Tag: media

I am certain there will be more than a couple “clarifications” regarding this morning’s announcement on voluntary buyouts..

Among the first: Star Tribune Guild reps say sports writer Steve Aschburner will stay on past Friday until the end of the current Timberwolves season. (As one crank has already posted on this blog’s “comments” section, “Hasn’t the Timberwolves season already ended?”)

Not to diminish the contributions of anyone else among this morning’s 24 but Aschburner will be loss to local sports fans/readers.
Aschburner is as good and entertaining to read as the Wolves are rotten.

Apparently three others among the 24 will also stay on past Friday for one reason or another.

The Guild does not yet have answer to whether Aschburner and the others who linger will be granted the two extra “grace weeks” tossed to those who leave Friday. The more immediate question to those remaining in the newsroom is, “Come next Monday, who is going to do the work The Departed have been doing?” As of this morning that mildly relevant question had not been answered.

Also, Strib Guild reps say that there are 375 Guild members in the newsroom PRIOR to this Friday’s departure of the 24, and that, to their best reckoning, there have been 25 other positions left unfilled over the past couple years, for a total of nearly 50.

What continues to eat at the nerves of those who remain is the absolute vacuum of information coming from new owners, Avista Capital Partners, or their new front man, (former Pioneer Press) publisher, Par Ridder. Guild reps met with middle-upper managers Scott Gillespie and Bob Schafer approximately a month ago and were politely told … we don’t have anything to tell you.

Among questions the paper’s professional information hunter/gatherers would like answered are these: Is another 24 fewer employees enough? And if so, for how long? Or should we immediately begin assuming that Avista needs an even smaller workforce to meet its ‘financial goals? If further down-sizing is the plan, does anyone in management have even a glimmer of an idea how to restructure the remaining staff to insure coverage of the most vital beats? What is Avista/Ridder’s idea of “vital”? Does the posting for D.C. bureau replacements for Rob Hotakainen and Kevin Diaz … at significantly lower rates of pay … offer a hint of Avista’s attitudes toward other “vital” beats?

Somebody owes these otherwise loyal … adults … better explanations than they are getting.

A total of 24 Stribbers took the voluntary buy-out allowed under the present Guild contract. The names were released this morning. They are:

Judy Arginteanu
Bill Arthur
Steve Aschburner
Mike Carroll
Bob Franklin
Grethchen Gramenz
Doug Halliday
Jeremy Iggers
Jocelina Joiner
Tom Jones
Jim Lundberg
Bob Lutsey
Ron Meador
Richard Parker
Darlene Prois
John Reinan
Pam Schmid
Al Sicherman
David Silk
Derek Simmons
Tom Simon
Dane Smith
Brad Stokman
Margaret Zack

In contrast to the abrupt, pre-holiday severings the Pioneer Press levelled on its’ employees last year, where the company also niggled over start dates to reduce the compensation to a few employees, the 24 Star Tribune people listed above will be paid an additional two weeks — until March 30 — in addition to their accrued compensation. Under the heading of “Thanking God for Small Favors”, its a small grace note.

The final work day for all will be … Friday.

I spent a good chunk of the day tending various hooks in the water, hoping to catch word of the names of reporters on the voluntary buy-out list at the Star Tribune. But it was dead quiet. Not even a nibble. Even though there was word of a 10 AM meeting of Strib brain wizards to review said list.

As we waited we chuckled over the letter published in the Pioneer Press from its’ former editor-in-chief, Walker Lundy, who is now happily retired in North Carolina, and I suspect wakes up every day delighted to no longer be playing pitiable henchman for Knight-Ridder executives. (Lundy left the PiPress for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a short, very bumpy ride.)

Lundy took young Par Ridder to task for disloyalty to his former paper by hopping across town to “The Enemy Paper” literally over a weekend.

The joke now is that Lundy, who was once considered a bit of an odd bird, an old school Southerner afoot on the passive-aggressive tundra, is now viewed as a kind of hokey savant. Lundy at least thought of himself as a journalist … and a character … and he liked characters in return. (God help him he loved mixing it up with Jesse Ventura.) Mostly though, Lundy achieves his new pedestal relative to everything that followed him into the Pioneer Press and what is now going down at the Star Tribune; a funeral march led by the bland and blander.

