The Rake Magazine

Tag: media

  • Having "It," but not necessarily talking about "It"

    Note to "media types:" Your power by using sexual innuedno to get the "prized audience" isn’t working so well…anymore!

    I have been spending a lot of time lately doing research on what people read and why. There are a few important areas that seem to bug the future of this country and the ones who will ultimately be the ones to make or break the disastrous state of our economy.

    First of all, kids, for the most part, are honest about everything. They are informed, sometimes too much, and can smell a phony from miles away.

    I asked my "research group" to help me understand what drives them to the sources they use for information, besides what they learn in school. The conclusion of my study was not surprising to me personally, but may be to some of you "media types…"

    Let me begin with this: The people I have been doing research with are teenagers from ALL walks of life and from different socio-economic backgrounds.

    Without giving away too much of the valuable information that I have accumulated over the last several months, I will share with you this, a portion of what I heard: "Don’t think we can’t figure out when someone has to use SEX in a headline to get our attention. If the writer has real experience and wants our attention, then it will happen naturally because we are inundated with images of SEX all day long and are numb to it. Thanks to the Internet, cable TV, bad radio shows…etc…We don’t think that SEX is any big deal."

    This, to me, a 40-year-old woman who is not embarrassed to say that I still feel shy about sex, is sad and disturbing.The allure of those great things in life we call "Chemistry" and "Love" seems to have hit the skids. And the adults who are using the innocence of young people to take away one of the pleasures we look forward to in life are responsible. This admittedly including myself at times.

    Sex may sell to some, but after a lot of conversations with the young ones, the excitement of the unknown, the mystery of what makes you fall in love and experience sex are still right where they should be: in their hearts. They still want it to be experienced the old-fashioned way: through unconditional love, honesty, kindness, respect, compassion, and friendship. Not from a "media type" who clearly would not have to talk about something sacred if they were getting that something sacred at home.

    As I was told by my parents and try to convey to my own teenagers: If you have "it," enjoy "it," and appreciate "it." The ones who don’t have "it" are easy to spot; just go on your gut and your morals and you will know.

  • 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.

  • Lost Files of the Star Trib Readers' Rep

    Sunday morning’s aren’t nearly as much fun anymore. Not long ago I’d heft the Strib off the doorstep, chuck out the ads, the news and the sports and dig right into my favorite column, "The Readers’ Representative." Having worked for a decade and a half at a daily newspaper, I miss hearing first hand the way self-criticism is transformed in to self-congratulation, the way dense curtains fall over assurances of transparency, the way anyone and everyone higher up the company ladder is not only always right, but right and brave. And especially I missed the way a big, high-profile media company saved a bundle on PR flackery by having a compliant middle manager wallpaper over the corpses hanging in the living room.

    But now I just miss the Reader’s Rep. Back in early October the kids up the ladder decided that, gosh, they were just so committed to giving us the latest health news — not so much on dark, complicated stuff like how local health insurance billionaires have goosed the cost of medical care and our collective stress level — but rather the importance of eating vegetables and getting annual exams, they "reassigned" the old Readers’ Rep to the health section and replaced her with … well nobody, apparently.

    The last two Sundays have featured columns by the Strib’s top editor, Nancy Barnes. In the first one she displayed a lot of comaraderie with veterans like Paul McEnroe, a.k.a. "Mac", as she called him, much like she does when they bowl together every Tuesday and Thursday night, I’m guessing. This week she gave out a number that’ll connect you to an editor somewhere in the building (maybe) whenever you’re pissed off at Nick Coleman, want to give Katherine Kersten a wet kiss or point out that someone, maybe one of the new (and cheaper) hires on the suburban team had Stillwater on the banks of the Mississippi in the morning’s East Metro edition.

    Somehow this isn’t as appealing to me. Obviously the old Readers’ Rep wasn’t actually "representing" readers so much as she was taking bullets for her paymasters, the now beached Par Ridder in particular. Not that Mr. Ridder’s myriad problems; a near complete lack of awareness of business ethics being just one, were ever addressed mind you. But the sheer spectacle of the Readers’ Rep’s elephant-in-the-room avoidance and the frenetic patter of her happy feet scurrying back and forth in search of any vantage point to laud the wisdom and bravery of her colleagues was reliably entertaining. You could read her and think to yourself, "Goddamit, I may have to spend eight hours in a cubicle working for psychotic nerds, but at least I don’t have to sign my name to that!"

