Tag: media

I love a good rip job, and commenter “lttl” gets off a terrific stream of rips while responding to Strib Guild officer Pam Miller’s post lamenting the loss of so much talent from her newsroom. Clearly “lttl” places far less value on the Twin Cities’ primary news source.

Here’s a sample:

“Ford, NWA, local govt, countless others, all gave good paying jobs to folks trying to make a better life for their kids — pull them up the ladder. Lots of those jobs are gone thanks to the “invisible hand” and I pray for them every night.

“Very few of the Strib refugees fall into that bucket. Other than the fabled Phone Ladies of Lileks’ fame and lore, aren’t the displaced all (a) educated, (b) degreed, and (c) skilled people? In other words, why should I give a crap about some overeducated dilettante who went into journalism viewing him(her)self as some ascetic purveyor of The Truth?

“It’s a load of CRAP. Sid Hartman, Kate Parry, Kersten, Coleman, Lileks, CJ, Lambert — good luck to you all and I’ll give you a buck when I see you under the 94 viaduct. You chose your Craft (hence the ‘Guild’). Your product lacked quality and could be found in abundance at higher quality and less (in most instances, no) cost. I can hear Sid’s babbling about Close Personal Friends for free every morning on the Good Geriatric Neighbor. Anything Kersten has to say is available from a variety of pablum packers online or over the air and the same with Coleman. I can get Lileks from bubble gum wrappers, fortune cookies, online and from my fillings if I’m too close to an old AM radio. And CJ? When I get so addled that I (a) give a crap about local spray-ons or (b) need her to tell me about them, I’ll just stick my withered gonads into a bag of rabid weasels and go out on a high note.

“At least she didn’t get run off by a second-rate backwater newspaper and a Clear Channel intern project. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

I shouldn’t laugh. But, come on, there’s some pretty funny stuff in there. Except for that last crack. What a mongrel bastard!

I draw attention to “lttl’s” comments because his attitude is palpable around town, and not just from talk radio chowderheads who see “liberal bias” behind every sports score and think Glenn Beck is the last honest man standing. I suspect “lttl” has a personal issue or two with some or all of us mentioned. Maybe we dismissed him in a story somewhere back in time, or maybe CJ DIDN’T quote him at a Vikings Celebrity Dinner. In my experience it doesn’t take much to make glib, cranky people wish most of us a wet cardboard box and a week at the Dorothy Day Center.

But while there is something to his shots at the implausibly lofty regard some of us have for our “craft” — so high we expect other middle-class workers, people who have been jacked around for years by what we’ll broadly call “market pressures” to take special pity on the spectre of us … US! … losing our cult-ish standing and being forced to face life as Wal-Mart greeters, or worse, Bloomington zoning commission reporters — “lttl” makes a big leap and a fundamental mistake in asserting that a breadth and depth of information-gathering equal to newspapers is already up and readily available on the web.

Hey “lttl”! Here’s a news flash for your rabid weasels. It isn’t. Not yet anyway. Maybe in a couple years. But not now. Almost all those links on The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report come from journalists somewhere, and every day there are fewer and fewer of them … and fewer still who are doing reporting of any “linkable” relevance. Sure, you can dial up looney tunes wing-nut stuff like NewsMax and call it “journalism” or “facts” without that arrogant “higher calling” crap. But that sort of thing really is the difference between a deep-fried Snickers bar and regular helpings of peas and carrots.

Before the nutjobs on either end of the spectrum do their spin thing, somebody has to make a few phone calls, visit a few people in person, check out the lay of the land and write a more or less straight report about what just happen. As newspapers wither — and they are withering, I’m not being hysterical about that, less will not be more — there are far fewer people with far less resources to make those calls, visit the sites of the incident and suss out what most likely went down.

(By the way, with all the attention on the Strib in recent days, we haven’t paid much attention to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a.k.a that “second-rate backwater newspaper” across the river. Before anyone goes all delusional about MediaNews’ more-enlightened-than-Avista commitment to community service, do yourself a favor and read this piece chronicling the skeletal coverage MediaNews is offering the San Francisco Bay Area.