Frankly, the loyalty “thing” in the context of rival newspapers was always a little suspect, even back in the fat and happy days of the late ’90s.

In his letter Lundy reminded his readers of the various PiPressers who jumped ship for the Strib during his reign. Treasonous curs! To his credit he acknowledges that during his reign most PiPressers were earning significantly less than their Strib colleagues and the Strib had nearly double the circulation. (Add to that the fact the PiPress was and is essentially invisible west of the river.) Reminding some way too much of old Gophers football coach, Jim Wacker, Lundy always loved a good rah-rah about how, “Forget all that other stuff. We’re better, damn it!”

The problem then and now is that money talks.

I called Brian Bonner, a PiPress veteran and a member of the paper’s Guild pension committee. Sometime in May, at the latest, the PiPress will commence contract negotiations with the new management group, headed by Dean Singleton of Denver-based MediaNews, a man and a company with a reputation for getting what they want at the expense of their employees.

“Yes,” said Bonner, “there was feeling of disloyalty [in the Ridder leap]. An audible gasp went up when it was announced. His move severed the last connection this place had to a long family tradition. Some of us really were stunned by it. I mean, these sorts of things aren’t supposed to happen. Brezhnev never jumped from the Soviet Union to America.” (Bonner spent a chunk of time in Russia). “No one expected [Ridder] to stay long. But I thought at the very least he’d launder himself through some other paper before coming back here.”

“But, I never had the feeling [Ridder] was really emotionally involved in the place. The two pillars of his term here were our new geographic focus, [toward booming east metro suburbs, mainly] and cost containment.” If you don’t hear anything in there about producing a better, fuller, more complete and appealing newspaper, there’s a reason for that.

Bonner credits Ridder for keeping his staff in the loop on the paper’s business situation … vis a vis the Star Tribune, in large part. But then, that is essentially all of what Ridder knows … and, sadly, pretty much all modern editors-in-chief and managing editors need to know. (God help those who remain at the Star Tribune though if Par Ridder starts making the calls on who best fits into the next marketing strategy over there.)

Bonner also gives Ridder thanks for bringing in the paper’s current editor, Thom Fladung. “A huge improvement over what came before him, wouldn’t you say?” (A not even thinly veiled shot at Vicki Gowler, who Knight-Ridder promoted up to the 63,000 circulation Idaho Statesman.)

Singleton has already asserted that a freeze on pension contributions is his primary/sole objective in the forthcoming contract negotiations. The Guild has said it will not agree to a freeze as proposed by Singleton, particularly since Singleton has sent out orders that no facet of the contract other than a pension freeze will be considered for negotiation. In other words, forget about trying to make up the money anyway or anywhere else. Nice.

For the record though, when Singleton stopped by the paper the day Ridder’s departure was announced, he declared himself, “Not anti-union.” Why any professional skeptic would take him at his word, I don’t know, but some PiPressers seemed charmed.

I caught John Hines at an awkward moment. The local radio and TV vet was just about to step in to give a deposition. “Its a ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’ thing,” he said.

I told him I was sorry to hear that. Those things are always some degree of gruesome. “Ah, what the hell,” Hines replied, “I’m getting used to it.”

The guy has bounced around town and the broadcast business long enough and often enough to know a thing or two about surviving traumatic transition … which will help him as he leaves K102, Clear Channel’s cash-cow country station for morning drive duties at KTLK, about 60 feet down the hall.

Hines’ arrival is scheduled for the Monday after next, March 19, and he’ll get an extra hour, working 5 to 9 am, as the station cuts back one hour of Dan Conry’s show. The move was announced earlier this week after the station parted ways with Andrew Colton, a TV news guy who was recruited for KTLK out of Florida by Clear Channel brain wizards. Colton was lured up, and given the title of “news director” on the now farcical premise that KTLK was going to offer a bona fide news product.

(And yes — full disclosure again — I briefly worked there. Which is why I can assure you the idea that the station was ever serious about hiring reporters and going head to head with WCCO, much less MPR, was absurdly implausible from the get-go. No effort was ever made to do anything other than market Fox News and read wire copy.)

