Tag: media

There was a brief flurry of activity yesterday as a rumor blew around town that Ramsey County Judge David Higgs was ready to announce his decision in what we here at Slaughter Central like to refer to as Le Affair Par. It proved a false alarm.

But the mere thought of another round of Par Ridder/Avista follies, (and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Higgs will dismiss Dean Singleton’s complaint as much ado about nothing), reminded me of a point worth reiterating in the matter of the closing of the Star Tribune Foundation.

As I reported last month, despite a recent letter to subscribers touting the on-going philanthropy of the Star Tribune Foundation, the Star Tribune Foundation no longer exists and the current Avista Capital Partners-owned Star Tribune has no foundation of its own and as far as any fund-raiser in town is aware Avista Capital Partners aren’t donating so much as a dull nickel to Twin Cities’ community and arts organizations. Zero.

Looking for a perspective on this sudden evaporation of contributions from a company that used to play a significant role in enhancing the vitality of life here in the Twin Cities — as opposed to simply sucking as much cash as possible out of it — I called around to people well aware of the now defunct Star Tribune Foundation’s role.

First was Colin Hamilton, executive director of The Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library. Hamilton emphasized that the Star Tribune Foundation was a small-ish player in comparison to something like the McKnight Foundation, making modest four-digit contributions routinely for years. But the Foundation stepped up big time when the library launched its capital campaign for the new building, donating $500,000, and just as importantly, donating first and thereby setting a precedent for other major contributors. (Cargill was another early donor.)

“First gifts are always very significant,” said Hamilton. “Often times you are not credible to other potential donors until someone else has demonstrated their confidence in you, which the Star Tribune Foundation did. We were extraordinarily grateful. Sam[antha] Fleitman has always been a very good friend to the library.”

Fleitman’s job managing the Star Tribune Foundation was axed as the McClatchy Corporation shut down operations here, took whatever was left in the Foundation accounts with them back to California and the new owners Avista, uh, DECLINED to establish a Foundation of its own. Fleitman now works for Andersen Windows’ foundation.

Among Twin Cities non-profit fund-raisers Andy Currie qualifies as something of a dean. He has personally been in the fund-raising game for 40 years, the last 32 in the Twin Cities. His recent work includes capital campaigns for Regions Hospital, Sister Kenny, the Minneapolis Planetarium and the Tubman Family Alliance.

I asked if he was aware of any kind of charitable funding coming out of the Avista-owned Star Tribune?

“I’m not aware,” he said, “of anything charitable being done right now at the Star Tribune. I certainly have not heard of anything. They seem to be having enough other problems, but I don’t know what’s going on there.”

The issue obviously is one of basic community quid pro quo. The guy running the corner sandwich shop knows enough to give a little get a little goodwill and customer favor. Unfortunately that game breaks down pretty fast when the company’s owners leave town — or in Avista’s case — never even bother to move here. No one expects Exxon/Mobil to dole out money to the Minneapolis Library or The Jungle Theater, although God knows they could. But a monopoly local daily newspaper, pitching itself as “The Newspaper of the Twin Cities” is playing a much different game, especially at a time when it is trying to sell “right-sizing” as a facet of a “hyper-local” or “local, local” uber-commitment to every neighborhood and suburb in the area.

In my mind a “hyper-local” editorial strategy gains credibility when it is accompanied by a return investment in the institutions that vitalize and sustain the neighborhoods a newspaper claims to be so earnestly committed to covering.

But I live here. Avista doesn’t. Although I have to assume that after tallying up their return-on-investment from all of their various businesses Avista Capital Partners, or Avista Capital Holding LP, should have at least $3 million a year left to sprinkle around/re-invest in Minnesota. You’d think they’d be hip to doing it if only as a gesture of goodwill and ingratiation by a faceless company that more Minnesotans every day regard as just another dispassionate siphoning operation, depleting us for the greater good of a few hedge fund types far, far away.

