Tag: media

The sight of Roger Parkinson, the sharp-edged former publisher of the Star Tribune, strolling through the newsroom yesterday inspired dozens of tongues to cluck the same two words, “interim publisher.”

The innocent explanation for Parkinson’s appearance is that he was in town from Toronto as part of his duties with the local Humphrey Institute and he simply wanted to stop in and say hello to old friends. But, as several people remarked to me, “he had to have a sense of the moment”, meaning Parkinson the old newspaper boss who was legendary for fine-toothing everything but the classifieds, must have known that with the paper’s current leader, Par Ridder, operating under a cloud of litigation, speculation would immediately fly that he — a guy who can find his way from the parking garage to the cafeteria without asking directions — was in the building to get a read on his next assignment.

A well-placed source strongly doubts that scenario, but adds, “Who really knows?”

Parkinson is currently Chairman of the Board of the University of Toronto Press. An employee at Parkinson’s office has promised to pass this question on.

While I wait for McClatchy muckety-mucks to respond to my questions I’ll slide along these interesting numbers from the company’s “10Q” report — breaking out the first quarter performance of the Star Tribune this year compared to 2006.

It ain’t pretty.

God help you if you ever rely on me for advice on your investments, but this appears to show a $35 million DROP in revenues from year to year, a roughly 40% decline. As I say, I’ve contacted McClatchy’s money gurus for clarification, asking if somehow this precipitous a drop is related to one-time bookkeeping jiggering associated with the sale to Avista Capital Partners. (I’m not holding my breath that they’ll get back to me.)

Until then maybe one of you can offer an explanation.

IF the numbers are correct and IF they are a pure reflection of routine business activity at the Star Tribune over the past year, my curiosity is then whether this has come as a surprise to Avista, and whether it in anyway ratchets up their impatience with their new toy and their desire to accelerate profit-taking through forced attrition, real estate sell-offs, etc.

Here is the link to entire report.

The Star Tribune entry is located on Page 10, Note 2.

UPDATE: I should have held my breath a bit longer.

McClatchy Treasurer, Elaine Lintecum, responded to my question about this drop-off saying:

“We sold the Star Tribune on March 5. So the 2007 amount includes only 2 months versus 3 months in the prior year.”

R. Elaine Lintecum, Treasurer
The McClatchy Company

That was one line of thought, but the statement didn’t provide a footnote specifically explaining that difference. But okay. If true, that is definitely better for all concerned. Well, for Avista anyway, I’m not sure about its employees.

Assuming each month represents roughly 33% of income, the Strib’s year-to-year revenue slide is more in the “normal” 7% range than something truly apocalyptic like 40%.

I don’t envy Strib writer, Matt McKinney, who has the job of walking the razor’s edge describing the convulsions at the Strib to the satisfaction of both his employers and the general public.

But in his May 8 story on the latest round of cuts, there were these graphs …
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“The Star Tribune’s problems aren’t unusual: Newspapers nationwide saw daily circulation fall 2.1 percent and Sunday by 3.1 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

Other papers also are focusing locally. The Dallas Morning News last year closed foreign bureaus and refocused the paper on local coverage. It’s too soon to know if that has paid off, but the trend is clear, said Rick Edmonds, a newspaper industry expert at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.”
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While it is “soon” to be assessing the impact of calling home foreign correspondents in favor of emphasizing more “local” coverage at The Dallas Morning News, with Strib executives determined to mimic the same strategy here, it isn’t exactly a testament to their due diligence to note that circulation at the new, more “local” Morning News dropped a stunning 14.27% in the most recent circulation report.

Here are the Top 25 Daily and Sunday Newspaper lists from Audit Bureau of Circulation for the six-month period ending March 2007. Industry-wide, circulation slipped more than 2% daily and 3.1% for Sunday. All daily averages below are for Monday-Friday. The comparisons are based on the six-month period ending March 2007 and the six-month period ending March 2006.