In it, one veteran MediaNews editor who recently bailed says this about his “craft”:

“The newspaper business I got involved in, some say it’s dying. I say it’s dead. The last 10 years of my career has been hospice care.”

Newspapers are fair game for a lot of ripping. There is plenty of arrogance to spare in the average newsroom. A lot of it of the, “How dare you criticize me!” sort. The average second, third and fourth-rate papers are grossly over-mediated and god-awfully dull, not to mention baffling in their love of redundancy. But stale as they have allowed themselves to become, they are still the only people doing the dusty grunt work of talking to strangers, victims, witnesses and objective experts .

In some ways those who remain at daily newspapers are like the “illegal immigrants” so much in the news these days. They’re doing the work nobody else wants to do. If you look at it that way, that arrogance of special-ness and reproach-proof “craft” loses a lot of its luster.

A little good news for a change.

My erstwhile radio partner/combatant, Sarah Janecek, editor of Politics in Minnesota and close pal of Kevyn Burger says word direct from the treating physicians is that Burger’s cancer is Stage 2 and therefore completely treatable. She will undergo the usual draining chemotherapy but prospects for a full recovery, says Janecek, are “excellent.”

This is just released by Nancy Barnes, Star Tribune editor …

>>> Nancy Barnes 6/5/2007 5:24 PM >>>

Dear Staff:
Since Monday, we have accepted 40 people into the voluntary buyout program, for a total of 44 approved buyouts to date. We have also had one resignation in the last month, which brings us very close to the company’s target of reducing combined news and editorial staffs by 50 jobs. We are still evaluating the remaining buyout applications to determine if others will be approved. We are also working hard on the newsroom reorganization and we hope to get the remaining assignments out before the end of the week.
It is an understatement to say that these have been extremely stressful weeks for everyone. We want to thank you again for your patience and dedication to journalism as we work through this difficult period. We are lucky to have such a terrific staff to lean on. Soon, we will be saying goodbye to a lot of talented people, many of whom have dedicated their careers to this paper. The list includes a few who have been here for almost 48 years. We simply cannot thank people enough for their work for the Star Tribune and for journalism.
The last day of work for most of those accepted into the buyout program will be Friday, June 15, and we are working on a plan to recognize their contributions. All suggestions for how to do so are welcome. Meanwhile, here is the list of people who have been accepted so far. It is important to note that this list is tentative: people have 15 days to rescind their buyout application and it is possible that a few people may decide to stay.

Nancy Entwistle
Doug Grow
Ron Nies
Stephen Berg
Catherine Stanley
Larry Hanson
Carol Hartman
Stormi Greener
Jay Weiner
Conrad deFiebre
Kay Miller
Dan Wascoe
Sharon Schmickle
Linda Mack
Michael Anthony
Susan E. Peterson
Eric Black
Paul Gustafson
Joseph Kimball
Charles Haga
Linda Scheimann
Jim Phillips
Pat Norton
Heather Munro
Jim Boyd
Maury Hobbs
Susie Hopper
John Addington
Patricia Pheifer
Randy Miranda
Beth Thibodeau
Julie Rosckes
Delma Francis
Greg Patterson
Barb Glander
Jeff Rush
Christine Norman
Nancy Olsen
Susan Barbieri
David Peters
Already in the buyout program
Rob Daves
Larry Werner
Denise Brownfield
Bob Jansen

Eric Black, the Star Tribune’s Talmudic analyst of things political and media has already plotted his next move, announcing that he will begin an association with Minnesota Monitor a fledgling website with a strong progressive political attitude. Black has taken the recent buy-out, and expects to be fully separated from the Strib by June 15.

For the past year or so Black has been writing, “The Big Question”, easily the Strib’s most-visited blog. A few months back he brought in the paper’s erudite but libertarian political editor, Doug Tice, for a little counter-point. It wasn’t exactly, “Jane, you ignorant slut”, but it had potential – more in my opinion if each gentleman loosened the foundation garments a bit and applied a little showmanship. But that’s just me.