And if Avista’s argument is that they don’t have $3 million, I’m thinking that mortgage meltdown has crept higher than I ever imagined.

Obviously, GIVING MONEY BACK to one of the dozens of communities where it has investment interests is not even on the Avista radar. The sole point is to extract money.

Andy Currie notes that under ownership by the Cowles family, the Star Tribune was a founding member of The Keystone Club, the group of corporations who committed to the 5% of profits rule for local contributions, a standard that was the envy of other large metropolitan areas and contributed significantly to the Twin Cities much-touted quality of life.

“More community-minded people you could not find,” says Currie of the Cowles. “They were heroes to me.”

Currie also reminded me that that hefty library check withstanding, the Star Tribune Foundation normally eschewed gifts to capital campaigns, preferring instead to underwrite individual productions at Jeune Leune and The Jungle and other arts venues.

“When Honeywell was sold to that company in, where is it? New Jersey?” he said, “that knocked $11 to $15 million out of the local contribution market. And now the Star Tribune. You’re talking a pretty serious impact.”

Over at The Jungle, executive director, Margo Gisselman, explained the cruel irony that, “It takes a while to qualify for funding from the Star Tribune Foundation, and after years we had finally gotten in. They gave us $5000, and now it’s gone. It is such a bummer to us.” Individually, she says, the Cowles family continues to support The Jungle.

Avista? Not so much. “No, they are not donors.”

Currie says Best Buy, Minnesota’s 21st century empire, “is gaining momentum as a corporate contributor”. He commends the Hubbard family (of KSTP-TV and radio) for being “very generous” to various causes, notes that KARE-TV occasionally provides grants through parent company, Gannett, Inc., that other stations, like WCCO-TV are good about donating anchor time for charitable events. But that Clear Channel, which owns seven radio stations in the Twin Cities and over 1200 nationwide, “is not on any [contributor] lists that I look at.”

Clear Channel’s various stations do do heavily-branded events with percentages going to various causes. But Texas-based Clear Channel, with over $5 billion in net media revenue in 2006 (according to Ad Age), is not making any great philanthropic effort in Minnesota.

The old joke of course is that Clear Channel is the operational model for media investors like Avista.

Charles Ferguson, director of, No End in Sight, currently playing at the Edina Theater, has produced what, for The New York Times at least, is the first video letter to the editor, responding to Iraq boss Paul Bremer’s recent assertion [in Times Select] that numerous military officials were aware of and agreed to his decision to disband the Iraqi army in May of 2003.

Here is Ferguson’s video letter.

Ferguson’s film is terrific, but the concept of a video letter to the editor for on-line newspapers is another very intriguing evolutionary moment that bodes well for the transition away from print.

Note the enthusiasm of NY Times edit page boss Andrew Rosenthal in this this Editor & Publisher interview.

With the broadcast networks routinely sliding Presidential speeches off to their cable sisters, I parked myself at MSNBC for this evening’s run-up, Bush speech and run-down.

Obviously, Keith Olbermann, who last Friday beat Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly in the head-to-head ratings for the first time, was primed for battle. With every cable anchor staking out some specific acre of turf to call his or her own — Lou Dobbs on Mexicans with leaf-blowers, Nancy Grace on any blonde on any crime blotter anywhere in the world — Olbermann’s nightly, erudite-to-borderline verbose eviscerations of George W. and his leaking lifeboat of fools has paid off like Jed Clampett out shootin’ coons.

There is still great beauty contestant-like fun to be had watching Olbermann and Chris Matthews, whose ratings are not going north, interact for the camera. A DisneyWorld Jumbotron couldn’t contain both egos on the same screen. With Bush coming on at the top of the hour, Olbermann left the last eight minutes of his show for a collegial interview/chat with Matthews.