Post-deposition, Hines called back to say that, no, he has no specific agreement that he will continue on with local Clear Channel in the event KTLK’s ratings problems persist and notoriously impatient Clear Channel corporate, (who mandated the idea of an FM talker to local managers), decides enough is enough and flips it over to Smooth Jazz 3.0.

“You know how these contracts go,” said Hines. “Its basically just a wage agreement. I’m free to leave anytime I want, and they’re free to make their moves.”

One hopes Hines’ reputation as a broadcasting pro and as a reliable employee to the local empire will protect him from the combination of reckless fiat and/or incompetence afflicting the station thus far.

“For me, personally, its a challenge,” he says. “The station doesn’t have a, uh, ‘strong market position’, as they say, and after 16 years of doing what I was doing, I want to see if I can help turn the place around.”

Hines is one of those familiar personalities who has somehow managed not to register as any kind of political ideologue. But, I wondered, is that middle-of-the-road shtick viable on an unapologetically hard right-wing station like KTLK, an other-worldly realm realm where George W. Bush is still given the benefit of the doubt … when he is not being painted as a victim of scurrilous whiners?

Hines believes he can get away with being a straight morning radio jock. He says morning drive is, or can be, a separate beast entirely from everything else that follows. “There is not a station in town,” he says, “that has a morning show that mirrors exactly what goes on the rest of the day.” (Mmmmmmm. The key word there, John, would be, “exactly”.)

The previous show was doomed by being forced to pretend the station was some kind of legitimate news source. Hines says, “A lot of elements in the show, like the news clock, [the hourly schedule for traffic, weather, breaks, etc.] will probably change.” And he says he expects to draw in the show’s producer, Christopher Gabriel, a grossly underutilized talent in my estimation.

Fundamentally though, the issue is the audience KTLK has chosen for itself. By appealing solely and only to the hardest of the hard core Bush-nicks and echo chamber mushrooms, they are in a position where unless their hosts feed that crowd what they want — and regularly — their prospects become more and more limited.

Hines mentioned Jay Leno’s monologue as the sort of equal abuse comedy that draws a nice audience. And that may be true. But radio is played in tight demographic compartments, and talk radio’s is one of the tightest of all. Despite the overwhelming abundance of comic (tragi-comic?) material sloughing off the current administration you’re risking summary alienation from KTLK’s target demo if you put more than a toe down that path.

Bottom line though, Hines is a pro who at least knows and understands the true variety of opinion and humor lurking in these towns, and that is waaaay beyond Clear Channel’s usual knuckleheaded view that, “the Twin Cities are no different than any other place” — (a direct quote from one of their barnstorming consultant-gurus).

Good luck, John.

Today is Thursday. Star Tribune guild employees who want to take advantage of a voluntary buy-out, triggered by the paper’s handover to Avista Capital Partners this past Monday, have until next Monday, March 12, to notify the powers that be. Most, presumably will wait until the last moment to return their company paper clips and stick pins. One who didn’t bother to wait until next week is Dane Smith, the paper’s dogged, deeply-sourced capitol reporter.

Like his competitor, Pat Sweeney, who exited the St. Paul Pioneer Press last Thanksgiving, Smith’s departure leaves a rather significant void in a beat that may not register much with “our younger readers”, (a stale mantra of modern newspaper managers — few of whom ever reported a story), but has always been a cornerstone of journalistic responsibility. As in, if you can’t cover, or aren’t willing to cover the state legislature and how the characters there spend taxpayers’ money, you really ought to just become a high school sports daily.

The Strib still has an entirely solid cast of reporters up on the Hill in Mark Brunswick, Pat Doyle and Pat Lopez. But Dane Smith is a major loss.

Echoing what he told Paul Schmelzer over at Minnesota Monitor, “This is not a big statement of protest. As much as anything its the fact that I’ve been here exactly 20 years. That’s the max on the buy-out, [40 weeks pay]. And I feel I’m young enough to explore something different.”

Smith has had preliminary chats with politicos around town. He’d like to “expand on teaching”, which he does down at Inver Grove Community College, “maybe do some public relations work, some government communications, or, who knows, maybe try my hand at academic policy wonkery. I’ve always wanted to be a wonk.”

