.)

    "I sound my barbaric YAWP o’er the rooftops of the world." —WW

     

     

  • 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.

  • If I were king of the fore-e-e-est

    I hope you all noticed the bold initiative of the Star Tribune, as expressed on their editorial page on Sunday. Yup, they put their heads together, snorted and wheezed with the Herculean effort, pressed hard on their temples to concentrate the intellect, and made their endorsement regarding tomorrow’s "Super Tuesday" nationwide primaries and caucuses.

    And you thought they were too timid to actually make an endorsement without doing a focus group first of what they could get away with without offending their ever shrinking base of readers and advertisers.

    Well, the joke’s on you. The Strib editorial board ain’t afraid of nobody or no thing. Not nobody. Not nohow.

    And just to prove that, they threw caution to the wind, damned the torpedoes, hurled themselves once more into the breach and endorsed…voting.

    As they put it, "Super Tuesday, Too important to miss." If that weren’t endorsement enough, they even said,"It could be a transformative moment in American politics."

    That’s some bold talkin’ there.

    So whatever you do, don’t miss Super Tuesday. It’s too important AND it could be transformative.

    And speaking of "Super", how ’bout them Giants? They made the top of the Strib’s front page today, right above the coverage of the candidates.

  • Another Death Sentence for Journalism

    NY Times media columnist David Carr told a sad tale today. It started out with him telling how the city of Chicago had just paid out $20 million to settle lawsuits by four former condemned men who had been tortured by police.

    He mentioned that, in essence, because of these men being tortured into confessing capital crimes, the death penalty for Illinois had been put on hold in Illinois by former Governor George Ryan.

    And he told the story that these men, and others like them, had been freed based on the reporting of John Conroy of the Chicago Reader.

    And then, Carr reported that Conroy and three others had just been laid off by the new owners of the Reader. The Reader’s companion paper, The Washington City Paper, where Carr was once editor, had also laid off five newsroom reporters. Declining revenue and the need to cut costs were cited, as usual.

    Good thing it happened last week, instead of a few years ago, or those men would be dead, and several Chicago police would have gotten away with murder.

    Now it’s journalism that’s on death row. It’s been put there by readers who don’t demand investigative work, and advertisers who don’t want anything to do with any story that involves more in depth reporting that asking people where they get their favorite hamburger.

    It’s only a matter of time. Soon we’ll have nothing but insipid city mags and so called newspapers whose business model doesn’t include any editorial that doesn’t pander to the lowest expectations of readers and the highest ones of advertisers. Add that to all the advertisers being sucked away from the actual content providers by the likes of Google, and it won’t be long until even more publishers push the plungers on their staffs.

     

     

  • Tripping the Road Fantastic

    Soon you may be heading off on a thanksgiving vacation. The trip may be short or it may be long. Unless your relations live next door, however, you will have to make that journey in an automobile. These days that will likely mean a minivan or small European "touring wagon" (which Chrysler attempted to call its Pacifica with no luck).

    Alas, I can remember a time when my family made the journey in something closer to a submarine replete with paisley patterned vinyl seats. It was a bright yellow Pontiac Safari wagon. I truly believe it was the closest my parents ever came to experiencing the 60s. Yet for me those Thanksgiving rides always seemed like some kind of trip.

    The Pontiac Safari

    For starters, the Pontiac Safari (and its GM cousins) was the largest station wagon ever built. I found a reference that confirms this:

    "Most of the truly huge station wagons seem to have
    been built before 1982 ( in fact up until 1978). The station wagons with the greatest interior volume
    (passenger volume plus cargo volume) would seem to be the 1971-1976 full-size GM
    wagons with approximately 184 cubic feet of volume. Other leading wagons are the
    1974-1977 Chrysler Town and Country and Dodge Polara/Monaco (177 cubic feet), and the 1969-1978 full-size Ford and Mercury station wagons (169 cubic feet).

    Yet the preponderance of information suggests that the largest
    station wagons of all time were the 1971-1976 Buick Estate, Oldsmobile Custom
    Cruiser , and Pontiac Safari."

    Now I realize my timing is a little off. We owned a 1971 Pontiac Safari which would have placed my family trips safely out of the 60s. Still there was something about this wagon that made me lose my head.

    Was it all that space?