Matthews, who is psychologically incapable of letting anyone under the rank of Vice-President finish a sentence on his own show, has now completely dropped his tap-dancing on Bush’s war and is pretty full-throated about calling it a sick charade, designed solely to slide the denouement off on the next President and protect the Bush legacy. Matthews’ strength has always been his eye and ear for the grotesquely cynical machinations of DC power, so he knows a ham-fisted strategy when he sees it playing on a grand stage.

But Olbermann interviewing him and asking Matthews what he expected to hear from Bush was an invitation to a filibuster that even Olbermann had a hard time breaking. (I remain open to the possibility that Matthews’ position-taking on Iraq … easily four years late … is part of an overall MSNBC strategy to thoroughly exploit the vein Olbermann has opened. Joe Scarborough has been slid off to mornings, Tucker Carlson has been marginalized in Oprah-time and is regularly rumored to be getting the axe, and their boss, Dan Abrams, has pulled back from his customary kissy-face with administration spin-meisters. But what the hell. It’s show biz and everyone has to have a shtick. This new one — from the company that whacked Phil Donahue, after first ordering him to book two conservatives for every liberal — at least has the added value of making moral sense.)

Going in to Bush’s speech Olbermann was already playing with Bush’s “Return on Success” phrase as an eminently lampoonable piece of neo-Orwellianism, along the lines of, “Mission Accomplished.” Coming out it was Bush’s neuron-toasting assertion that 36 other countries were fighting alongside us in Iraq. Not even Nixon apologist Pat Buchanan, in MSNBC’s post-op panel, could handle that one, and Joe Biden, campaigning down in Council Bluffs was rendered as close to speechless as I’ve ever seen the man … and that kids, is really saying something.

By the way, Joe Biden may be the next Terry Bradshaw or Tiki Barber. He’s had good career in the Senate. He’s never going to be elected President, and his best act might be his third, as a regular commentator on a cable channel. He knows the game. He knows the players. He’s not afriad to say something outrageous from time to time and he’s not ashamed to get emotional — like tonight, when he wonders aloud what in the hell Bush is talking about. Biden was good stuff.

There was a precedent-setting moment in the post-speech hash, when John Edwards popped up in a two-minute commercial staking out his position as THE cut-off the money NOW candidate among the Democrats. Olbermann wondered afterward why Edwards bought time since MSNBC, generally respectful ground for Democrats, certainly on Olbermann’s show, would have probably had him on. The obvious answer of course was that by buying two minutes Edwards could answer his own questions, not Olbermann’s, or, God help him, Matthews’, and thereby say exactly what he wanted to say.

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, on the panel with Buchanan and Rachel Maddow, an Olbermann favorite from Air America, predicted a carnival of candidate contortions in Iowa this weekend at former Sen. Tom Harkin’s bash with every Democrat trying to out-do each other as the leading “out now” candidate. Here, is an interesting piece Fineman wrote a couple years ago about the demise of “the main stream media party”.

Tim Russert and Brian Williams mailed in a couple clubby observations from their recent luncheon with Bush, with Williams appearing to violate the luncheon’s off-record agreement by hinting that Bush had said something about maintaining bases in Iraq for years to come.

My curiosity, looking toward tomorrow morning, and the rest of the mainstream media, including our local press, is who among them is courageous enough NOT to play the “balance game” and be as indignant as the MSNBC cast was?

I know. “Oh, goodness. Such temerity! Wonder aloud what in the hell the President of the United States is saying about 36 allies and and ‘enduring presence’. Heavens! What if we got an e-mail from those Powerline guys?”

Even Buchanan could only credit Bush with “solidifying his base” enough to hold his veto-proof minority and slide this mess off whoever comes next, to which Matthews, looking pained, responded, “but that’s a political decision”, not a strategy for the military or the country.

It seems like it would be a peripheral issue, but I never cease to be amazed at how many actual newspaper consumers, or “intense readers”, as Joel Kramer is describing his target audience for MinnPost.com, lock up with the notion of reading their news off a two-pound, desk-bound computer. They all want to flop somewhere other than their desk, whether at home or the office.