The shame would be if he doesn’t write more about the stuff he knows best, the innards, skeletons, past histories, context and curiosities of Minnesota politics. The guy is a walking contemporary history of Minnesota government. But under modern newspaper “rules”, where 25″ has become some kind of major feature, very nearly too long for the “busy reader”, (more mantra), who wants only straight factoidal nuggets with their daily stew of criminal mayhem, sports and “people” coverage (ditto), Smith says he was constantly frustrated by his inability to get more of what he knew into the Star Tribune’s dead tree version.

“For years I’ve expressed my irritation with space limitations,” says Smith. Where 10 years ago a story filed from his beat might regularly run, “35, 45, 50 inches. Hell, even 70″ if it was a hot profile”, 25″ is now the norm. Worse, for whatever the combination of reasons, he says the Star Tribune’s website still hasn’t been tweaked and tooled to handle the detail-rich, “plus-sized” version of a story, with the speed-read nuggets going on to print. Smith openly laments what he sees as Minnesota Public Radio’s deeper and broader web-based political coverage. “I think MPR has maybe the best political page, don’t you?” (Yes, I do.)

Not that Smith is ripping his paper. He expresses pride in the work that is still being done there. He seemed genuinely moved by e-mails he was getting from long time Strib colleagues. “I still think the Star Tribune is going to be a very good paper for a very long time. I’ve always thought of it as an intelligent paper. There are still terrific people, terrific reporters over here. And I think that’ll continue under Avista.”

Is that wishful thinking?

“Maybe a little. But it is too early to say which way this is going to go.”

In a different world, the Star Tribune’s new publisher, Par Ridder, fresh aboard after leaping from the afterdeck of the Pioneer Press, would refuse to accept Smith’s resignation, offer him a new deal with written assurances that at minimum the current buy-out offer would apply whenever he might decide to leave and work out the kinks in the web site. But that’s asking pigs to fly.

Better for all concerned might be Smith hooking up with some new entity that simply wants everything he knows about Minnesota government and politics, day after day.

He says he’d be happy to keep coming to the capitol. “I think I’m like a horse, you know? Following the same path.”

Whether some new web or whatever concept can pay the bills remains to be seen. Which is why Smith is keeping all options on the table, as the Bushies like to say when they’re into sabre-rattling.

“I suppose I could always be a tobacco lobbyist,” he jokes.

Yeah, and last time I checked the methamphetamine crowd had no representation up on the Hill.

Smith replies, “I asked a tobacco lobbyist one time if there was anybody he couldn’t work for. And he said, ‘I would never work for pawn brokers’.”

So we can cross that off the list.

Jack Shafer poses a good question over at Slate today. Unfortunately, while the headline, “Our Ann Coulter Problem. Why the Press Won’t Just Ignore Her”, suggests he supplies an answer, he doesn’t. Other than the talk radio crowd who eerily echo the notorious line, “Coulter has some good ideas”, (Like what? Blowing up the New York Times?) — everyone else who has watched Coulter’s career arc has to have asked themselves, “Why?”

As in, “Why is this rude, unmodulated, and not particularly insightful shock-jock-style pundit given so much airtime?”

My old pal, David Carr, of the Times, had it as right as anyone when he suggested Coulter wouldn’t get past security at The Today Show and CNN if it weren’t for the blonde-in-a-cocktail dress bit. (The reverse logic there being that Matt Lauer and everyone else might have had a few more chats with, say, the late Molly Ivins, if Ivins lost 40 pounds, 20 years and made friendly wih a bottle of peroxide).

Let me suggest … again … (as in “yet again”) … that the media’s problem with Coulter is two-fold, maybe three-fold.

One: The mainstream media lives in a state of constant, palpable, dry-mouthed fear of being targeted by right-wing partisans. To be called out as a “liberal” is to be on a slippery slope to getting Dan “Rathered”, where a stupendous network of resources comes to bear on you with such constancy and virulence it becomes nearly impossible to do anything — like “normal journalism” — other than rebut crackpot criticism and invective. In order to blunt this very high potentiality, mainstream media news entities and performers make extraordinary concessions to personalities who embody the far-far-right ethos. It is a way of indemnifying themselves.