I caught Black on the way into the office this morning to clear up a few details of his arrangement with MnMonitor.

“It will be an independent blog,” he explained. “I control it. MnMonitor can use all or as little as they please. Ideally, material will flow back and forth freely. But is is my blog. I don’t have a name for it yet. [“The Big Question” apparently is the Strib’s “intellectual property”]. The Center [for Independent Media, MnMonitor’s parent organization] is helping me set it up.”

And the compensation, considering Black is an established name bringing valuable credibility to a young organization with sober ambitions? “Well, they are definitely paying me for it. I won’t disclose the terms. It is not a full-time job with benefits. But when you leave your old employer with a year’s pay, some things are possible.”

Black and I have discussed the evolution from newspapers to blogging, and he has confessed there are attitudinal and stylistic adjustments he will need to make.

“But,” he says, “it would be unfair and untrue to suggest the Star Tribune in any way restricted what I wrote on the blog. But as you and I have discussed, there are cultural aspects of the newspaper environment. There certainly are norms and limitations you buy in to. In that way I’ve already found [The Big Question”] very liberating. It may take years though to stop the kind of self-censoring all newspaper reporters do. I’ve said I have a lot of unlearning to do. But I think I’ll adapt.”

The relationship with Tice, one of the better conservative writers in town, is on indefinite hiatus. That’s too bad. As Black notes, one of the serious downsides to the web is the segregation of ideologies, with each camp having little-to-no interaction with the other, “except in derision,” as Black says.

“I’ve been doing a lot of brain-storming, and will continue to look into ways to create some kind of civil discourse.”

While the powers that be at the Star Tribune mull who among their employees to keep and who to kick on to “new opportunities”, I talked to my former competitor, Deborah Caulfield Rybak, about one of the stranger ironies of the Strib and so many newspapers’ “hyper-local” business stratagem. (I say “business” because it has everything to do with short-term business and almost nothing to do with relevant journalism, and “stratagem” because it is more contrivance than well-considered “strategy.”) Namely, the irony of desperate newspaper managers with a tin ear for what core readers are interested in reading.

This may sound more than a little self-serving, since both Rybak — who decided Friday to take the latest Star Tribune buy-out (after the paper eliminated the media reporting job) — and myself worked the media beat for daily newspapers. But I assert relevance in the context of “localism” and readership — factors that allegedly matter, even within the “right-sizing” template Par Ridder has now dropped on both papers here in the Twin Cities.

Our beef: Rybak and I were well aware (and proud) of the traffic our work generated for our papers’ website. According to the geeks in IT, traffic is good. To some extent it connotes readership, and readership is supposedly still important, even amid The Great Newspaper Revenue Collapse. Moreover, all those “hits” are the only regular, reliable accounting of traffic either of us, or management, could ever grab on to.

Nevertheless, both Rybak and I have now experienced the, uh, “sobering” experience of getting the word that contrary to all that “traffic” and “readership” numbers jibberish, local (and national) media coverage is all but entirely expendable when managers need to sling a few bodies overboard. What gives?

I know. Poor, poor pitiful us. If we ever get a real job you’ll cry for us.

A seasoned reporter long before coming to the Star Tribune — she worked at the LA Times and had a successful free-lance career for almost a decade before landing at the Strib — Rybak migrated into media reporting from the Strib’s business desk, and her business reporting sensibility was the hook to her coverage of the usual shenanigans of local TV and radio stations, i.e. Minnesota’s local “celebrities”.

Pre-Ridder and Avista her primary internal conflict was with gossip columnist Cheryl Johnson, a.k.a. CJ, whose beat is at least 40% dependent on telling tales out of local newsrooms. Rather than resolve the conflict in the overlap of the two beats sensibly — let CJ cover after hours hijinx and Rybak the on-the-job stuff — the Strib’s managers let it fester in CJ’s favor. CJ retained her columnist’s license, while Rybak was pointedly told there would be no column and no undue attitude in her stories.