     

     

     

  • What Will Dan Barreiro Do?

    You want to feel a cone of silence? Call around to KFAN and KSTP and ask what’s up with Dan Barreiro? You gotta hope the U.S. spy satellite program has security this tight.

    As has been reported here and by Judd Zulgad over at the Strib, Barreiro is at that rare moment in a broadcaster’s career when he has maximum leverage to close a sweet, long-term deal with either of two eager employers. (I was going to strain the usual "seduction" and "suitor" analogies, but lifelong bachelor Dan just got married — finally — so it seems in bad taste to suggest some kind of reckless promiscuity.)

    What can be said is this; KSTP AM 1500 has made Barreiro a handsome offer for six years, most likely in the 11-to-2 slot, and KFAN — which is to say the suits in Clear Channel’s San Antonio office — have roughly another week to meet or beat that offer. Whatever Barreiro decides will have serious impact on both stations since it hard to say which needs him more.

    For the unaware, Barreiro’s 4 to 7 p.m. KFAN show is something of an oasis of literacy in Twin Cities commercial talk. While the basic stratagem for holding male audiences continues to depend heavily on feeding the ill-informed near toxic amounts of bullshit and candy, Barreiro’s act routinely reflects someone who reads material heavier than NewsMax, the deep thoughts of Hugh Hewitt and Fantasy Football websites. The ex-Strib sports columnist appears to actually read — gasp! — books, novels and more than one newspaper. What’s more, his show reflects something more evolved than a supermarket check-out line intelligence level.

    KSTP badly needs Barreiro to add octane to an act that was slumping before the departure of their right-wing marquee attractions, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, to Clear Channel’s KTLK two years ago. (Jason Lewis departed prior to that, and signed with KTLK in large part because Clear Channel didn’t want him rebuilding right-wing talk back at AM 1500). The station’s much publicized and very expensive deal to bring the Twins in — $1 million a year for four years, with virtually all ad revenue accruing to the Twins– did not deliver anywhere near the kind of ratings boost they hoped it would give the rest of the line-up. Other than Joe Soucheray, the station’s other personalities just aren’t pinging many radars.

    KFAN does well among men, but should be doing better. If Barreiro left they would no doubt consider shifting P.A. and Dubay, their all-football all-the-time mid-morning act to afternoon drive. They might — or at least they should consider giving Barreiro’s long-time sidekick, Joe "Mr. Phun" Anderson his own show … if he doesn’t follow Barreiro to KSTP. (Anderson’s contract expired at the end of September. Word is he has been told to stay cool until the Barreiro deal is settled.)

    Even earlier this year, with Mick Anselmo running KFAN and the other local Clear Channel operations, Barreiro most likely would have been sewn up long before by now. But the perception now is that none of the surviving managers here in Minnesota have anywhere near the pull with San Antonio to make this deal happen via their own influence.

    Anselmo hired Barreiro years ago and, with Dan Seeman, cultivated Barreiro’s game. Seeman was fired in late ’05 and Anselmo was canned earlier this year. The fact that Seeman — whose support and insight Barreiro values — is now only one office door away from AM 1500, running Hubbard Broadcasting’s FM 107, has to make the offer from KSTP all that more appealing.

    Another thing that must be playing in Barreiro’s mind is the ever-tightening clutch Clear Channel corporate has around the necks of all its local operations.

    Formal approval of the Clear Channel empire’s move back into private ownership will almost certainly mean another round of budget-tightening and even less local-level decision-making. The joke in the business is that where Clear Channel is a company with almost no patience (never mind that the KFAN line-up has been unchanged for years), Hubbard Broadcasting is a place with far too much patience. Change comes at a very pre-global warming glacial pace at Hubbard radio. The upside, if you’re Barreiro, is that once you’re in you tend to stick for quite a while. A deal at AM 1500 has to be seen as significantly more secure, all things considered.

    Finally, there is the matter of the notorious Clear Channel "basic contract", which in truth is less contract than a series of medieval dictates of no value whatsoever to the employee. The standard language allows the company to do pretty much whatever it wants whenever it wants. As much leverage as Barreiro has, there is always the question whether he has enough to push Clear Channel into a for-real guaranteed contract. That is to say, a contract with language so specific that "meet" actually means "meet" in terms of matching every detail of KSTP’s offer.