Two: Mainstream television and radio news — and I use the word “news” very advisedly in the context of commercial radio, since it barely exists anymore — is entertainment, first, second, third and foremost. That means glamour of a fairly cliched variety is a primary criteria for access to the network camera. With that in mind, rail thin blondes in short cocktail dresses — often at 8 in the morning(?) — are inherently more viable as guests than say some middle-aged gal like Ivins, or nerdy-looking wonky characters like, um, David Sirota or Glenn Greenwald, neither of whom I recall ever being asked on to chat up Lauer, Diane Sawyer or whoever is doing that CBS show these days.

Third: Coulter can be relied on to make “news”. She will, invariably insult, vilify and engage in reckless hyperbole. Its guaranteed. Its like booking a barking seal. Her willingness to spew over-the-top invective of a sort that were she a guy in a bar would get her nose broken, is fundamental to her appeal to mainstream infotainment. Its part of an unwritten contract. “We’ll have you on, and you say something — anything, we don’t care — just as long as it is ‘hot’ enough that every other network has to pick it up and run it. Cross-promotion, baby! Its how you play the game.”

The direct link between Coulter and the latest absurdist celebrity overreach — Anna Nicole Smith — is almost too obvious to note. (Carl Hiassen whacks his press colleagues for their Anna Nicole frenzy in his Miami Herald column.) Where Smith could be relied upon to behave like the siliconized trailer trash she was every time a camera turned in her direction, Coulter can be relied upon to give voice to the worst instincts of the country’s most angry, ill-informed yet active media watchdogs … and be blonde the whole time she is doing it.

The solution? As an old altar boy, I place great faith in the cumulative power of shame. Enough citizen-viewers e-mailing the Matt Lauers or Charlie Gibsons of the world, or standing up during one of their barnstorming tours and asking, “the Ann Coulter question”, will eventually diminish her appeal. Cable news, even more desperate than network morning shows for sick-to-dead blondes to hold their audience, will take a lot longer to shame. And even then Coulter will be replaced … probably by something worse.

My God! What if Coulter used her book royalties to buy herself an Anna Nicole boob job? MSNBC would give her her own show.

After picking their jaws up from the floor, staffs at both the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press began analyzing and contemplating what Par Ridder leaving the latter to publish the former really means. Ridder is the 38 year-old scion of the once renown newspaper family. A family whose dance with Wall St. devils proved fatal, to many of their employees, if not to them.

Knight-Ridder’s bungle led, first, to the evisceration in terms of staffing and quality of its’ papers across the country, including the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In the Twin Cities it led to a sale last spring of the Pioneer Press to Star Tribune owner McClatchy to satisfy private equity investors. That move was followed by another sale of the Pioneer Press, this to cutthroat media owner, MediaNews. What significant publishing experience the young Mr. Ridder has gained in his short career came from overseeing the execution of rigorous downsizing in St. Paul. (Ridder was quoted only last week telling Pioneer Press employees they’d be better off without a union.) He will bring that expertise to Minneapolis.

Ridder was introduced at a hastily-called 9:15 AM meeting, (a company-wide e-mail went out at 8:29 AM, almost as though someone preferred most reporter-types were NOT on hand for the Ridder-era curtain-raising). His introduction coincides with the first day of Avista Capital Partner’s ownership of the Star Tribune, following McClatchy’s startling Dec. 26 fire-sale of the paper to avoid capital gains tax penalties.

Ridder’s tenure at the Pioneer Press, overseeing draconian cutbacks in staffing and depth of coverage, is not the sort of thing that should reassur either Star Tribune newsroom employees or, if it cares, the community at large. A brief Q&A at the early morning introduction apparently did not get into specifics of the Avista game plan, which has most of the staff on edge, presuming cutbacks and lay-offs a la what Ridder supervised at the Pioneer Press.

Pioneer Press staffers were in a different state of shock. Ridder may have been regarded as a rich kid in a largely empty suit, but no one I talked with ever considered he’d leave … for the Star Tribune. While the Pioneer Press “playbook” may be a thin, rudimentary text these days, Avista may — “may”, I say — see an advantage in having a guy who knows how all the revenue deals are managed on board their ship, if getting ruthless and sinking the Pioneer Press once and for all is part of their profit-making strategy.

More to follow.