Newspaper, Daily circ as of 3/31/07; % Change:

USA TODAY 2,278,022; (+0.23%)
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, 2,062,312; (+0.61%)
NEW YORK TIMES, 1,120,420; (-1.93%)
LOS ANGELES TIMES, 815,723; (-4.24%)
NEW YORK POST, 724,748; (+7.63%)
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, 718,174; (+1.37%)
WASHINGTON POST, 699,130; (-3.47%)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 566,827; (-2.12%)
HOUSTON CHRONICLE, 503,114; (-2.00%)
ARIZONA REPUBLIC 433,731; (-1.14%)
DALLAS MORNING NEWS, 411,919; (-14.27%)
NEWSDAY, 398,231; (-6.91%)
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, 386,564; (-2.93%)
BOSTON GLOBE, 382,503; (-3.72%)
STAR-LEDGER OF NEWARK, 372,629; (-6.08%)
ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION, 357,399; (-2.09%)
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, 352,593; (+0.61%)
STAR TRIBUNE OF MINNEAPOLIS, 345,252; (-4.88%)
CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER, 344,704; (+0.45%)
DETROIT FREE PRESS, 329,989; (-4.70%)
ST. PETERSBURG TIMES, 322,771; (-0.08%)
PORTLAND OREGONIAN, 319,625; (-1.05%)
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE, 296,331; (-6.58%)
ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER, 284,613; (-5.07%)
SACRAMENTO BEE, 279,032; (-4.83%)

I gotta tell ya, it is a real, “Where to begin?” situation following the no-ups and all-downs of the Star Tribune lately.

Indecision over where to begin may explain why what follows is even more scatter-shot and incoherent than usual.

1. As expected, Guild employees of the Star Tribune voted overwhelmingly yesterday to accept the paper’s terms for a buy-out offer that commences this Friday and closes at 5 p.m. June 1. (I was in error when I said yesterday that the “window” would open today. My apologies.) The company then has until the end of business on June 8 to post a list of those who are walking away.

2. A supreme irony of this latest round of “right-sizing” is the trashing or marginalizing of significant elements of the paper’s very expensive, (over seven figures) and absurdly protracted “redesign” which it unveiled in October in 2005. Don’t get me going on “re-designs”.

The joke at the Pioneer Press when I was there was that preparing for and working on the next re-design was every management regime’s best excuse for avoiding dealing with garden variety problems like under-performing beats, redirecting assets to better effect, yadda yadda. The standard response to any suggestion/complaint was, “We can’t get to that until we finish the re-design.” Then, once it was finished, the next one began.

But I think it is safe to say now, after 17 months, that the Strib’s 2005 re-design added little if any value to the paper. Circulation has dropped steadily if not precipitously in its aftermath. I know my first reaction to seeing it was a shrug. “All that time and money for this?” It was pretty much one, “Big whoop”.

But the Strib’s features section played a prominent role in the grand design. Yes, it came with the usual mantra of “shorter, shorter, shorter”. (Modern, design-driven managers are convinced all readers are averse to “long” stories, i.e. 20 inches or more. But they see the supposedly younger and more female audience for features sections being even more impatient and having almost no tolerance for words. Any picture and any list trumps every “wordy” story.) But under the re-design the Strib’s feature section was key to that other mantra, the preeminent, “local, local, local” babble.

(I don’t know which image is more appropriate to newspaper managers chanting, “local, local, local”, a sprawling turkey farm or a radical, head-bobbing madrassa.)

Anyway, the excising of what were once key locally produced components of the Strib’s Arts and Entertainment; TV, classical music, architecture, some percentage of theater, Randy Salas’s eminently readable “Web Search” and DVD columns, along with talk of folding in, cutting or “right-sizing” the whole jumble of “Scene”, “To Go” and all those other barely identifiable sub-sections effectively confirms suspicions that the vaunted re-design has proven a non-asset, at best.

For the record, the Strib is planning to continue TV coverage via syndication, classical music looks likely to move to some kind of free-lance status, architecture will get added atop a visual arts beat and while both theater critics, Graydon Royce and Rohan Preston will stay on, Royce will devote some yet-to-be-determined percentage of his time to editing.

The very ironic overall effect: However it is cut, the new post re-design Strib will be less “local” than previously.

3. A recurring theme from meetings Stribbers are having with bosses Nancy Barnes and Scott Gillespie is the two editors telling reporters they are making tough cuts in features because they simply have a “hard news” orientation. (Several staffers have expressed notes of sympathy for the two, quoting Barnes and Gillespie subtly pleading for understanding, saying, “We have bosses, too.”)