    Was it my sister spitting blue meanies (she kept blue scratch paper that she would chew up into little gross little projectiles) or scratching my forearms (still have scars) with her face flushed as red as Enzo at the racetrack?

    Or was it a little voice inside of me that said, "Someday Chris you will design things for a living. So know right now that these seats belong in a bathroom or a really ugly house. And cars, little boy, are never supposed to be yellow."

    That must have been it. Car seats were just NOT supposed to match the formica on the kitchen counter. And my sister be dammed.

  • MinnPost Debut: A "Thoughtful" Approach to News

    RYBAK: Sigh.

    For some time, I’ve put off writing a post about today’s 11 a.m. debut of what’s being touted in some circles as the divine answer to the Twin Cities’ current Crisis in Journalism. I’m referring, of course, to the launch of MinnPost.com, the online newspaper creation of Joel Kramer, the former Star Tribune editor-turned-publisher-turned journalistic manumitter.

    Kramer stepped forward this summer to, I guess, rescue the Twin Cities from the ravages of PiPress owner Dean Singleton and the faceless Avista-owned Star Tribune. Both, you see, have condensed news, bought off and spit out reporters at such an alarming rate (well, alarming if you’re a reporter), that it seems Kramer decided it was his sacred duty to restore Twin Cities journalism to its illustrious past.

    I want to put some emphasis on the word “sacred.” It contributes to the fact that—as much as I’m trying to keep an open mind about MinnPost and as much as I would like to see it succeed as a kick-ass publication—the whole undertaking makes my teeth hurt.

    As Kramer makes clear in his rather dry lectures–um, presentations– (one of which I recently attended) that there will be nothing frivolous about MinnPost. No sports scores, no stocks, no movie, music or theater reviews. No oddball, newsy feature stories that gave newspapers of old their vibrancy. Instead, Kramer emphasized, his new publication is designed to attract “news-intense,” “civically-engaged” readers, the sort of readers “who like to read The Economist,” and who value news written by “high quality” “professional” reporters “who care about Minnesota.”

    Hence, his new publication’s motto: “A Thoughtful Approach to News.”

    That’s where my hackles really start heading north.

    Let’s talk about how Thoughtful it is to tout this new online/new media approach, then, just to be on the safe side, announce that you’ll be passing out 2,000 printed copies of the paper every day. They won’t look like a paper, mind you, (just eight sheets of 8×11 paper stapled together) and they’ll be handed out on street corners in downtown Minneapolis, St. Paul, the 494 strip and Edina. How Thoughtful is it, when you’re operating on a shoestring and paying only your editors full-time wages, to be spending 20 cents a copy on that endeavor, for a total of $104,000 per year? Oh, and then brag about the fact that, as a non-profit, you’ve already raised about $120,000. Guess we know where those Thoughtfully-donated dollars will be going.

    It just doesn’t make sense.

    Nor does it make sense to tout yourself as an online version of the extraordinarily popular Slate and Salon online journals where little similarity exists. Kramer has taken pains to distance his Thoughtful Approach to News from Thoughtless, opinionated outfits (well, like ours). However, Slate was just described recently in the New York Observer (probably not a Thoughtful enough publication to suit Kramer) as a fixture of “opinion journalism.” The San Francisco-based Salon is an online magazine (as opposed to a collection of tiny posts or news stories) which prominently features reviews and articles about music, books, and films.

    LAMBERT: Damn, talk about a tough crowd. I knew I needed a little sharper knife when I was alone in here, but you, girl, are one hard sell. Do you heckle funeral eulogies? … not to make any connection between funerals and the arrival of MinnPost.I’ve listened to more than a few of Kramer’s presentations, and I concede they aren’t exactly 20 minutes of Chris Rock. And I’m assuming he will steer MinnPost in a direction I wouldn’t go … entirely.

    But before anyone accuses me of being closed off and utterly negative to MinnPost I have to say I admire and will root for anyone who can deliver more credible content into the public news diet. Too many people consume too much fact-free bullshit. Anyone who is working to re-balance that situation has my support. Moreover, I admire someone who is willing to stick $250k of his own money into the venture and actively work at it, as Kramer has and is.