This all-important crowd has an almost genetic affinity for the ergonomics and portability of newspapers — even after you remind them of the staggering carbon footprint of leveling forests and trucking thousands of tons of newsprint from paper mill to printing plant to their front stoop.

The Washington Post’s tech guy, Rob Pegoraro, has a thread going discussing the Sony Reader-like devices that seem like the inevitable replacement for paper.

There are all sorts of incipient technologies burbling out there, all requiring testing for real world reliability. But I too am curious what you might demand/expect from a wireless, portable device that replaces a print newspaper. How big would it have to be? What, if anything, would you be willing to pay? (The assumption is that news”papers” will have to heavily underwite the cost of whatever device they offer to encourage the transition from print to electronics.)

Personally, I think a device like this, with newspaper/computer-capabilities would be best amalgamated with something like iPhone 4.0. I’m not interested in carrying another piece of hardware everywhere I go, but would be delighted to have my subscription to the NY Times or Wall St. Journal … or The Rake … available 24/7 via my phone.

In a moment of moral weakness I paused in my surfing from the end of the Twins game last night to Letterman to The Colbert Report. What caught my eye was Harvey Levin, the guru of TMZ.com, being fed “story ideas” by his, uh, staff of twenty-something “news” hounds.

With journalism winding down in print and starting over on-line and elsewhere, the idea of a story meeting for TMZ.com, the ultra-popular , celebrities-as-people-and-usually-at-their-worst paparazzi website was irresistible. Okay, so what’s a story, kids?

Well, there was one with video of a drunk starlet being tailed out of a New York club being asked if she ate ice cream and her replying, “No. Milk makes me fart.” Cool! Harvey loved it. Then there was a still of Madonna leading her hub, Guy Ritchie, the movie director, through the door of a swank London restaurant carrying a box with a new “strap-on” in … a transparent bag. (Of course the poor career provocateur had NO IDEA the awaiting paparazzi would be able to see through the bag. None.)

“Strap-on”, you ask? Please. Haven’t you ever been in a newsroom?

Eventually I realized this was the much-awaited (by others) TV debut week of TMZ: The TV Show, with local air provided by Fox9 (big shock) KMSP-TV. (Fox 9 by the way, has hands down the worst voice mail set-up of any local media operation. I dare you to sit through the two or three levels of anchor-promo introductions and/or connect with anyone in the building. I tried “Programming” — which is about 11 levels down the voice-mail command chain — and still got a recording, and no one call back. That’s good business.)

Anyway, TMZ (i.e. “Thirty Mile Zone”, an inside-LA reference implying that nothing really matters outside that tight perimeter — unless you’ve got video of Madonna or a drunken starlet), is now a 10:30 pm option for all of you suffering celebrity information deprivation here in the Twin Cities.

Having … very … limited tolerance for anymore anything involving Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Madonna or whatever wildly dysfunctional, self-aggrandizing blonde is currently being chased around LA, I don’t know that I’ll be missing too much Colbert over this. But I have to give Levin — who busted his move for shameless, exploitative prominence during the OJ Simpson trial — credit for moving well-past the $20 whoring of the “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood” shticks.

The brilliance of TMZ: The Business Model — and Joel Kramer’s editor/filters should keep this in mind as they produce the front pages of MinnPost.com — is in having their cake and eating it too.

Levin is shameless (that word, again) about exploiting every bimbette and arrogant hunk-du jour for all they’re worth AND blowing past the publicity machinery protecting them on “Entertainment Tonight” for the mundane encounters out of make-up at airport baggage carousels and as they’re puking up their Hennessey on a TriBeCa sidewalk. Never mind if some of this stuff looks like it was shot with a cellphone, TMZ sees their mission in reducing the vain and nit-witted to their rightful states of cultural scorn. I like that.

On the other hand, they’ve got time for George Clooney to wander out of a Manhattan restaurant and chat up their “correspondent” and even talk tech about the guy’s camera. Clooney — talk about smooth.