To be fair, Barnes and Gillespie are only following a tread-worn strategy first laid out by publisher Par Ridder’s father, Tony, across the entire Knight-Ridder empire through the 1990s. It was a re-organization plan that when matched with Ridder’s deal with Wall St. devils seriously undermined the quality of every Knight Ridder newspaper and eventually led to the entire chain’s abrupt sell-off. (I’m broad-stroking there. But the Tony Ridder survival strategy is an object lesson in how NOT to enhance the value of your product.)

There’s no point belaboring my opinion that regular, sustained coverage of suburban community minutiae is anything but, “hard news”, or that the Strib is open to serious criticism over how “hard” it has been on several very high profile, relevant stories in recent years. My point is only to suggest that Barnes and Gillespie might want to dial back the “hard news” talking point if they want to maintain credibility with their staff.

Based on my conversations with Stribbers there isn’t a person in the newsroom who believes these latest cuts (or the buy-outs before them) have anything whatsoever to do with improving the paper’s production of news, “hard” or otherwise. More to the point, if there is anyone in the newsroom who thinks Ridder and Avista are committed to producing a better, healthier, more relevant product, those people have no business or future in journalism.

Finally, 4. I have the utmost respect for reporters who take on Guild steward jobs. I was far too lazy and misanthropic to volunteer for anything of the sort. In the current situation at the Strib, Guild stewards are like exhausted, under-equipped smoke-jumpers mashing down forest fires with shovels. Forget about getting your day job done. It’s everything you can do to answer dozens of frantic, anxious questions from colleagues in between attending and holding meetings.

The concern here is that the Strib Guild not be played like the pre-Rahm Emanuel Democrats, who got flattened in every big game by ruthless operators focused solely on the bottom line. The Guild really ought to reach out beyond its usual legal representation/advisors to some aggressive local labor law firm for advice on a strategy that considers how best to play several key elements in the current situation, not the least of which is the impatience of Avista Capital Partners with a worse-than-expected financial performance of the Star Tribune and an expensive and an embarrassing civil law suit thrown at their publisher, Par Ridder.

Like everyone else in the world the Guild needs leverage, and there may be some to be had in toying with Avista’s impatience and their fear of discovery, if some kind of legal action can be mounted.
Guilds have been accused of playing easy on personnel disputes relative to their effect on the next contract negotiation. But in the current situation it would seem prudent to apply a worst case scenario mindset to that next (2008) contract and assume Avista will be even more insistent on guaranteeing return on investor dollar via truly draconian cuts in employee compensation and staffing levels.

Ten years ago laid-off newspaper people had some hope of sliding into another paper in another town. That ain’t happenin’ no more. At the risk of sounding hysterical, now is good time to approach all events leading to next year as though they were part of an end-game for an industry as we once knew it.

Pressured by a small group of colleagues inclined to take the buy-out offer presently on the table, Guild employees at the Star Tribune are expected to accept company terms in a 4 p.m. meeting/vote today. A similar vote yesterday fizzled when Guild members had too many unanswered questions to vote.

The offer from Avista Capital Partners offers an additional three months pay to the maximum, plus six extra months of COBRA coverage on health insurance. The Guild had asked for a year on the latter, along with several other small concessions, like staggering pay-offs to diminish tax implications, but the paper rejected those requests.

If the buy-out is accepted today, Guild employees will have two weeks, starting tomorrow if accepted, to make their decision to leave or stay, and another 45 days after that to rescind a decision to leave.

The company is looking to cut 50 positions out of the present newsroom. Best guess-timates at the moment believe the buy-out offer will get something less than 20 takers, leaving the company and union poised to battle over the remainder.

If laid-off, a Strib Guild member would get essentially the same compensation package as 24 former colleagues took in early March.

Being a fellow of modest dreams some days all I want to be is the Readers’ Representative for a big city newspaper, like the Star Tribune. If my dream came true I’d write something like this:
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Hi, everyone. By now you’ve probably heard of big changes at this paper you’re reading.

It is all true. There will be a lot more lay-offs, and they follow the firing of some very pleasant ladies at our switchboard who have lived in the Twin Cities for decades and knew everyone in the building and provided a nice human touch to our customers’ first interaction with the paper. In the newsroom people will be getting switched from beats they’ve worked and studied for years and know very well to beats they don’t know much if anything about. And that’s THIS YEAR. Next year we’ll have to duke out a new contract, and I’m telling now that that’ll be bloody.