    Put another way, there is every good reason to be highly, intensely skeptical of anything Clear Channel promises. Three years down the line they could get bored with his "literate" act and all that book and reading stuff and demand a shift to all Vikings talk all the time (like a real sports station) and, if Barreiro rebelled, the big firm could whack him, a la John Hines, leaving him paid but in professional limbo.

    Finally, as I mentioned in a previous post. There is the Soochie factor at AM-1500. As most listeners and all his colleagues know, Soochie ain’t exactly Mr. Cuddly. More to the point, I seriously doubt there is anyone in the Hubbard building who dares even ask Soochie if he’d consider moving into the old Limbaugh slot in order to make a better fit for Barreiro.

    If there is anyone foolish enough to pipe up, "Uh, uh, Joe … I mean, Mr. Soucheray … could … uh … uh … I mean … " I want to be there to see what happens.

  • Randy, The Reader's Rep …

    (A semi-regular Q&A with "Randy" the new Star Tribune Reader’s Representative, most frequently found on the corner stool at the Dry Dock roadhouse, in the shadow of the big microwave tower, Chaffey, Wisconsin.)

    Randy, Your Reader’s Rep: Dang but stuff piles up. I come back from baitin’ a few bear traps, havin’ a couple beers and getting old Jonsered ready for cuttin’ season and look at all this mail. Sheeeit. When the Star Tribune hired me back, I had no idea they really meant a weekly gig. I thought with little Par out sun-bathin’ it’d quiet down.

    Guess not. So here goes.

    Question: I heard that the staff at the Star Tribune all got flu shots the other
    day? Is this true? Where did this happen? Were these shots administered in a sanitary way? And did the top executives
    join in?

    Randy, Your Reader’s Rep: That is definitely true. Flu season is coming on pretty strong, and Avista Capital Partners, the really fine folks that own the paper want all their Full Time Employee Units running like a big pack of Dodge Hemis. There are a lot of very big stories that are going to mean plenty to the Avista folks’ year-end numbers. Like for example, ‘Who is going to buy them damned parking lots?’, and whether the folks in Eveleth and Granite Falls are going to pitch in to build a new stadium for the Vi-Queens, which would mean Avista might have half a chance of selling the main building to what’s his name, the billionaire dude from New Jersey.

    As for "where it happened"; it wasn’t in the butt, Bob.

    I know. I know. I heard some pretty risque jokes about everyone standing up, dropping trow and bending over at their desks while Chris Harte went down the line pokin’ tushies. But the truth is everyone took it in the arm.

    Don’t know about the sanitary thing. I suppose a bunch of $4 coffee drinkers like that crowd used … ooooo … pre-moistened towelettes, like you get at Famous Dave’s. But I’m not sure. I mean, hell, I usually just wave a butane lighter under my buck knife to cut out slivers.

    But yeah. Chris Harte himself took a pokin’. Right there in line like he was a normal person or something. Ain’t that something?

    Funny though how happy and agreeable everyone was for the rest of the day.

    Question: I was reading that bastard Nick Coleman’s column a couple days ago and I noticed that right next to his little picture, the one where he doesn’t look anything like George Clooney, it said, "One view". Was that a typo or something? I mean, he’s writing a column, right? Who else’s view were we supposed to think it was? And does this mean that all the other columnists, like Katherine Kersten and C.J. and Sid Hartman and Reusse are going to have "One View" next to their pictures. (And none of them look much like George Clooney, either.)

    Randy, Your Reader’s Rep: That’s a good question. Tell you the truth, I didn’t notice until you brought it up. So I sent a note asking what the deal was. Nobody wrote back. But I hear through the old company grapevine that no one told Coleman about it and no one knew who put it there. But come on, there are so many brave and courageous editors at the Star Tribune doing so many important things to, you know, enhance the quality of life in the better zip codes of Minneapolis they probably just overlooked it.

    My guess is all whoever stuck it there meant to say is that, "This is that commie prick Coleman’s view, not our view." In fact, I gotta check and see if it says, "Our View" next to Kersten’s and Sid’s pictures the next time they write.

    Question: That blonde Republican babe, Sarah Janecek, wrote a story this week saying how a couple of your reporters used some pretty foul language talking to the MnDOT people. Those guys McEnroe and Kennedy sounded like jerks. I suppose they were pretty ashamed when that story came out, and they must really be pissed that people know how obnoxious they are.