Best though, was a “Jay-Walking” bit TMZ did last night, on the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. The man/party twit-on-the-street question was pretty simple: What year did the 9-11 attacks take place?

Thankfully for TMZ’s cameras, the 5-watt party bulbs they put the question to were pretty simple, too. WAY … pretty simple. Ditz after ditz after ditz couldn’t quite place what year that thingie thing happened. They COULD however, right off the tops of their boney little heads, instantly recite the names of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s children. (The 75% blonde factor didn’t exactly help defuse that cruel stereotype.)

I’m not going to go so far as to say Harvey Levin is bravely holding a mirror up to modern vanity and stupidity … but he’ll make another fortune by slapping it on TV.

Even with my “Expectation Meter” set to zero, the opening statements from Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker at today’s House hearings left me wondering how two reports advertised as “balanced” could be so nakedly compromised? I listened — via NPR and the stammering Neal Conan — on the drive down from Duluth and was left pretty much mouth agape. There’s an acid test here for who among the Congressional questioners has the spine to say, “With all due respect General and Mr. Ambassador, this smells like the rankest of bullshit.”

Both men, Crocker, in particular, spun each and every aspect of the Iraq situation in positive terms, with repeated references to our fights against Al Qaeda, Iran and Iranian-supported Shiites and little or none to the wider ranger of violence within each sect and general criminality. Neither offered any reflection on how any of this was unleashed, and Crocker in particular, skipping past all that pesky business of the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, painted a picture of Iraq today so upbeat and brimming with democratic possibilities you’d have thought he was talking about some redevelopment project in suburban Indianapolis.

Whenever either ever so briefly tempered their giddiness and counseled patience on the part of the American public, neither quite had the guts to remind their audience — that’d be be us — that patience means continued death and maiming of American troops and a staggering level of expense projecting out into the foreseeable future.

Every so often a comment rolls in too ripe for response to bury in a link. So I’m dragging a couple recent shots across my bow out in the full light of day. (How many metaphors is that?)

The first, upset with my “ranking” of local TV newsrooms, says:

“Lambert, you love taking swipes at KMSP.
And no doubt there are a few clunkers at every station. But ‘CCO’s reporting staff has been decimated. I wouldn’t trust most of them to cover a house fire. KSTP’s staff is just strange. And KARE’s are exceptionally strong story tellers, but I don’t think you’ll see them breaking much news.
“KMSP slightly back,” doesn’t wash. That’s not analysis Brian, it’s a cheap shot.”

I hope this came from a loyal KMSP staffer, otherwise some simple viewer has way too much emotional involvement in the local news game for his/her own good.

I of course deny “loving” to rake swipes at KMSP. Yeah, I did write this back last spring, but otherwise it’s been live and let live. Still, I stand by my off-handed ranking, with the caveat that “slightly” means exactly that. “Slightly”. As in just a bit off the pace.

I’m arguing that the number and quality of reporters/photographers obviously matters. Less is not more. Every TV news shop undergoes regular churn, losing career-climbers to better jobs, sloughing off the gold-brickers and screw-ups all while continuing to benefit from the established, reliable dogs who can always be counted on to bring back something worth running, whether a story about a house fire or a cat beheading. (Actually, I think the Strib owned the cat story.)

But as big a factor as the talent pool out there in the newsroom is how they are deployed, what news strategy/vision they operate under. For my taste … cheap shot or otherwise … KMSP’s hour-long 9 o’clock news show is too heavily stocked with instantly disposable eye and ear candy. I get the strategy. It’s “Fox-y”. Celebrities, attitude, hip. Definitely … not your Mom and Dad’s news-with-a-hot-cocoa show. Differentiation. Young and younger. But trivia is trivia. More to the point, it’s shameless and not particularly imaginative. (I suppose I should give KMSP points for being “shameless”.)