    I attended his open house, too. Remember? I was the one encouraging hugs between you and my old drinking buddy, Neal Justin, (who we told we were going to rip for his new Monday column, and which we did a couple days ago). The concept and the cost of this 2,000 stapled copies thing strikes me as kind of funky. The sort of thing that could be the first item red-lined when someone screams, “belt-tightening!” But I do recall Kramer talking about some kind of feature/analysis style sports coverage.

    In fact, one of the more interesting conversations I had over at the MinnPost office was with ex-Strib Timberwolves beat writer, Steve Aschburner, who will contribute stories to the site. Steve’s separation from the Strib was one of the most hamhanded of many hamhanded episodes. But he seems philosophical about it now.He said two things that I found interesting. One, he sees in Kramer – for all his wonkiness and lack of hip-hop cred – “an actual leader,” as he put it. A much overlooked factor in the struggles of modern newsrooms is that while the staffs may be aging-to-aged veterans, middle level editing/managing jobs – thankless eye-glazing jobs — are often handled by comparatively inexperienced people for whom budget control is as high or higher a priority than quality writing and reporting. Too many, in my experience, don’t even qualify as avid newspaper readers themselves. I’m paraphrasing here, but Aschburner’s view was that, “I’m tired of being told to respect and follow somebody just because they’ve been handed a title. With Joel, I have no proble
    m following his direction because he’s proven he can lead.”

    The other thing Aschburner mentioned was that as a sports writer he doubts he’ll have the difficulty making the transition to the less formal and freer style of the Web. Sports departments everywhere have long had a special license for language, attitude and commentary that newsroom managers in other departments – some for reasons of inexperience, others for reasons of incompetence and/or timidity – don’t allow their staffs.

    RYBAK: I truly am sorry. I don’t mean to be so nasty. But as a ratty-ass reporter, undue pretentiousness beckons like an overfull balloon to a pinholder. Oops, there I go again, not being Thoughtful.

    I want to say something nice about J-Kram, so you’ll get off my butt. I wasn’t working at the Strib when Joel was in the building. But my homies say that he was one of the finest editors the paper ever had during his days in the newsroom. A guy you wanted looking over your shoulder as you wrote. The best.

    Once he ascended to the publisher’s suite, however, opinion shifts. Kramer the publisher, in order to save journalism back in the mid-1990s, implemented procedures at the Strib that remain laughable to this day.

    He divided its reporters into “teams,” (which totally Balkanized the newsroom), and engaged in a whole bunch of newsroom renaming: Subscribers became “reader-customers,” the managing editor became the “news leader,” and the newspaper became “perhaps the most ridiculed newspaper in the country,” according to a New York Times article about the Strib written in 1995. Kramer, the once-accessible editor dug in his heels and stubbornly defended his rampant jargonism, which was dismantled after he left the paper.

    I see Joel the editor in his commitment to an ambitious undertaking like this and in seeking to bring some legitimate news gathering back to the marketplace, even if I think he is severely underpaying the talent. There are some real standouts among the reporters he’s signed up and I look forward to seeing their bylines regularly.

    However, I see Joel the publisher in his stubborn belief that he knows better than anyone else when it comes to the Internet. If he really believed in the Internet, he wouldn’t be messing around with handing out expensive stapled copies of an online paper. If he really understood the Internet, I think MinnPost would be a lot more Daily Mole and a lot less refried mainstream media.

    That said, I’ll be reading with great interest.

    LAMBERT: The other issue that caught my attention was when he declared that MinnPost, with people like Doug Grow, Britt Robson, Susan Albright, David Brauer, my old buddy Sarah Janecek, G.R. Anderson and Steve Berg, to mention just a few, would not be offering political endorsements … on the advice of his attorneys and their interpretation of the 501(c)3 statutes.

    I don’t get this.

    As it is, MinnPost might be tilted more heavily left-of-center than the old Strib – Sarah can’t do all the righty lifting – but other than porn and Britney Spears (a redundancy, I suppose) nothing drives traffic like politics, and a fair and open Op-Ed board-style discussion of candidates and referendums would be pretty damned interesting.

    This will be a fascinating test of the appetites and affinities of web users, web-intense users. Will Kramer appeal to an MPR quality audience with a product that goes only a little bit further than the existing daily papers? Or will he find that the stories/posts that earn the largest audience – and hold out the greatest potential for ad revenue – point in him a different direction, possibly more Slate and Salon than StarTribune.com?

    I wish him and his crew the best.