    Randy, Your Reader’s Rep: Oh yeah, and how. I tell you, nothing
    makes those two stick their tales between their legs more than everyone in town knowing they shout in the phone and use words like, "bullshit". I don’t know what they were smiling about after that thing ran.

    Because, we have a very strict policy about bad language here at the Star Tribune. Penalties, too. If you’re heard saying, "This place is total bullshit", you have to put a dollar in the Save Par jar. If you say, "I’m going to cap the next a**hole who assigns me an Eagan Sewer Commission story", you have put in $5. Of course if you say something like, "These Avista douche bags wouldn’t know a paragraph from a parsnip," you have a choice between hurling yourself off the roof or editing a Katherine Kersten column.

    Question: I see that you are starting to run more editorials supporting a new Vikings stadium, which would be built practically right next door and most likely goose up your real estate value pretty nicely. Don’t you think you need to at least mention that fact every time you write opinion pieces? You know, maybe a standard little box at the top that says something like, "If you stupid chumps bite on this deal we’ll make a shitload of dough."

    Randy, Your Reader’s Rep: Man, I’ve heard cynical. But you about take the jelly donut. You got something against football? You want to see a place without a team I suggest you come up to Superior, because that’s what you’re going to end up with if you don’t close ranks and play to win, pally.

    The folks at Avista Capital Partners, some of whom have even heard of Green Bay, are actually doing you one shiny ripe favor. They are looking out for your interests when obviously you won’t. They are family people just like you, and they know that special feeling fans get when they contribute a little bit extra out of every pay check to have a place where, you know, if they cut their coupons and save up a couple months they might be able to take their kid to see a game. Three months if they want to park and have a beer.

    Until next time. Think transparent thoughts.

  • Last Night's Debate: Bite Me, Wolf.

    Now that we’ve more or less cleared up that "illegal immigrants with driver licenses" issue, the line I was pleading for one of the Democrats to throw back last night was, "Wolf, do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound? Do you ever get tired of this ‘gotcha’ crap?"

    Something like that probably would have to come from Joe Biden, whose demeanor these days suggests a guy drifting well into, "Aw, f**k it" mode, since debate moderator after debate moderator has effectively reaffirmed the polls and consigned him, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich to side show acts.

    In actual fact it was Kucinich who said to Blitzer, referring to the yes/no driver license bit, "I take exception to the way you framed that question." Thank you, Dennis. But you should have added, "What’s with the week-old beard thing, Wolf?"

    My beef with Blitzer, who aside from the vaudevillians on Fox News, may be the most implausible "news man" on television, is that the guy not only takes the bait and over-works the meme — ad nauseum — but that he does it with such humorless, halting verbosity. Aaron Brown may not have had the Upper West Side pedigree or the promotable cover boy look of Anderson Cooper, but the guy could ask an intelligent question in less than five paragraphs, and maybe even flash a little wit.

    Last night’s debate in Vegas — was irresistible viewing after two weeks — TWO SOLID WEEKS — of Blitzer, Hannity, O’Reilly et al — burying their bloody snouts in "Hillary’s Flop", the aforementioned immigrant driver license "issue" from the Oct. 28 debate. (And did anyone think of staging this debate in the Mandalay Bay sports book
    instead of some anonymous field house? I mean, how about a slice of
    Americana while we ridicule our candidates?)

    The real issue of course was Clintonian parsing. Her Bubba-ness. A resumption of that famous, "A little something for everyone" act. The horror! Because, God help us, the worst thing that could ever happen to this country is to have more Clinton-style government. You know with balanced budgets, respect for the Constitution, no troops getting shot up in some medieval hellhole and … oh, christ, don’t get me started. So yeah, the point was parsing and the ticking clock on someone else, Obama or (my guy) Edwards, to bust a move with an effective attack on the little lady.

    And its not like I don’t understand the ratings imperative of getting the blood on the ground early to hold viewer eyeballs. Come on! We’re putting on a show here, people! But after the cornball NBA-style introduction bit with the candidates half-trotting out from the wings, (I expected Blitzer to swat Biden on the ass and shout, "go get ’em, Stud."), the potential leaders of the free world had barely settled behind their podiums when Blitzer — with neither style nor wit — began angling for someone to lob a grenade Hillary’s way.

    According to a Google search there are approximately 8,543,907 web sites currently analyzing last night’s debare performances. So I’ll spare you mine, other than to state the obvious.