I’ve followed this stuff too long to blow (another) gasket over low common denominator pandering. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t what it is. I continue to believe “average news consumers” need both spot news reporting AND informed analysis … badly. Make that “very badly”. Avid news consumers will take care of themselves just fine — although KMSP and everybody else had better lose sleep over that avid, and often up-scale news crowd drifting away from the local TV news habit because the stuff is so generic, predictable and insistently middle-brow.

To reiterate my essential point … everyone, KMSP, KSTP, KARE and WCCO needs more feet and cameras on the street. Last time I checked the population of the Twin Cities and the region was increasing, i.e. there are more stories out there, not fewer.

The next rip comes from “The Frogman of Grant”, commenting on media reporter Deborah Rybak leaving the Strib:

“I’m getting lost here. Prisoner? Gulag? Man, that media beat is a bitch! And remind me again why we are obsessing about who’s in or out at the Strib. It sounds like we should give Ms. Caulfield Rybak a round of applause and a warm blanket. Surely, she’ll press charges. Meanwhile, I don’t think I’ll sleep a wink until I know which fledgling online recycler of aging local journalists signs her up for one of those coveted $100-a-story contracts.

“But if things are so bad down at 425 Portland, why all the hand-wringing about its undoing? And who is to blame for Caulfield Rybak’s torment….the “dicking” as you have it…Avista or her colleagues now carrying water for Avista? Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think you can have it both ways. Is the Strib a corrupt, venal insitution beyond redemption…or a noble element of the Fourth Estate we should be pulling for? Maybe we could get Dick Cheney to pronounce the Strib officially in its “last throes.”

What I’ve been trying to get across these past few months — poorly, no doubt — is that, A: Good journalism matters, maybe more right now than in anytime since I was born, what with the country’s reputation and sense of purpose reeling from an unprecedented number of staggering frauds and blunders. And that B:, The “strip and flip” ethos of pirate “entrepreneurs” like Avista Capital Partners is making the process of relevant journalism more difficult, not less.

Fundamentally, journalism is a tough business to force into a strict profit/loss model. The stuff we all need to know most can take time/money to ferret out, often makes people angry and isn’t nearly as sexy/salable as schlock — which describes not just celebrity foo-foo but timid business and political “stenography” reporting as well.

So yeah, the steady, inexorable depletion of an entity like the Strib is worth wringing hands over, and its harvester/executioner, Avista is worth denouncing.

Personally, I’m pulling for anyone who can apply a reliable supply of intelligence, guts and imagination to the noble profession of news reporting, commentary and analysis. If Avista has little or no interest in honestly incentivizing its staff to do that, I’ll root for whoever can re-invent the game.

I do agree, completely, that that re-invention will cost a lot more than $100 a story.

Deborah Caulfield Rybak, the Star Tribune’s media reporter officially resigned Tuesday after months of deliberations. Rybak took on the media beat in 2004, after coming to the paper in 2001. Earlier in her career she spent 10 years at the Los Angeles Times.

When the Strib announced its most recent round of buy-outs this past May, Rybak was on family leave in California. To be euphemistic in the extreme, “confusion” ensued as to whether the paper was offering her job back, putting it up for grabs or eliminating it.

Nominated by the Strib for a Pulitzer for her work with Dave Phelps on how the state’s tobacco money was being spent, Rybak has a pretty good idea of who is zooming who. She felt frustrated by the previous Strib administration and, in the end, couldn’t see her situation improving with the steadily thinning Strib of today.

“In the end,” she said Wednesday, “I decided to reassign myself out of management’s reach.”

It is no secret she has been approached by incipient on-line news sites and other local periodicals.

“I’m like a prisoner who has just been released from the Gulag,” she said. “I want to be a spectator for a while before I jump back in with another work crew.”

Having been admonished to always stay above the self-pitying fray, I will leave it to others to note the de-flavorizing and red-lining of local media coverage at Par Ridder-run newspapers.

This morning’s rumor has Jeff Kiernan leaving his job as news director at WCCO-TV for an upgrade in Boston.