It was not exactly an acute reading of where “celebrity”-oriented journalism was going. Sports is an entertainment business and no one would ever think of printing a paper without a sports columnist making merry with the hometown team.

Says Rybak, “That was Anders (Gyllenhaal, the Strib’s editor at the time until leaving his past February for the Miami Herald). Anders did not want any more columnists. Columnists meant opinions and opinions meant conflict for him, and Anders hated conflict.”

Conflict aversion has become my best explanation for why so many newspapers avoid local media reporting entirely. (In most newsrooms a TV critic — basically a movie reviewer for TV — suffices). Those papers that do cover local media keep a very tight rein on the amount of voice and analysis their reporters are allowed. Why? Clearly there is readership for the plucking in the aggressive pursuit of the locally famous.

Back in the Pleistocene Era Nick Coleman wrote a local media column for the Star Tribune. (That’s a joke.) It was great stuff, with Nick, never mistaken for being reverential to fame, goosing up solid reporting with frequently and hilariously acid wordplay describing the craven, anything-for-a-buck grandstanding of local TV “stars.” (It got worse/better when he’d go out to L.A. and slash up Michael Landon, aka “Jesus of Malibu”.)

“Yeah, but one reason I walked away from it,” he says today, “is because I could feel my editors pulling back their support for me. If you’re doing it the way it is supposed to be done, [reporting and analyzing editorial decision-making in radio and TV], quite often what you’re writing is also reflecting badly on them. Chickenshit is chickenshit. So what makes it worse is that at the same time this stuff is reflecting badly on them they’re also taking shit from the people they think of as peers. There’s a kind of class distinction issue involved.”

In other words, almost as a professional courtesy, media managers understand to keep their minions under control. Only “facts”, the drier the better, please. Never mind that a straight report of some station’s cratering ratings without informed analysis is arguably misinformative.

Among these obvious ironies — the steady supply of “local” coverage along with easily-proven reader appeal — the shame about the Strib whacking media reporting, (someone may yet get tossed the occasional ratings or anchor-hit-by-bus story), and losing Rybak, is that the Strib is shuffling out an extraordinarily well-networked and aggressive reporter, someone with deep memory of this market and plenty residual memory from her previous work covering Hollywood and straight business.

Of course, the same claim could be made for a dozen or more Stribbers getting pushed toward the door.

But my point here is that Rybak’s value in an a less-fettered, interactive on-line environment, toward which newspapers will evolve sooner or later, is immediately obvious. Put simply, she gets the electronic “thing”.

The value just isn’t obvious to current Strib management, which, as I’ve said before, seems to be pursuing the same uninspired reorganizational template that daddy Ridder applied across the country through the late Nineties, and young Par dropped on the PiPress during his brief stopever/training-wheels assignment there. It is a moribund template that offers no vision for enhancing brand value.

One argument, espoused by former Strib publisher Joel Kramer, is that the fundamental newspaper business model has already passed the tipping point and is plunging rapidly toward unsustainability. Interviewed on TPT’s “Almanac” Friday night, Kramer disclosed his interest in creating an on-line newspaper here in the Twin Cities, an all-electronic entity without the gruesome overhead of print media.

We’ll see what he decides after he finishes doing all the math. But if Kramer, or someone, is prepared to suck up a little editorial risk — and let established, well-sourced reporters write the kind of stories a public, (maybe not the Great Mass public) wants to read — they will probably find revenue following readership.

Anyone who tries will have an ample talent pool from which to choose and substantial readership prepared to take it for a test drive.

*Version 3.121* Copyright © 2001-2004 Six Apart. All Rights Reserved.

Without further comment … this from Pamela Miller, Star Tribune Guild officer and the paper’s Faith & Values reporter.

“Brian’s coverage of the misery at the Strib has been accurate and intelligent. I appreciate that.

“But I wonder if you, the blog- and media-reading public, really care what happens to a bunch of middle-class journalists who will probably land on their feet. The real tragedy is not for journalists, but for you citizen consumers of news, who now will find less of it, written more hurriedly by fewer people, in their local paper AND at that paper’s website.