  • Of Burrows and Bergs

    I like the rodent.

    Gotta love the beautiful turn of phrase in a blog. Jeff Horwich over at MPR got off a good one about MinnPost‘s staff yesterday in his piece on the pending competition between MinnPost and The Daily Mole. He described them thus: "[the staff list] reads like the manifest of lifeboats from the "Titanic" that appears to be the Twin Cities’ newspaper industry."

    I can’t comment much on MinnPost because I haven’t seen anything yet more than the almost daily announcements of how serious they’re going to be: "A Thoughtful Approach to the News"?

    Well maybe I can comment on that…

    The Strib, the Pioneer Press aren’t thoughtful? Here’s a hint: not everybody jumped overboard. Some brains are still on the boat over there. They’re just younger brains who weren’t eligible for the buyouts and so have to stay and bail furiously. (Here’s another hint: their owners aren’t going to sit around and let you steal their online audience without a fight, but that’s for another day and another post.)

    Steve Perry over at The Mole noticed the "Thoughtful" tagline, too. He put a motto up on The Mole the other day: "A Think-y Talk-y Approach to the News."

    The comparison between MinnPost and Daily Mole is spurious, sort of like the difference between what’s looking a lot like oatmeal and what is already mindful of spicy Thai food. One will be good for you, if you can choke it down, and the other will be good for you too, and make you happy you ate it, and it goes really well with beer.

    The Daily Mole is, of course, out there already being thinky and talky, and Steve tells me that there’s a lot more to come. Right now the staff is basically Steve and a weather guy who is a whole lot better than Paul Douglas. He’s got a couple of really good posts today: a conversation with Margaret Kelliher and a disection of the Strib’s bridge story.

    People have asked me what I think the difference between MinnPost and The Mole is going to be. So far, I’ve been saying that I have no idea–other than I know Perry a lot better (we worked together at City Pages for ten years) and I would never underestimate his ability to come up with provocative and spot on commentary.

    But as of yesterday, I’ve got even a better answer. Here it is.

    Did I mention that Perry is also one of the funniest people I know?

  • News Hole

    photo by Raffy Abasolo
    (Cover photo by Brian Hayes) 

    Strange and terrible things happen all over the world every day, of course, as well as wonderful things, things merely prosaically sad, irresistibly trivial, or urgently relevant to our lives. People suffer and die in far-away places and in neighborhoods where we live. Legislation is debated and passed; businesses change hands, people lose their jobs; the fates of criminals and innocents alike are determined in court; professional athletes triumph or flounder or change teams; celebrities suffer breakdowns or engage in appalling behavior. And amid all the clamor and the calamity there are always, unfolding all around us, poignant, miniature dramas and acts of quiet integrity and heroism.

    All of this boils down to news of one sort or another, and, unless we find ourselves directly affected by an event, that news comes to us secondhand, as stories. We depend on the media to assemble those stories, and to pass them along so that we can remain informed about the world beyond our immediate lives. But what happens when the stories don’t get told?

    Few people who live in the Twin Cities were unaffected by the stories and images that emerged in the wake of the rush-hour collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge into the Mississippi River. It was one of those huge news events that instantly became a galvanizing communal drama. The destruction of a bridge, after all, resonates on any number of levels; it’s a catastrophe that can be easily transformed into an all-purpose metaphor—emotional, logistical, structural, infrastructural—for the perils of life in a modern metropolis.

    The news media in the Twin Cities rightfully devoted all its resources to telling that story, and did a terrific job of quickly pulling together the myriad pieces and angles of a confusing and rapidly developing tragedy. There’s not much to criticize in how the bridge collapse was covered locally, but it did raise a question: what happens to the rest of the news when a major story breaks, particularly in your own backyard? We’ll push our metaphor a bit further: If the news media is increasingly our bridge to the world beyond our doors, what happens when that bridge gets swept away by a huge and legitimate breaking story?

    We’ll admit that we got as wrapped up in the bridge story as everybody else, and only after we’d had a chance to finally pull ourselves away from our televisions or delve deeper into the back pages of the newspapers did we get around to wondering what else had been going on—around the world, elsewhere in the country, and here in Minnesota—that day and in the days following the disaster. What became of the stories that would have been front-page news—or at the very least received prominent play—on any other ordinary day in the Twin Cities?