As the hacks says … “Developing”.

(Update) It is now confirmed. Kiernan, news director for ‘CCO since 2003, will exit here on the 19th and begin work on the 24th in Boston for the two CBS owned-and-operated stations, WBZ and Channel 38. Former WCCO (and KSTP) GM, Ed Piette is currently the resident boss for those two operations. Boston is the country’s seventh-largest media market, the Twin Cities are 14th.

I spoke with Kiernan a few moments ago. Having covered some colossal clunker news directors over the years I have no problem at all in saying that Kiernan, who did 20 years in Milwaukee before coming here, is one of the brighter and more thoughtful newsroom managers to work these towns in the last 20 years. He is a careful, fellow, however.

At a moment when new media and internet-TV convergence imperils local TV news at least as much as newspapers, Kiernan has demonstrated politically dexterity in maintaining ‘CCO’s reputation as the first-stop for breaking news amid serious financial pressures from parent company Viacom, Inc.

I asked Kiernan if he could be objective now about the qualitative differences between the cities’ four TV news shops. In my opinion very little separates the news-gathering/story-telling abilities of KARE, WCCO and KSTP, with KMSP, depending on the reporter, just slightly back. Yet audience habits are deeply ingrained. When the bridge collapsed WCCO drew the bulk of the audience share during prime time, but KARE claimed the 10 pm news while KSTP did a terrific job staying on it round the clock — an advantage to not having distant corporate masters to answer to.

Kiernan took the, “there is tremendous quality in the Minneapolis St. Paul [TV news] market” angle, which was a little disappointing, but entirely arguable if you’ve ever watched the follies that play night after night in markets as huge as Los Angeles, for example. “I have a great deal of respect for KARE, KSTP and KMSP,” he said. “They each, I think, offer very distinct choices, and each produces quality.”

Ok, so he’s not going to call anyone a demented rat bastard.

How about how many reporters and photographers he’d add to WCCO to bring it up to his ideal staff level?

“Well, you know, even if I had 10 more reporters and 10 more photographers there would still be times when I’d say I didn’t have enough. But as the business continues to evolve, you simply have to be realistic. This is a business. And in some places we’re seeing audience declines and advertising revenue declines. There is a tremendous amount of change out there. I choose to be realistic and acknowledge that.”

I told him that from my perspective very few news directors stay in their jobs, much less get promoted up, by constantly complaining about a lack of resources.

“You have to be realistic,” he repeated.

And give me an idea, I asked, how much change you see coming in the look and tone of local TV newscasts over the next, say, seven years.

“Seven years! I’d shorten that up to a year from now, or even six months. Issues of convergence, new media and things we know nothing about today will have a significant impact on this business.”

My point was the static formatics of local TV news, the mom and dad anchor “teams”, the strict allotment of time to weather and sports, the whole “Leave it to Beaver” atmosphere that so often reminds you of something dug out of a time capsule. You’d think by it is a shtick long overdue for serious re-invention.

I didn’t really expect Kiernan, a realistic TV news businessman, to agree with me and say, “You know, you’re absolutely right. This stuff is so hopelessly cornball it couldn’t open for Mr. Ed. Just the other day I was thinking of dumping Shelby and Amelia for these two Goth mimes I saw at the Fringe Festival, but then I got this Boston gig.”

Bottom line is that Kiernan avoided making news himself, which I get. TV news, local-style, is a business, and right now it is a precarious business. What has worked is still working well-enough, revenue-wise, and in reasonably large part, journalism-wise, that no corporate board is going to blow it up for the hottest trend of the hour.

But another couple years of 15% annual audience declines and rapid expansion of video news prowess from the Web 2.0 crowd and precarious will get pushed closer to, “Evolve or Die.”

I told Kiernan I’d keep up with him.