Then there is our publisher, the one who is being sued for plotting his switch from our major competitor across the river to this paper while he was still in a position to do significant competitive damage to the paper over there. (And yes, to put a point on it, that very same fellow is currently charged with assessing the return-on-investment needs of HIS employers here and if that means depriving 150 middle class Minnesota families of a very large portion of their livelihood in order assure those investors that they will not have to find cheaper dockage for their yachts in Naples this coming season.)

Obviously I won’t being saying anything about our publisher’s problems, ever. Nor will I comment on the propriety of someone under such a cloud inflicting the kind of financial and emotional damage he is on Minnesota working families. Why? Well, because that would be pretty incautious and imprudent of me, wouldn’t it? A lot of us in newspapers are just trying to run out the clock to the reasonable, modest retirement we had planned for ourselves before our new owners decided our retirement incomes would look better in their pockets.

But that said … the way I look at a Readers’ Rep’s job is this: My job is to observe and analyze the performance of all levels of this newspaper without fear or favor. If the influence of newspapers depends on our reputation for being reliable truth-seekers and truth-tellers, my job is to be transparently candid as to whether my colleagues and superiors are living up to what is, let’s face it, a critical social responsibility. I mean, look around, we seem to be living in a time when every other news source except maybe Bill Moyers is playing back and at half speed to avoid taking the kind of criticism that is supposed to come with the territory.

One criteria for being a really good newspaper is the desire and ability to go after stories that effect the largest number of citizens. That’s why it is extremely important that we always follow the money. When lots of money starts piling up in one corner of the city or another you have to be able to depend on us to snoop around and ask the kind of annoying questions that always make really rich people speed dial the publisher and complain about our impertinence and threaten to pull advertising if we don’t knock it off.

We sure screwed up on UnitedHealth in all those years leading up to Bill McGuire’s back-dated stock option scandal didn’t we? It was pretty embarrassing to watch the Wall Street Journal dig that story out of our backyard, start a national reexamination of executive pay “techniques” and win a Pulitzer Prize for it, no less.

But, to be honest, we can’t get into that kind of thing.

I’d like to be able to promise you that we learned a lesson on the UnitedHealth story. But the fact is we’re playing a much different game than the half-dozen or so real newspapers left in the country — the Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times and — well, maybe there aren’t a half dozen anymore. Papers like that still see the whole country and the world as part of their beat and they still assign their own people to cover it. A paper like we are today, with investors demanding pre-internet levels of profit — through attrition, not growth — all we can do is pick up what they write a day or so later. Sure, most of you who are really interested in that kind of reporting have already read it on line or in the paper edition the Journal and the Times deliver to your door at the same time as ours. But, I’m trying to be honest here, that’s just where we’re at. We can’t play with the big boys anymore. The best we can do is pretend.

Just as we gave up on reporting from overseas years ago, and just as we have now pretty much given up on reporting on anything national … other than sporting events, which of course doesn’t make any sense since only Paris Hilton’s breast augmentation and suspended driver license gets more coverage than big sporting events … we are now pretty much getting out of the kind of “enterprise” reporting that might upset very influential local companies and people.

It’s been years since we had enough people for that kind of thing, and after our investors take this latest round of cuts, we’re going to have even less for the kind of stories that take longer than a day or two to report, because we’re reassigning a 100 or so reporters to the suburbs.

Some of you keep asking, “What’s with this suburbs deal? Who cares what’s going on in the Bloomington school district. Don’t they have their own Sun newspapers to cover that stuff.” Well, of course they do, and those Sun papers do a fine job. But, with Macy’s and other advertisers starting to slide dollars over to the internet, the fact is we need to poach the Sun papers’ advertisers more than ever.

We need the mom and pop stores in Bloomington and Eagan and Woodbury and Blaine, and in order to get them we’re sending reporters out to write stuff about class sizes in Bloomington, etc. and the stars of the Bloomington Jefferson track team and the Blaine tennis program, etc. Nothing too critical, you understand, because then we’d just have a smaller version of the same problem we get into with the UnitedHealths of the world. But, still something we can call “coverage”, you know. By that I mean, “facts”. How many votes for. How many votes against. No snarky “analysis”.