Having made a point — an “appointment” — to watch all but one episode of the highly-anticipated and now by all appearances canceled “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” I am not the least bit surprised it got whacked. And I am not engaging in schadenfreude. I was genuinely eager for another Aaron Sorkin series, even a post 12-step Aaron Sorkin series, and I hope he learns something from this and comes back with another.

I never revered “The West Wing” like some. When interviewing Sorkin with other critics during that series’ Clinton-era glory days I asked him, repeatedly, why he was so consciously writing away from the ripest, juiciest, most crowd-grabbing story lines? As in anything resembling the epic manipulations of public attitude and congressional authority, not to mention the potboiler sexcapades of those innocent Bubba times of yore. If you were doing a top-of-the-line network TV series about the Oval Office, why, for God’s sake, would you avoid the titanic clash of interests — cynical, reckless and butting up against the weight of the Constitution — going on outside our door?

Every time I asked, whether on the “West Wing” set or at some cocktail schmooze, Sorkin would give the slightest little sigh of exasperation — (as though network bosses were wondering the same thing?) — and repeat that he was not interested in the dark and mendacious aspects of government. Rather, he said, he wanted to do a show about the nobler impulses of government.

That never satisfied me. Good God man, pit nobler impulses against the forces of dark mendacity! There’s a long history of that concept working very well. Especially at a moment when the entire country was endlessly analyzing everything from stained blue dresses to, as I say, the naked corruption of Congressional authority.

Frankly, I thought “The West Wing” became more watchable after Sorkin checked in for treatment. True, those three or four classic Sorkin lines of dialogue were suddenly gone from the new episodes, but pesky details like plots and storylines were elevated to a higher priority.

So last spring, about the time of the May “up-fronts” in New York, the buzz started early and heavy about “Studio 60”. A smart insider’s look at network television from the perspective of a very savvy survivor. Terrific! I’m in. And never mind the come-down in gravitas from the internal dynamics of the Oval Office. In pop-culture addled 21st century America, the attitudes and role-modeling of Hollywood are a supremely valid point of dramatic departure. The people most addicted to “pop” entertainment and information have little to no idea how it works, or who is working it. Add the possibility of topical satire and parody inherent in a show set behind-the-scenes of a live, weekly comedy skit show and we should have been talking a steady flow of 80 mile an hour fastballs into Sorkin’s wheelhouse.

But instead of exercising the opportunity for cultural commentary — nobler or more crass — Sorkin headed off into the not at all interesting emotional travails of people — TV writers, producers and executives — almost none of us have ever been inclined to worry about. Worse, what ripe character conflicts Sorkin created, he studiously managed to avoid picking for their juice. Matthew Perry’s character can’t resolve his obsession with a Christian cast member. Cool, you think. But other than a few good Sorkin lines about the hypocrisy of the religious right, the Matt & Harriet relationship was pretty much one of constant aggravation, bickering and tease. Swell. Who can ever get enough of that?

Basically, every episode of the show to the point of its’ cancellation felt like throat-clearing, scene after scene, episode after episode preparing the audience for something truly significant and substantial … that never came.

Obviously you don’t usually associate “significant” and “substantial” with a TV show about a TV show. But Sorkin nattered around with the fitful romance of Matt (Perry) and Harriet (Sarah Paulson), then introduced another one between Danny (Bradley Whitford) and network boss Jordan (Amanda Peet). I just didn’t care. Whether any of them ever got together and raised plump babies in a gated Pacific Palisades estate just didn’t matter to me. I was making an appointment with an Aaron Sorkin inside-the-industry-he-knows-best drama for fresh, lucid insights and observations on the network/Hollywood/show biz culture. The creation and marketing of pop iconography, even. It was something he could have done with the cast he had but chose not to.

I could go on, but let me wrap it here, by saying that both of the key women were badly mis-cast. I never got the visceral allure of Harriet on Matt. Harriet was a study in cool restraint. (Wouldn’t spontaneity be a criteria for working on a skit show … and winning the heart of a comedy writer?) And Amanda Peet, usually a vivacious free-spirit in other roles, was flat-out unbelievable as a network boss — all allusions to former ABC chief, Jamie Tarses, withstanding.