“Like most of my counterparts, I wrack my brain day and night for a way to save my beloved craft, and hope that we’re all wrong and that this terrible time is just a dip in, not the death throes of, mainstream journalism. I believe journalism won’t die, but just evolve somehow. But how, in a way that preserves accurate, cool-headed reporting?

“Like Brandt, I am among the lucky ones at the Strib — the religion beat will survive, whether it’s covered by me or not. But I never forget that a few years ago, when the first symptoms of shrinkage appeared, an equally important beat, Science, was killed. And now I look around and see talented folks like Warren Wolfe scrambling for a gig after his growing-in-importance topical beat, Aging, is unplugged. And I look at Doug Grow, whose trademark hearty laugh sounds almost sad these days — here’s a guy who in the past would have had a retirement party that would have filled a stadium; now he tells me he’d rather we didn’t even have cheese, crackers and beer at Jax for the 50 departing folks “because it would feel too sad; no one will wanna come.” And I look at wonderful support staff folks like Patricia Grice and Brian Leehan, who contribute deeply to our paper’s intelligence and humanity, and feel angry that they may be forced to walk the plank so an oil-drilling company can have its big bucks.

“I have a teenage son who is co-editor of The Quill, the student newspaper at Robbinsdale Cooper High School, and for years he dreamed of being a journalist. Now he’s not so sure.

“We have a great union contract, but even the best contract can’t prevent layoffs and buyouts. We union officers feel like hospice workers, treating symptoms and holding hands. But in this grievous time, we also feel strong stirrings of solidarity and stubbornness in those of us left. Avista can expect to face a savvy, strong union when negotiations open next spring. We’re not rolling over — far from it. We’re going to have some things to talk about.

Pamela Miller
Faith & Values reporter
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Media reporter Deborah Rybak has decided to take the buy-out and leave the Star Tribune. She joins the likes of Eric Black, Doug Grow, Stormi Greener, Sharon Schmickle and 40-plus more Star Tribune newsroom employees who have/had until 5 pm today to officially notify the paper of their intentions. The paper has decided to deep six the media reporting beat.

Every departure has its elements of skullduggery and drama and Rybak’s certainly is no different. Working half time for the past six months as she dealt with family issues in California Rybak has been out of the newsroom maelstrom, but hardly immune to the effects of the tentacles of of misinformation, calculated or clueless, that have added to the anxiety dripping off the walls of the building these past few months — really ever since the day after Christmas when McClatchy announced it was selling out to Avista Capital Partners.

Rybak had no intention of leaving as of even a week ago. In fact, she has a May 14 e-mail from managing editor Scott Gillespie assuring her that, “Our agreement is airtight,” plainly meaning that he understood she intended to return to the media job and that he had agreed to that.

Still, to give you an idea of how screwy (and worse) these last couple weeks have been, Rybak, following the action from California, watched in a combination of puzzlement and horror as Gillespie nevertheless posted her job — meaning it was technically available for other reporters to choose — and then faded off into a veil of incommunicado-ness, sliding decision-making up and down the management pecking order. This left Rybak asking repeatedly, and long-distance, for clarification on what in the hell was going on — as in how she could declare her intentions to keep the job, based on the paper asking her to declare that she wanted it, then watching them first post the beat to all-comers, before eventually dumping the job entirely.

UPDATE: Some of you have asked when the full, final and official list of buy-outs will be released. Guild officer Pam Miller explains that Strib management has some kind of a June 6 deadline, “But I expect they’ll announce it before that.”

Complicating the situation is the paper’s stated (to the Guild) intention to get rid of “about” (says Miller) 10 of the 35 or so newsroom support staff, meaning news aides, librarians, etc. As Miller explains it the paper has said it will not accept more than 50 reporters, if it doesn’t get the minimum number of support staff. That could have the effect of some people who chose to take the buy-out being told their request has not been accepted.