    1: Clinton learned her lesson from the Oct. 28 "flop" and was not only completely composed, she nailed Campbell Brown’s question about "playing with the boys". There isn’t a woman over 30 in this country who doesn’t understand — viscerally — Clinton’s point about "impediments".

    2. Obama clearly doesn’t have a shiv side to his act, and can’t really compete with Clinton or Biden on foreign affairs savvy … not a good sign for "looking into the soul" of Vladimir Putin or the next Chinese trade minister.

    3. Bill Richardson seems a likable sap, but he should probably head back to New Mexico before he totally screws a shot at another cabinet job.

    4. My guy Edwards is still saying most of the right things — about the broken, corrupt system and how we get nowhere replacing "corporate Republicans with corporate Democrats" — but he’s getting out on thin ice with his obsessive Hillary-focus. Also John, you really didn’t answer the question about voting for all those free trade acts. That bothers me.

    Lame and predictable as the driver license bit was, Blitzer jumped the shark completely with his other "gotcha" question, the one demanding to know — yes or no — whether candidates would put human rights ahead of the security of the country. Yeah Wolf, there’s an on/off dilemma. I mean, you’re either with us or against us, right? That act is working pretty well, isn’t?

    The candidates may be tiring of this debate circus, and with the preening stage craft of Tim Russert last time and the ham-fisted pomposity of Blitzer this time you can understand their frustration, but if you’re a media/political junkie I have to concede it is great theater/farce.

    On the 28th the Republicans — at long last, and after first refusing — will submit to a CNN/YouTube debate, (hosted by Cooper, possibly in a tight t-shirt). This holds the possibility of an average citizen asking any or all of the creationists, I mean candidates, how exactly the Grand Canyon was carved in six days, how far out from California you have to go before you fall off the edge of the Earth and whether they are prepared to protect America by personally strangling each and every suspected jihadi with their bare hands.

     

     

     

     

  • The TV Writers Strike: Reverb into Newsrooms?

    The average couch tuber probably isn’t tracking this TV writers strike too much. Not beyond fretting over an early end to Heroes and no new Daily Shows. Beyond that the affected "workers," a lot of smart-ass Bimmer-driving West L.A. espresso sippers, are never going to win an outpouring of empathy from the people who obsessively consume their programming.

    I’m not going to argue that this is the moral equivalent of the Harlan County coal miners, but as so many businesses, media in particular, try to find a way to monetize the Internet, this particular strike seems likely to set some important precedents for a lot of industries, possibly even newspapers.

    For a short (and funny) primer on the basics of the TV strike, check out this video posted yesterday by The Daily Show writers.

    The central claim is this: On one hand a media tycoon like Viacom’s Sumner Redstone, (Viacom owns Paramount Pictures, CBS, MTV, Blockbuster video, etc.), will sue YouTube for $1 billion based on its perceived effect — financial — to his value, while simultaneously arguing that there isn’t enough value on the Net to justify sharing …. ANYTHING … brought in via new technologies with the people who created it.

    No one knows for sure what tomorrow will bring, but the TV writers are smart enough to know that unless they nail down every possibility today they will continue seeing zip tomorrow … as billions in value pile up around the feet of the Redstones, and Rupert Murdochs of the planet.

    Ron Moore, showrunner for the series, Battlestar Galactica gave an interview offering a tangible example of how the media empires are overplaying their hand.

    He says:

    "Fundamentally this is about the internet, and this is about whether
    writers get paid for material that is made for the internet or if
    they’re paid for material that is broadcast on the internet that was
    developed for TV or movies.

    "I had a situation last year on Battlestar Galactica where we were asked by Universal to do webisodes, which at that point were very new and ‘Oooh, webisodes! What does that
    mean?’ It was all very new stuff. And it was very eye opening, because
    the studio’s position was ‘Oh, we’re not going to pay anybody to do
    this. You have to do this, because you work on the show. And we’re not
    going to pay you to write it. We’re not going to pay the director, and
    we’re not going to pay the actors.’ At which point we said ‘No thanks,
    we won’t do it.’"