We’re also getting rid of our TV critic and our architecture critic. Because, well, we can get stories about TV shows from the Associated Press or a hundred other places, and we know they’ll be timely and positive and fun and that the people who wrote them won’t go howling to the copy desk when we cut them from 30 inches to 6 to fit around a really cute picture of Lindsay Lohan fresh out of treatment and promoting her new movie.

We will continue “coverage” of local media. But again, the snarky tone you read on websites and blogs is nothing but a real pain in the tuckus when you have to make small talk with radio and TV people at luncheons and seminars. They don’t like us telling our readers they screwed up. Who would? Not us. So we’re going to just stick with “reporting” who got hired and the latest ratings. We don’t think you’re interested in anything more than that.

Again, I’m just being honest with you, here. I could say something like how all our reporters are looking forward to the “challenge” of “covering” the Shakopee Planning Commission meeting and that research shows a tremendous hunger among readers to find out if Shakopee really is going to approve that 48-unit Skunk Guano development … but who’d believe something as transparently false as that?

Oh yeah, the architecture critic? Well, again, we know you’re interested in what’s going on with big building projects you see all the time. But frankly, like a lot of this stuff, we’re betting you won’t complain about what is not in the newspaper, and after a while you’ll stop caring it’s gone. Besides, we need one more reporter to cover the Lakeville gymnastics team.

Finally, it is true we haven’t even explained to our own reporters who exactly owns us and what they intend to do with this newspaper. We should be covering the hell out of it, since it’s another “follow the money” story with relevance to hundreds of thousands of local citizens, but we won’t. And I’m not going to demand it. It’s just too risky. I mean, people are getting laid off left and right.

We are however hoping the Wall St. Journal or the New York Times sends some reporters out here and finds out what in the hell is going on. Once they do, we might run a heavily-edited version of their story. That is if there’s any room left in the news hole after the update on re-paving Hwy. 101 through Minnetonka.

I repeat though, I’m just trying to be honest here.

Your Readers’ Rep-for-a-Day.

I see a string of legitimate questions piling up in the “comments” area, about the latest Strib carnage and other topics, and I vow to generate a post dedicated entirely to answering them in the very near future.

But among recent comments was this one:
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“As one who’s felt the sting of “dynamic change,” I fully empathize with the Strib staffers now on the receiving end of the same corporate lock-step speak. I’m especially sad to hear about the treatment of colleague Neal Justin. Newspaper potentates are idiots when it comes to understanding the value of a TV critic in the marketplace.
Anyway, I’ve had my own web site, unclebarky.com, since two days after leaving The Dallas Morning News on Sept. 15. It’s a totally homegrown site that allows me to write about local and national television in the way that the gods of independent journalism intended.

I wish everybody the best at the Strib. But as one who’s been there, it won’t be the end of your worlds.”

Ed Bark
former TV critic of 26 years standing at The Dallas Morning News
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I’m not over-gilding the lily here when I say that Ed Bark was (and is) something like the dean of the nation’s TV critics. Deeply sourced, respected by the whole vertical structure of today’s television culture, from the heads of network news and entertainment divisions to anchors to fledgling sitcom divas, the self-effacing Bark is a bona fide wise man, precisely the kind of professional journalist whose word, in person or print, is well-considered, fair and often quite entertaining. The guy is a walking encyclopedia of television lore with a sly Texas lawyer’s way with a provocative question. Ed is every bit the equivalent of Pat Reusse, a trusted expert on his beat with a voice as unique and familiar as your favorite uncle.

And the owners of the Dallas Morning News squeezed HIM out. (Ed has written about it.)

Though it may not seem possible to believe at this moment here in Minnesota, but the Morning News’ owners, the Belo Corporation, are actually more thoughtless vulgarians than the Par Ridder/Avista Capital Partners crowd.

Ed’s e-mail was followed not long after by this one:.
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“The broadband revolution has brought into focus that there are indeed two types of newspaper readers, (there are actually more, but let these two stand for now).

One is a group of people who are interested in issues, national and world politics, and events, and who bemoan the parochiality of a newspaper that covers zoning boards.