I understand the need for high-profile executives to project a flat affect and never let the bastards see them sweat, but Peet’s character never seemed affected by anything. Not the machinations and threats of her boss, played by Steven Weber, her pregnancy … nothing. Come on! Having chatted up network bosses being microwaved by bad publicity, bad ratings, upper management pressure and desertion by former friends, believe me, you can read the stress on their faces. Its that kind of job. More to the point, there is fascinating behind-the-scenes drama in watching a clever, resourceful, highly competitive character put on the public face required to handle such situations.

Finally — and this time I mean it — “Studio 60”, like “The West Wing” badly needed to get off its’ lavish, expensive set and breathe. As a viewer I felt entombed. Didn’t this hot and trendy cast and crew ever get out, hit the town, gather at parties in the Hollywood Hills and enjoy their notoriety? Would some strategic location shooting – a la “Curb Your Enthusiasm” been such a sacrifice?

I remember asking both Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme, who directed a lot of “West Wing” episodes, if maybe a show about the President of the United States might need a bit more sense of scale — motorcades, Air Force One, foreign trips, political rallies, conventions — venues that conveyed the rarefied ambience of the world’s highest office? Their response was on the order of, “You’re talking about the #1 show in the country. Go away.”

Obviously, despite this failure, Sorkin will work again. He’s one of those people I’ve never worried about. But I’d like to encourage him to take one more shot at a show set behind-the-scenes of modern media. There’s plenty to be explored and said. How about for example, an HBO series, (for language and adult situation license), behind the camera of some particularly pernicious cable news channel?

I see Bradley Whitford as Bill O’Reilly, and Amanda Peet can play Greta Van Susteren.

With only five days to go before the McClatchy newspaper corporation flips the keys to its’ once flagship property, the Star Tribune, to the Avista immediate-return-on-investment corporation, a terrible virus has infected the newspaper’s connections to the internet. Something wormed into the Strib system Wednesday cutting off access to the net, and by Thursday it still hadn’t been completely knocked back. “Its still running really slow, kind of like being connected to AOL,” said one Stribber.

The thought of some nasty cyber toxin prowling the tubes of the Stribs’ internets goosed the already high levels of profane gallows humor affecting the building. (The imagery of The Strib infected with an STD, as a result of a quick, tawdry union of McClatchy and Avista was amusing.) As noted here several times earlier, since no one has a clue what Avista is really all about, every professional skeptic in the place presumes the worst. And with good reason. There simply is no available precedent that encourages high hopes in the current situation. Private equity companies typically want to mine their downward-trending old media companies for profits, usually by rigorous cost-cutting … I mean, “localizing”.

Comments over the weekend by new top editor, Nancy Barnes, essentially confirming the prevailing view that Avista is a strip-and-flip squad intent on getting acceptable profits out of the Star Tribune in “three to six years”, wasn’t anyone’s idea of a comforting bedside manner.

Point being that next week will be a big one in the lives of dozens of Strib employees, who have seven days, until March 12, to decide to take the contractual voluntary buy-out, or hang on and hope they aren’t reassigned to covering feral cats in Woodbury stories. (A rumor working the Strib today was that Avista was planning to summarily whack all merit pay, sending veteran employees back to union scale salaries they haven’t seen in decades. By the end of the day consensus was that there was language in the current contract prohibiting such an action, or at least most of it.)

One other move of interest, the Star Tribune’s D.C.-based reporters, Rob Hotakainen and Kevin Diaz, were formally reassigned away from the Star Tribune, Hotakainen to the Kansas City Star and Diaz to McClatchy papers serving Alaska and Idaho. Both will remain in D.C. Among a host of mysteries is whether Avista plans to build its’ own D.C. bureau. The presumption is they won’t.

My apologies for the paucity of posts. I’ve been out of town since Saturday. But I’ve returned with a head full of savagely deep thoughts. Until one bites me there is this …

I am not pretending that many will notice or care, but my alma mater, KTLK, (noted in previous posts for its’ gruesome ratings performance to date), has terminated morning host, Andrew Colton, as of this morning, Feb. 28. No further details at this time other than a comment from a KTLK insider describing, “a dramatic scaleback of news operations”. Odd,I wasn’t aware there was a news operation at KTLK. Don’t you need reporters for that? Maybe the source means KTLK missed a payment for access to all those Fox News rip ‘n reads.