Or, put another way, the situation really is miserable.

Miller, who writes for the Strib’s Faith and Valuyes section, described, “an eerily quiet scene” after today’s 5 p.m. deadline passed. Many had gone home early, perhaps seeing no purpose in ruining a perfectly good spring weekend with an extra hour of the spirit-sapping vibe of the Star Tribune building.

“You know,” says Miller, who by the way plans on staying, “I think of myself as a happy person. I’ve liked almost all the jobs I’ve ever had, and I like this one. I look forward to coming in in the morning. But I am very concerned about what this has done to this place. The way this has been handled has made everyone more suspicious of our managers, more suspicious of Par Ridder. It has become an unhealthy, toxic environment.”

Based on Ridder’s history and current ethical challenges I wonder if there is anyone who believes he and his current management team even have the skill set to restore their own credibility, much less a semblance of productive collegiality to the building?

Miller adds that it isn’t as though she and her colleagues don’t understand the profound problems of the newspaper business. Rather it’s that they detect no vision at all for moving their paper into something better.

I mentioned a memo from LA Times publisher, David Hiller, that was picked up on LAObserved yesterday.

The LA Times is beset by at least as many problems as the Star Tribune, and may or may not be better off with the smoke and mirrors purchase by Chicago tycoon Sam Zell. But the Times at least understands, and constantly reminds its staff that it intends to survive the transition to all digital news, and at the very least it isn’t going to go down without a fight.

Said Hiller, “We are adding technology and online product development resources. A little later today, we are announcing that Scott Sullivan has joined latimes.com as chief technology officer and will be building the teams to speed our development and rollout of new interactive products in the second half of 2007 and 2008. High on the priority list will be new local entertainment and listings products, building off the current calendarlive.com offering. We’ve also made initial investments in the camera and editing equipment necessary for our developing video strategy and continue to address our multimedia editorial training and staffing needs.”

The Avista owned, Par-operated Strib maybe be giving lip-service to such ideas, but there isn’t anyone in the Strib newsroom who thinks they’re going to take any serious risks to achieve anything like what the Times is attempting. And THAT is demoralizing.

Hiller added, “The recent [reduction] program was a difficult but important part of how we are changing – reducing expenses in the core and investing for growth. As part of this, we are both eliminating some positions and adding back some positions. We eliminated approximately 170 positions, mostly through the voluntary buyouts; we are planning to hire back approximately 50 positions in the core paper to strengthen talent in multi-media, local coverage, marketing and sales. In addition, we will be adding likely more than 30 additional staff in interactive before the end of the year. We are a living, changing organization and this all part of how we adapt.”

I’ve said it before, the current Avista “team”, and I say that sardonically, betrays far more interest in “harvesting” than “investing” in the Star Tribune. Cornball chatter about, “leaner and meaner” is, frankly, an insult to the intelligence of the average reporter. Money talks, and what Avista’s money is saying is, “Every man for himself.”

Conservatives have enjoyed great success pilloring Democrats and liberals with accusations of “flip-flopping”. Any lefty who everv changed their mind, voting against a flawed bill and then voting for a repaired bill was labeled a “flip-flopper”. It worked because the party’s base, the average Sean Hannity listener, wants glib judgments made for him, and made with instantaneous and unequivocal bias.

As we see today with Mitt Romney, that “flip-flopping” can cut both ways. But I’m more fascinated with the “pander factor”, where supposedly intelligent, worldly, sophisticated men (as all the Republican presidential candidates are … “men”, I mean) not only attempt to out-Sgt. Rock each other on the issue of who can be the most ruthless toward our “enemies”, (long, murky list there), waffle on their acceptance of evolution — EVOLUTION, for chrissakes! — and, in the case of John McCain the other night on “The O’Reilly Factor”, let pass with out comment, much less condemnation, one of the most naked assertions of gender and ethnic privilege I’ve ever heard.

Here is the YouTube link. The most interesting stuff begins at about the 1:40 mark. That is where we hear this exchange:

Bill O’Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you’ve got to cap with a number.