The other is a group of people who pick up the paper to find out: Did they rezone that piece of property? Why are they putting all this silly stuff about Sarkozy and Putin in the paper?

The groups, alas, exist in mutual incomprehensibility.”
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The two intersected in my alleged mind at the point of trying to understand the financial value in the de-flavorized, de-voiced and dessicated journalism model now inflicted on BOTH Twin Cities newspapers, thanks in no small part to Par Ridder, (although he is clearly just the callow front man for other, far more influential forces).

There are a lot of examples at the Strib of this counter-effective process of excising beats and voices that provide the PLEASURE and ENJOYMENT of reading a newspaper and replacing/reassigning them to the cheapskate “localism” of suburban city council meetings, high school sports and re-phrasing police blotters. Architecture critic Linda Mack comes to mind. But I don’t know Linda.

As his former competitor though, I do know Justin. (I don’t think “full disclosure” requires me to go into a lot of detail about those night caps at the Liquid Kitty in West L.A.)

Our running joke was that I was the TV critic who never watched TV, and who could just barely tell Geena Davis from Wayne Knight, while he was the guy who, any day, was going to bust the searing, no-holds-barred expose of the Minnesota connection to the LA porn industry. (A few more months of research and he’d have it, by God. Then it was just a matter of getting it past the copy desk.)

More realistically, our debate was over what kind of TV coverage readers most wanted to read?

Since I took the elitist view that adding local coverage to the latest “hot” show, the “Joe Millionare” of the moment, was both redundant, given the bales of copy available on the wires as well as professionally embarrassing, (since the implicit expectation from editors was that I was to avoid my usual acerbic take on the genre in favor of reflecting the giddy excitement of the show’s lovelorn teenage fans), I would tell Justin there was fun to be had in playing with local TV and radio characters. Over-sized egos. Craven capitulation to corporate dictums. Each and every one, God’s gift to journalism. The whole package. Day after day.

The key, I always said, was whether the paper allowed you to apply the same voice to the beat as say a sports columnist has to his.

Justin, who is a very entertaining character, would slam his glass on the bar top and say, mostly facetiously, “Yeah. But nobody wants to read that shit.” This was his way of reminding me that he had a much stronger stomach than I did for prime-time programming.

And he may have been right. In telling Justin that their interest is in “straight reporting” on TV, as opposed to any kind of sports-like amalgamation of reporting/opinion and analysis, Strib management is asserting the same drab standard Ridder brought to the Pioneer Press.

But my immediate point is that Neal, like Linda Mack and others getting shuffled away from any semblance of learned analysis, personal voice and writerly prose, delivered
copy that was pleasurable to read and, since it doesn’t get much more local than a box blaring in your own living room, his TV stories had metro-wide relevance far beyond 10″ on a housefire in Inver Grove Heights.

The truest description about what’s going on here in the Twin Cities, first to the Pioneer Press and now to the Star Tribune, (with worse to come as each paper enters into negotiations for new contracts, starting this month in St. Paul and next year in Minneapolis), is that
none of this is about “saving” the newspaper, and all of it is about “selling” the newspaper.

I’ll spare you my screed on how the recently-fired “sweet old ladies” at the Star Tribune switchboard are a prime example of the berserk redistribution of wealth going on in this country, as their meager salaries are yanked away and redirected into the already plump portfolios of Avista Capital Partners. But I will tell you I don’t understand how anybody, even a bunch of hedge fund-style sharks like Ridder and Avista, (whoever they really are), would see more bottom-line value in the monotonous, rote reporting of suburban minutiae than a “product” dusted with at least an occasional glimmer of wit, analysis based on long-term exposure to a topic or industry, and style.

Who looks at the “broadband revolution” and says, “The secret to making money in this environment is to get duller and more homogenized, fast”?

Here are the most general ratings. All listeners 12 and older. Comparing the fourth quarter of ’06 with the first quarter of ’07.

