With the clock counting down to Friday’s deadline for accepting Star Tribune management’s buy-out offer, Strib reporters will get a look at the big, new, glossy, reorganized reassignment chart top editors have been fussing over. Word is it will debut sometime today or tomorrow. Actually, I don’t know about the “big” or “glossy” parts, but … Read more
In an open letter to friends and colleagues, Kevyn Burger, mid-morning host at FM 107 and, as I’ve said for two decades, one of the great gals/babes of the Twin Cities, announced she has breast cancer and will undergo aggressive treatment beginning this weekend. A reporter at KSTP-TV and then WCCO-TV before settling into her … Read more
(SEE IMPORTANT UPDATE BELOW)> Is this bait and switch? Star Tribune Guild officer Chris Serres notifying his colleagues this morning … >>> Christopher Serres 5/29/2007 9:44 AM >>> Dear Guild friends and colleagues, The buyout package agreed to by the Guild was intended to reduce the need for involuntary layoffs. However, there is still a … Read more
It’s a bit like motherhood. You can’t be against “localization”—the revolution in reporting that every second- and third-tier newspaper in the country is embracing as vital to its salvation. Like motherhood, “localization” is something you can dress up in pretty sentiment, fake, and do badly, or you can do it well by applying tenderness and … Read more
I’ve never been able to pull off the infallibility thing. I’m genetically inclined to screwing up. In his comment on my non-news news post on the absence of WCCO radio reporter, Eric Eskola, Britt Robson cuts me a new one: “I’m late to the party here, but the big problem with this post is in … Read more
An essential part of my posts on “StribTV” is that the disintegration of the basic business model for newspapers is a harbinger of a similar breakdown of TV news. Once any source of news is available on the same screen via the same clicker as KARE and WCCO whatever “exclusiveness” those business can claim starts … Read more
In what may have been a first for a Minnesota public official soliciting media attendance at a press conference in a public building, US Attorney Rachel Paulose’s staff announced prior to the start of her Monday press conference that Ms. Paulose would NOT be taking questions off the topic of her indictment of 25 people … Read more
By now the question, “What’s going on with Eric Eskola?” has been pretty well answered among media insiders. The question remaining is, “How do we explain it to the general public, if we do at all?” The position taken by WCCO-AM is to say simply that Eskola, the station’s heretofore indefatigable government and politics reporter, … Read more
It says something about the quality and value of TV news, local TV news in particular, when a guy suggests a big city newspaper like the Star Tribune demonstrate a hipness to the coming convergence of internet and television and smart people react like he’s suggesting polluting Perrier with dioxin. In the previous post I … Read more
As foul as the air is over the Star Tribune these days, (and it isn’t any better across the river), the soon-to-be-“right-sized” staff might feel the slightest bit better if they were being given any reason — ANY REASON — to believe the end result of all the slashing, cutting, out-sourcing, etc. was going to … Read more