John McCain: In America today we’ve got a very strong economy and low unemployment, so we need addition farm workers, including by the way agriculture, but there may come a time where we have an economic downturn, and we don’t need so many.

O’Reilly: But in this bill, you guys have got to cap it. Because estimation is 12 million, there may be 20 [million]. You don’t know, I don’t know. We’ve got to cap it.

McCain: We do, we do. I agree with you.

In fairness, McCain is “agreeing” with O’Reilly’s notion of a cap on immigration. (Get back to me with those enforcement details, Bill.) He is not specifically “agreeing” with O’Reilly’s Berchtesgaden-like view that, “the white, male, Christian power structure” is some kind of inviolable, God and Constitution-ordained law in this country.

My point is that unless McCain’s earplug went dead at that precise moment he had an obligation, as a candidate for President of the United States, a country where over half the population is female and the percentages of the other-than-white and other-than-Christian citizenry has been substantial and growing for a century, to say something to the effect, “Well look, Bill. I’ve got to stop you there and tell you that I’m not on board with the idea that what you call the ‘white, male, Christian power structure’ is something so pure and faultless it isn’t long overdue for a little enlightened evolution.

“Sorry, bad choice of words, there. But even though this is Fox News and even though most of your audience is 68 year-old white guys sitting in their boxers in their trailers cleaning their guns, I’m just not comfortable with your assertion, or is it Pat Buchanan’s?, that white, male and Christian is the only way to run this country.

“Now, back to your point about making it tougher on the brown crowd to clip hedges in San Diego … .”

Let me ask you, has any politician with as much crossover appeal as McCain had even two years ever squandered as much so fast? It is astonishing.

Also, if you missed Jon Stewart’s “interview” with McCain about a month ago, here is that link.

It really is a shame. But I guess we knew all along that McCain’s biggest problem was going to be the GOP’s nutball factor. But, personally, I thought he’d blow his chances by doing the “straight talk” thing with Jerry Falwell, James Dobson , O’Reilly, Hannity and the rest of the court of fools and tell them how their combination of rigid sanctimony and crass, low-denominator marketing would sooner or later kill off their party.

Instead, McCain has shot his feet off by declining to play truth-speaker and pandering instead to their post-Weimar lunacies.

There’s a book in this one.

I gotta tell ya I’m damned near out of gas on flogging the Star Tribune (and the Pioneer Press, and WCCO TV and just about everybody other than KSTP’s Bob McNaney and Strib columnist, Nick Coleman) to look up from its new strategic focus on the Fridley Squirts Hockey league long enough to put a full-bodied squeeze on the US Attorneys/Heffelfinger/Paulose story. The thing is belching vaporous gas like an incipient volcano and they’re still taking “I don’t knows” from Heffelfinger (who most likely doesn’t know — so enough) and “no comments” from Paulose, who, at the very minimum, should be compelled to hold a full press conference on the matter.

Thankfully, other papers have recognized the pattern — particularly Karl Rove’s bogus voter fraud/vote suppression strategy — and are working more productive lines of inquiry.

Ex-Stribber, Tom Hamburger, filed this story for the LA Times. (Here is a good synopses via TPM Muckraker.

The Strib had the good sense to re-print the Times story — with minimal editing — but couldn’t find a spot for it on 1A.

Sharp eyed readers here at LTTS jumped on it and filed deliciously acid comments. To wit:

From “herbtheverb” —

“So, just to rub salt in the wound (like they care), who do you guess wrote the story? Why it would be L.A. Times staff writer Tom Hamburger of course! You know, the guy who was one of the top political reporters around these here parts, once employed by the Strib locally, then as Washington correspondent…..

Wait though! It gets even better since these were events that happened in 2004 and THAT’S THREE YEARS AGO FOLKS! So even now, our wonderfully competitive LOCAL papers can’t unearth potential voter discrimination by LOCAL officials against LOCAL citizens and needs ex-local reporters employed by a west-coast paper to inform their “customers”.