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KQRS-FM – 7.2 – 8.0
WCCO-AM – 8.2 – 7.4
KEEY-FM – 6.9 – 6.2 – (K102)
KNOW-FM – 4.5 – 5.8 – (MPR News)
KDWB-FM – 4.6 – 4.6
KXXR-FM – 4.1 – 4.6 – 93X
WLTE-FM – 6.1 – 4.5
KTCZ-FM – 3.9 – 4.4 – Cities 97
KSTP-FM – 4.5 – 4.0
KSJN-FM – 3.6 – 3.7 – MPR – Classical
KSTP-AM – 3.2 – 3.7
KQQL-FM – 4.5 – 3.5 – KOOL 108
KTTB-FM – 3.1 – 3.3
KZJK-FM – 3.2 – 3.3 – JACK FM
KFAN-AM – 3.2 – 3.2
KTLK-FM – 1.9 – 3.1
KCMP-FM – 1.9 – 2.1 – MPR – 89.3 The Current
WWTC-AM – 1.0 – 1.4
KTNF-AM – 1.7 – 1.1 – Air America
WFMP-FM – 1.3 – 1.1 – FM 107
KLCI-FM – 1.0 – 1.0
WDGY-AM – 0.8 – 0.9
WGVX-FM – 0.8 – 0.8
KLBB-AM – 0.5 – 0.6

In the radio business nobody much cares about those numbers, because they are all primarily selling to specific demographic groups, men (talk radio), women (modern country, “Lite” rock, FM 107), teens (KDWB), etc.

Here are the overall ratings for adults 25-54. Comparing the first quarter of ’06 with the first quarter of ’07.

Important note: MPR is not allowed to release its ratings for any category other than 12+. Historically though their stations rank at least as high among adults as the 12+ crowd, and often significantly higher. So factor that into what follows.

KQRS – 12.3 – 10.7
Cities 97 – 5.7 – 6.0
K102 – 8.1 – 5.8
93X – 4.6 – 5.0
KS95 – 4.6 – 4.8
JACK-FM – 4.2 – 4.8
WLTE – 5.4 – 4.4
KFAN – 4.8 – 4.4
WCCO – 3.3 – 3.8
KOOL 108 – 4.5 – 3.7
AM 1500 – 3.2 – 3.1
KDWB – 3.5 – 3.0
KTLK – 1.7 – 3.0
KTTB – 2.8 – 2.7
WWTC – 1.4 – 1.2
FM 107 – 1.7 – 1.2
Air America – 1.0 – 0.7

If you’re interested in morning drive, (6-10 am), every station’s most critical “daypart”. Check this out.

KQRS – 23.7 – 21.2
93X – 3.5 – 5.8
WCCO – 4.1 – 4.8
K102 – 6.7 – 4.8
Cities97 – 3.9 – 4.4
Jack FM – 3.0 – 4.2
KS95 – 4.2 – 4.1
WLTE – 4.2 – 3.9
KFAN – 3.5 – 3.9
KDWB – 3.5 – 3.0

(Yeah, Tom Barnard STILL kills everything else in sight. Note to ‘CCO. K102 and the rest … work more fecal material into your act.)

Afternoon drive? (3-7 pm). The second most critical?

K102 – 7.6 – 6.7
KS95 – 5.8 – 6.6
KFAN – 6.5 – 6.2
Cities 97 – 6.0 – 5.6
KQRS – 6.6 – 5.5
AM 1500 – 6.6 – 5.5
Jack FM – 4.1 – 4.5
93X – 3.7 – 4.5
WLTE – 4.9 – 4.3
KTLK – 1.4* – 3.9

It was a tough quarter for “radio country” over at K102. Overall, I’d say 93X won the diary lottery this time around, and KTLK shows an up-tick in audience share, to maybe 40% of what they need to cover their nut. (So they can (*) thank God they cleared that lefty moonbat and his excessively blonde partner out of drivetime.)

My permanent Arbitron disclaimer: The Arbitron ratings are, in my opinion, the most unscientific and utterly valueless of any ratings system I know. Who among us would bother to ACCURATELY record in a written diary every 15 minutes of radio they listened to day in and day out? Almost no one. The current Arbitron “survey” is primarily a study in habituation, not actual usage. It’s ridiculous.

But now coming over the horizon … the radio industry will be stood on its head once the entire country begins “reporting” via the so-called People Meters, a small device which Arbitron volunteers wear and which automatically records a coded signal from whatever source they are REALLY listening to, every time they punch a car radio button or tap away to Kenny G at work.

My prediction? Time spent listening to music stations will fall through the floorboards.