    "We got in this long, protracted thing and eventually they agreed to
    pay everybody involved. But then, as we got deeper into it, they said
    ‘But we’re not going to put any credits on it. You’re not going to be
    credited for this work. And we can use it later, in any fashion that we
    want.’ At which point I said ‘Well, then we’re done and I’m not going
    to deliver the webisodes to you.’ And they came and they took them out
    of the editing room anyway — which they have every right to do. They
    own the material — But it was that experience that really showed me
    that that’s what this is all about. If there’s not an agreement with
    the studios about the internet, that specifically says ‘This is covered
    material, you have to pay us a formula – whatever that formula turns
    out to be – for use of the material and how it’s all done,’ the studios
    will simply rape and pillage."

    If you missed it, Damon Lindelhof, co-creator/writer of NBC’s Lost, wrote an Op-Ed piece in last Sunday’s New York Times, a key assertion of his was this:

    "Twenty percent of American homes now contain hard drives that store
    movies and television shows indefinitely and allows you to fast-forward
    through commercials. These devices will probably proliferate at a
    significant rate and soon, almost everyone will have them. They’ll also
    get smaller and smaller, rendering the box that holds them obsolete,
    and the rectangular screen in your living room won’t really be a
    television anymore, it’ll be a computer. And running into the back of
    that computer, the wire that delivers unto you everything you watch? It
    won’t be cable; it will be the Internet."

    He adds:

    "My show, Lost, has been streamed hundreds of millions of times
    since it was made available on ABC’s website. The downloads require
    the viewer to first watch an advertisement, from which the network
    obviously generates some income. The writers of the episodes get
    nothing. We’re also a hit on iTunes (where shows are sold for $1.99
    each). Again, we get nothing.

    If this strike lasts longer than
    three months, an entire season of television will end this December. No
    dramas. No comedies. No Daily Show. The strike will also prevent any
    pilots from being shot in the spring, so even if the strike is settled
    by then, you won’t see any new shows until the following January. As in
    2009. Both the guild and the studios we are negotiating with do agree
    on one thing: this situation would be brutal."

    With talk that a long strike, relegating viewers to 52-week runs of Dog the Bounty Hunter and Tila Tecquila (and worse) could do for internet "programming" what the 1988 writers strike did for cable programming this Los Angeles Times piece, with a quote from Twin Cities-based media guru, John Rash, lays out the consumer conundrum. In short, pulp TV junkies though we may be, most of us have been spoiled by the production values of scripted television.

    Personally, I’ve got a stack of unwatched DVDs six feet high, college basketball will soon be in high gear and I can happily spend months without a fresh episode of Two and a Half Men.

    But the somewhat out-of-left field relation to newspaper writers is not so much that Katherine Kersten deserves a cut of every dollar Avista Capital Partners might make re-packaging her "Worst of the Flying Imams" columns for dowloading, but rather the pressure to add blogging and other web-related work to the existing job description … without additional compensation.

    It goes without saying that there aren’t more than a half dozen writers at either paper with the leverage to demand more compensation for anything, even if they agreed to spit polish the publisher’s car. But the point is … the future, man.

    The Pioneer Press recently wrapped a new contract with Dean Singleton’s Media News group and Guild officer/reporter Alex Friedrich says discussions of additional duties were pretty much brushed away in the rush to conclude negotiations quickly.

    "There is no new language in the contract that forces us provide any new work for the web," says Friedrich. There was also no discussion of anyone getting paid more for blogging and taking pictures, etc.

    Friedrich says the Guild made the point that they see a need to "get this thing laid out" in the not -too distant future, but that it just didn’t happen this time around.

    "Our big thing," he says, "is what ‘What are we going to judged on?’ All of us recognize that things are changing, and I know I don’t mind taking a picture. But I want some assurance that I won’t be dinged if it takes time away from my main job."

    The bet here is that, win or lose, the TV writers will establish precedents for a lot of other "creative" industries.

  • Startribune.com Readers: Very Sticky Eyeballs

    Holy eyeballs Batman!  The latest newspaper website readership numbers were released today by Nielsen Online (and printed on the  Editor and Publisher website) and startribune.com placed third (behind the Arizona Republic and New York Times websites) in the amount of time readers spent on the site.  Readers in October spent an average of 27 minutes, 40 seconds on startribune.com as compared to 34 minutes, 53 seconds for the New York Times, and almost 40 minutes for AZcentral.com.

     

    Could it be, with circulation down, that readers are spending more time  reading the entire Strib online?  The website’s readership numbers (1.5 million unique readers per month) didn’t change all that much, ranking 26th out of 30.  The New York Times website ranked first , with more than 17.5 million unique monthly visitors, up from 14.5 million in September. 