There are even more juicy tidbits there about Paulouse, about how they sought to keep it out of the papers of the time (no worrys, mate, just don’t talk about it in a Maple Grove zoning board meeting), and read carefully about the how/why the story was caught now (i.e. Monica Goodling angle).

Suburban H.S. sports coverage indeed: mission accomplished. The prosecution, uh….. rests…. “

Then, from “Not Pleased With Strib Cutbacks” —

“Tom Hamburger, a former Strib D.C. bureau reporter, finally does the digging his former paper has been incapable or unwilling of doing on the resignation of Tom Heffelfinger and how it fits into the overall picture of Karl Rove’s politicization of U.S. Attorneys.

This story is the reason why the Strib and the PiPress need strong and well-staffed Washington D.C. bureaus now more than ever.”

On that last note, the Strib did announce yesterday that it is bringing Kevin Diaz back to its DC bureau. Diaz was basically insulted with a salary cut when Avista took over from McClatchy, so he stayed with McClatchy — which has done excellent work on the US Attorneys scandal — SOME of which has been picked up by the Strib.

Nancy Barnes, editor and Sr VP for News had this to say in making the announcement, “As our chief correspondent, Kevin will be responsible for covering our delegation, as well as major state and regional issues before Congress, such as the farm bill. We expect him to be instrumental in covering the upcoming Senate race, and the Republican convention headed our way.

“Kevin will be joined in Washington by an intern: Jake Sherman, a senior from George Washington University and editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper. He has interned at the Washington Post, the Journal News in White Plains, NY, the office of Rep. Christopher Shay, CNN’s Crossfire, and the Stamford Advocate. He will intern with us from June 18-Aug. 31.

“They will report to Doug Tice. For those of you interested in the details: We have rented space in the Scripps Howard newsroom, effective June 18, since we lost our own bureau space in the McClatchy sale.”

Diaz and an intern. Well, considering the alternatives everywhere else in StribVille these days, how can I complain?

(Messages to Diaz’ voice and e-mail got the response that he is “away” until next Monday.)

The Star Tribune Guild convened a 10:30 meeting this morning to look at a pattern of age discrimination in the reassignments cooked up editors for the paper’s owner, Avista Capital Partners. Speaking on background one Guild officer said that by their count “only three or four” of the [30-40] reporters told they are being reassigned, “are under the age of 35”.

It is generally considered “paranoid” or “cynical” to read individualized, strategic intent in these reassignment frenzies. But when, as the same Guild source points out, the percentage of reassignees is so heavily skewed to older writers AND they are notified of their reassignment only days/hours before they have to decide to accept a buy-out and leave the paper, you really aren’t left with many credible explanations other than that this is the latest exercise in the tried-and-true corporate “right-sizing” template of — let’s describe it the way it smells — — insulting/threatening a veteran reporter with a switch to a beat usually covered by a summer intern, if at all.

There are specific examples all over the place, but when you get to Neal Gendler, a 60-something with a heart condition being reassigned to the OVERNIGHT copy-editing desk, you’re not even getting points for subtlety. (CORRECTION: I’ve since been told that Gendler’s reassignment is not as a copy desk editor, but as a general assignment reporter, from 10 pm to 7 am. In other words, police chase and flaming wreck with shoot out at 3 AM … Gendler’s your man.)

The Guild also has a problem with the peculiar sequencing of the reassignment/buy-out deadline process devised by the Star Tribune. As I asked wrote yesterday, how else can you explain managing editors spending so much time re-mapping their employee universe BEFORE knowing for certain who they will have to work with, other than as a not too subtle and yes, fairly cynical process for “encouraging” those they most want out of the building to pack up and go?

It may be technically legal, but it runs contrary to the spirit of journalism, where your agendas, if you have them, are supposed to be plainly disclosed.

Whether the Guild alone can get any traction on the age discrimination issue remains to be seen. I happen to believe they should pursue aggressive outside counsel if only to squeeze Avista for a fatter, longer-term health benefits package. But that’s me and it wouldn’t be my money.