One by one Strib reporters have been summoned in to a private meeting today with top Strib editors and told what their fate will be — reassignment, opportunity to reapply for current position, opportunity to apply for reassignment, etc. By reports describing post-interview expressions from “glum” to “despondent” to out-right tears, few Strib writers apparently saw “fresh and exciting opportunities in the challenging, fast-paced journalism world of tomorrow”, or whatever corporate-speak nonsense Team Par is selling today.

Among the more startling “reassignments”. TV critic Neal Justin will be given the opportunity to “compete” with Deborah Rybak for a job reporting on TV. Not a column. Straight reporting. Who got hired. Who got fired and the ratings.

Rybak has been on part-time status for several months, dealing with the death of her father and her mother’s Alzheimers. As of Monday evening no one from Strib management had contacted her about these changes.

Linda Mack will be reassigned away from covering architecture.

Recent hire Sara Glassman has been told her fashion beat is probably gone, but that may be re-thought when/if the paper hires a new assistant managing editor for features.

The Strib will continue with both of its present music critics, theater critics and movie critics.

But one atrocity has galvanized the glum and despondent more than most of the others. That would be the announcement that Ridder and Avista have summarily fired the half dozen people manning the company’s telephone switchboards. Most of this crowd are “sweet old ladies”, (one has been with the Strib for 40 years), who, in addition to being way too nice for pissed-off readers to stay surly with, stocked a jar of Tootsie Rolls and gum for the staff to grab as they passed back and forth.

The new plan is apparently for a computer-operated system, although there are a lot of black jokes about Avista out-sourcing the switchboard to Bangalore.

Looking at it another way though, as Nick Coleman put it, “When people call in to cancel their subscription over something that asshole Coleman wrote, there won’t be anyone there to take the call.”

Par Ridder’s barnstorming slide show, “Business Literacy”, (given first to the Pioneer Press staff before “right-sizing” them to virtual irrelevancy, and now yesterday to his new staff at the Star Tribune), is essentially a plea to the troops to have pity on the paper’s executive and investor class, which is facing the same severe economic duress as every other paper in the country.

But, as the local Guild confirms, there is reasonably clear language in the existing contract allowing the Guild to examine ownership’s books if ownership demands lay-offs as a result of … economic duress.

“Yes,” says Star Tribune Guild officer, Pat Doyle, “there is such language if they choose to seek lay-offs. And I fully expect the Guild to ask to see the books if they move that way.”

Getting a public company to open the books to a union is rough enough. But a private company like Avista Capital Partners, (the Strib’s new owner)? Good luck.

This after all is a collection of well-cloaked characters about whom, as Doyle puts it, “We don’t know who they are. We don’t know how many of them there are. We don’t know how much money they’ve put in. We don’t know who has how much much invested,” and, as a kicker, “We have never heard them say anything about the kind of journalism they intend to practice.”

On the other hand, the threat of a protracted battle over Guild access to Avista’s no doubt fascinating and highly revelatory books, might be leverage enough to make Avista sweeten the current buy-out pot — (the Guild is unimpressed with the offer Ridder trotted out yesterday, and a highly-unscientific survey doubts he would get more than 15 to 20 takers, far short of the 50 “needed” from the newsroom) — and/or abort lay-off talk altogether.

As you might expect, staff reaction to Ridder’s slide show was pretty dismissive. “The problem he has,” says Doyle, “is that there is no reason to take his word on any of this lacking any kind of corroborative information.” Ridder’s presentation was apparently quite light on the other shoe of the current newspaper business climate, namely investor demands for fat profit-taking … NOW.

“No one doubts that down the road a ways it could get pretty bad,” Doyle continues, “but the last time anyone looked this paper was still making around a 20% profit.”

The current Avista buy-out offer, which is technically a “proposal” that Avista wants the Guild to examine and respond to, does not apply to the most recently hired, (i.e. younger, cheaper) suburban “bureau” reporters. They can not apply for this buy-out. BUT, if the company moves to lay-offs, those recent hires would be the first cut under the rule of reverse seniority.

Doyle re-emphasized that the Guild, “Is not willing to accept yesterday’s buy-out terms.” But the Guild must accept the terms before the buy-out process can begin. What that means is the clock on the two-week buy-out window will not begin ticking anytime soon. “I can’t see it opening anytime in May,” said Doyle.