  • Banana Republic Fades into the Sunset

    Damn! Over here I keep a list of great story ideas and names of people I’ve really got to get around to catching up with, just to see what their story is today. Like MPR’s Bill Kling. Like all the guys who played in The Warheads years ago. And like Kirk Anderson, the former cartoonist for the Pioneer Press whose heave-ho in April 2003 was early, solid confirmation that "local, local" was going to have more to do with "money, money" and "innocuous, innocuous" than reader appeal.

    So what happens? That bastard, David Brauer at MinnPost.com, posts the news that Anderson’s weekly, spot-on evisceration of the myriad Bush follies, "Banana Republic: Adventures in Amnesia" is being dropped by the Star Tribune. (Brauer likes being called a bastard when he beats someone on a story.)

    Much to my disappointment, when I called Anderson was not raging against the machine. "It had to happen sooner or later," he said. "I’m thankful to the Star Tribune for giving me the opportunity." And, "I wish that it could have gone on endlessly." Well, you and me both, Kirk.

    With 70% of the public saying they believe the country has jumped the rails and is wandering in a profoundly bad direction (not to mention seriously considering a 180 degree change next year) you would assume the topics Anderson was trading in — gross abuse of executive power, officially sanctioned torture, the decline of our international reputation, etc. — would be thoroughly mainstream fare — and in a novel, entertaining concept.

    Obviously the quarter page the Strib had been giving Anderson will not go to a Denny Hecker ad — (but let’s not give them ideas) — and most likely will be filled with … well what? More deep thoughts from Debra Saunders and Jonah Goldberg?

    Anderson is very complimentary to opinion exchange editor, Eric Ringham. The feeling is mutuial.

    "I think Kirk’s a genius," says Ringham. "I really hope we can find a way to work together again. I just wish his fans were more vocal than they were. I loved it. But I didn’t hear the kind of buzz I wanted to hear. But the decision was strictly about money."

    Being a classier guy than me Anderson wouldn’t
    divulge how much the Strib was paying him, (I’m guessing
    somewhere between a free-lance music review and a quarter the monster
    salary of one of those sweet old switchboard ladies). He did put it in
    perspective saying that he and his wife aren’t big spenders and "pretty
    much live like college kids".

    Ringham likewise insists that the decision to drop, "Banana Republic" was, "not content driven." And, as for the money involved, the intention, he says, really is to hire a part time writer with the Anderson money, someone who will have to be paid at Guild rates. (If Captain Fishsticks or John Hinderaker gets the job the Strib will take unholy hell from this quarter.)

    As Ringham describes it he approached Anderson around the time of the Strib’s expensive re-design with the idea of doing some kind of "graphic novel", (as Brauer also pointed out). "In very short order Kirk brought back four different proposals, all of them very professional."

    The decision to drop "Banana Republic", he says, was made by interim editor for the editorial page, Scott Gillespie, who was recently elevated (some say "pushed") into the Op-Ed department in the wake of the paper’s not exactly cheery parting with Susan Albright.

    "But," says Ringham, "I don’t know that I fault him for the decision, and I may very well have made the same decision were it mine to make."

    It is my opinion that Steve Sack does a very good job as the paper’s official cartoonist. But in an age of declining readership … yadda yadda .. when papers are supposedly on high alert for topics and concepts that attract the mythical "younger reader", the decision to drop a sharp-edged, "Daily Show"-worthy weekly cartoon strip/graphic novel arouses suspicions (again) that the new, "local, local, hyper-local" Strib’s idea of irresistible fare for "younger readers" and people hip to "new media" are celebrity consumer features on Hannah Montana, reviews of "Halo 3" and of course, the latest sighting of Josh Hartnett.

    Anderson also has no bitter rip for the PiPress, although literally everyone who might have had a hand in "right-sizing" him out of that building in ’03 are now gone themselves. (For all intents and purposes the PiPress editorial "department" has been reduced to a staff of one, Jim Ragsdale. He’ll be local enough.) Neither paper, Anderson says, rode him hard to mushify his cartoons, even in the run-up to the war in ’03, when almost every paper in the country (with the notable exception of deputy editor Jim Boyd at the Strib) was swallowing the Bush administration bit and charging hard for freedom and glory, shock and awe.

    "Of course," he says, "as a staffer at the Pioneer Press my cartoon ideas got shaped a lot more than as a freelancer for the Star Tribune. I’d be told to ‘tweak this’ and ‘change that’. But it wasn’t that bad. I look at some of the ideas I had and I’m grateful they said, ‘No’."