    In an effort to give you back that day, and the few that followed, we spent some time digging for the news that got buried or jettisoned in the aftermath of the bridge collapse. What we found was that, horrifying and eye-opening as some of those stories are, it was, sadly, a pretty typical news week.

    Just not, sadly, here. —BZ

     

    PAGE 2: AROUND TOWN
    PAGE 3: CRIME
    PAGE 4: BUSINESS
    PAGE 5: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL
    PAGE 6: SCRAMBLE for bridge coverage
    PAGE 7: FALLOUT from the bridge collapse
    PAGE 8: CHATTER — or conspiracy theories

  • If a Newspaper Falls in the Forest

    Lost in the loud wailing heard in our little journalistic glade over the clear-cutting of staff at the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press is any serious discussion about what’s being severed: Is it actually worth the efforts of the journalistic tree huggers? To some, the answer is a stentorian “No.”

    I got an email the other day from one constant Strib critic who posed this question regarding the recently announced halving of the paper’s editorial board: “Can’t seven idiots do the job just as well as twelve idiots?” After the initial involuntary chuckle, however, the answer to this also has to be “No.”

    Journalists are an odd, and rare, lot. The best of them care nothing for their social standing in the community, and think even less about their position in the market. It’s not that they don’t like to have friends and customers as much as the next person, it’s just that the best of them realize that sometimes having friends or being considerate of what the market wants is antithetical to what they do.

    The guy who sent me the email cited above is a former Republican operative, and so of course regards most newspapers as adversaries. His comment, however risible, portrays the fundamental disconnect between a good newspaper and about half of its audience on any given day. That’s because most newspaper types, at least the ones I know, don’t exist to produce demographically or politically correct stories to fit around the expensive ads that have traditionally paid for expensive enterprise journalism. They exist to tell the truth as they see it. That means that, alongside the news of the latest murder in North Minneapolis or misguided liberal social initiative, we’re occasionally going to get unpleasant revelations about just the sort of advertisers that newspapers have counted on. We’re also going to be treated to unflattering accounts of how Minnesota business moguls have backdated their stock options, or of how Minnesota doctors have accepted what amounts to bribes from drug companies.

    Some of these stories are easier than others to do. Some, like the options and drug company stories, are almost never done by local papers any more. They’re too expensive and too risky. They require employees from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times to come to Minnesota and do them for us (as was the case with the aforementioned two stories).

    My memory isn’t perfect, but the last “enterprise” story of this nature done by the Star Tribune was the series done almost three years ago by Strib reporters Ron Nixon (now at the New York Times), Dee DePass, and Terry Collins. It related, in several parts, how “instant loan” companies were ripping off their low-income clients, and how several local and reputable banks were skirting state usury laws by backing these loan sharks in suits.

    Three years ago this story got plenty of space in the Strib, and it should have won the Premack Award, the most prestigious statewide journalism prize. Instead, that year the Premack went to another Strib story about how globalization was providing opportunities for Minnesota business. (The five-member Premack panel that year included two Republican politicians. Guess which way they voted.) The globalization story had a constituency, and that constituency was willing to exert its influence in its support. The constituency of the loan story was a lot of Minnesotans who take home around two hundred dollars a week after taxes and check cashing fees and don’t have votes on the Premack committee, or any other committees, for that matter.

    Newspapers have always been a business. It’s just that until recently they’ve usually been family businesses with close ties to the community they serve. There was a sense of pride in the unique service the daily paper provided. But along with that, there was also a virtual guarantee that the paper could make money, no matter how many advertisers or readers it angered, because it provided an indispensable source of information. That information was the bridge between advertisers and readers.

    Those days are gone. It’s not only because classified ads have migrated to the web, or that we no longer have locally owned anchor advertising clients like Dayton’s department store to support the newspapers. It’s also because prospective readers have thousands of choices for ways to spend their time, and thousands of media to cater to their narrowly defined political preference or demographic categories. Those targeted media are more than willing to suck up the advertising dollars that used to go by default to newspapers.

    This, of course, means that newspapers—the “people’s media”—are dying, while a new “luxury” magazine springs up every few months. Four luxury titles have launched in the Twin Cities just this year. Unless the newspapers find some way to fertilize their own orchard with advertisers and readers who are willing to pay the true price for difficult journalism, the pruning of journalists will continue unabated.