    This despite the prevailing mood at the recent Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, where, he says, most of the complaining was about "the push toward the mushy middle" and the "local, local" gimmick, the latter of which — as has often been said — serves to discreetly remove the biggest and most provocative themes and material of the moment from the playlist of editorial writers and satirists.

    "The war in Iraq is a huge national story and provides a lot of ideas," says Anderson, who by the way is free to re-launch "Banana Republic" anywhere he chooses. "It’s tougher doing a cartoon on the Chamber of Commerce. It’s not nearly as juicy."

    No kidding.

     

     

  • Politics in Minnesota: MnDOT Suffering Under Strib Attack

    Whoa. Sarah Janecek’s Politics in Minnesota newsletter sure lobbed one into the Strib newsroom late Friday. In a Weekly Report item entitled “MnDOT Under Seige: The Star Tribune’s Agenda,” Janecek writes that MnDOT personnel are getting pretty fed up with certain pushy, expletive-spewing Strib reporters.

    According to an email sent by a MnDOT mucky-muck to an unnamed GOP legislator and passed along to Janecek, agency employees “have been subjected to professional and unnecessarily harsh name-calling, hostile phone conversations and phone and email harassment. MnDOT employees have come to me with reports of enduring profanity in phone conversationsand having their professional and personal integrity questioned.” Among other charges leveled: When MnDOT employees did grant interviews and provide information, “they feel their work has been mischaracterized in print and facts have been disregarded in lieu of predetermined story lines.”

    In particular, according to Janecek, employees singled out Strib investigative team members Tony Kennedy and Paul McEnroe as particularly egregious offenders in the offensive language category, uttering phrases like “bullshit,” “you’re lying” and “you’re stonewalling.”

    MnDOT has been under investigation on so many occasions by the Star Tribune that I wonder why its employees aren’t more desensitized by now to the journalistic speculum. However, another part of me sympathizes with MnDOT worker bees.

    Kennedy and McEnroe are not the warm and fuzzy feature writers the paper uses to staff the booth at the State Fair or provide whimsical insight into the paper at Rotary Club luncheons. No, Kennedy and McEnroe are the baying hounds from Hell that are released from their heavy chain link kennels by leather-gloved handlers when the prisoners escape.

    Thinking of them working a story brings to mind the description given Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator: “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever.”

    That’s McEnroe and Kennedy. Especially McEnroe. This is the man the paper has sent to cover two wars—and not as an “embedded” correspondent. When rookie Minnesota Viking Dimitrius Underwood went AWOL to Philadelphia in 1999, McEnroe was dispatched with a pocketful of cash and orders to find him in that city, with no other information. He did. McEnroe is relentless. So is Kennedy—ask Northwest Airlines, which he covered like a blanket when assigned to that beat.

    That’s good news for Strib management, which has been reaping the benefits of their exhaustive, scoop-filled bridge collapse reporting and is gearing up to nominate the pair in all sorts of Pulitzer categories, according to staffers. The bad news is, when you unleash the dogs, sometimes people get bitten.

    In this case, according to Janecek’s report, the victims are MnDOT employees who are either potty-mouth adverse or just plain tired of being—pardon the pun—hounded by the pair. Is that a crime? Should the Stribsters be sent to journalistic charm school for a refresher course? It’s doubtful the paper will pay much attention to the PIM report, other than to write it off as political polemic.

    Neither McEnroe nor Kennedy responded Friday afternoon to an email containing the PIM story. Kennedy, reached at home Sunday night, seemed more poodle than pit bull. He said he hadn’t received the email, wasn’t aware of the PIM report and didn’t want to hear about it. "I work hard during the week; I don’t want to deal with anything on the weekends," said the reporter, who is well known for making calls at any time, day or night (or weekend), when he’s working on a story. "I’ll deal with it Monday, if I have to deal with it at all.

    Of course, I was tempted to yell at him, “Stop stonewalling me with that bullshit!” but I guess he wouldn’t have gotten the joke.

    However, the part of Janecek’s story that did gave me pause involved claims that story coordination at the Strib seems so poor that everybody and their mother at the paper appears to be asking for the same documents, which is making for costly extra work at MnDOT, an agency funded by tax dollars.

    That may be the point where this story rises above the partisan pool.