As for Kiernan’s replacement, WCCO’s press release talks about the usual extensive, exhaustive nation-wide search, yadda yadda. But two names that may be of immediate and logical interest would be former KSTP news director, Scott Libin, now down at the Poynter Institute, and Libin’s second-in-command at KSTP, Mark Ginther, now with WFAA in Dallas. Either would offer a fairly seamless transition from Kiernan and both are thoroughly familiar with this market.

For a couple weeks I’d been hearing rumors of a directive … or something … to the Star Tribune editorial page from Chris Harte, the ex-Knight Ridder executive, (way back in the early ’90s), and as far as anyone knows the only Avista member with any actual newspaper experience. At first hearing the information was ninth-hand, at best. But the story had Harte telling (those who remain) on the paper’s edit page staff to go easy on calling for gas tax increases in the aftermath of the I-35W bridge collapse.

Really? Why would Chris Harte care enough to stick his nose into something like that? Isn’t Par Ridder the publisher? (He is isn’t he?) If anyone, wouldn’t Ridder be the one to open the door to the dimly-lit offices of the Strib’s Bartleby-like Op-Ed wretches and admonish them with something like, “Now, now you crazy Commie, hippie kids. Let’s not get carried away with silly notions of throwing money at problems. We all know how ineffective and wasteful government is. I mean it’s not like a big public company that’s been laying off people left and right forking over $600,000 to an ace executive like me in return for my promise to stay in a job I left anyway barely six months later.”

Eventually, with the departure of Steve Berg from the Strib just before Labor Day, I found someone with a first-hand connection to the story. And what do you know, the rumors appear to have been pretty much true.

According to Berg, Harte did NOT order the editorial staff to reverse its long-standing support of a gas tax increase, (there hasn’t been one in 19 years). “It wasn’t like that,” says Berg. “Rather it was suggested heavily that we be careful to include other options in what we wrote.”

Uh, huh. So Harte strolls in one day not long after the bridge goes down and says …

“This was all by long-distance phone.”

What? He wasn’t even in town?

“If he was I didn’t see him. But we got this by phone. I think he called from Maine or Texas.”

I told Berg the first question(s) that crossed my mind when I heard the story was, “Who got to Harte that fast, and why did he listen?” I mean, as everyone knows all too well, Avista Capital Partners has demonstrated almost zero interest in ingratiating itself as a member of the Twin Cities community. It isn’t known if Harte keeps even an apartment here. But the rest of the visible members of the “partnership” are East Coasters. Why would they give two cents … or 10 cents … if the Minnesota State Legislature hiked the gas tax?

“He never spelled out why,” says Berg, who incidentally has agreed to write for Joel Kramer’s MinnPost.com. “A cynical speculation could be as simple as he was concerned about the cost of running the [delivery] trucks.” The delivery trucks. The cost could add up, never mind that gas prices are spiking up and down 30-40 cents a gallon depending how close we are to a holiday weekend. Eventually though, with an extra dime or quarter here and there you’d be talking real money. Maybe even enough to imperil Avista’s end-of-the-year bonuses.

Berg, who handled transportation issues for the Strib’s edit page, doubts Harte or anyone else at Avista, “has actually sat down and studied the state budget.” He suspects rather, “They’re really interested in tone, in us being less like a knee-jerk liberal editorial page,” never mind all those pesky years Berg and his pals had spent actually reading the state budget and following the local politicking — in person, not by long-distance phone conversation.

In fairness to Avista, Bergs adds, McClatchy was just as concerned with not “antagonizing local readers” with pro-tax editorials. “They were also urging us to be more nuanced in what we wrote.”

“Nuanced” could be construed as corporate code for “mushier”, or in the context of adequate infra-structure funding, less informed in terms of how far the state has fallen behind, and more, shall we say, pandering, to the usual noisy critics whose cynical small government crusade is doing to public schools, police and fire funding, what has already been done to highways and bridges.

But back to the, “Who?”

I remain intensely skeptical that Chris Harte, vacationing in Maine or managing his portfolio in Texas suddenly got a bee up his silk boxers and speed dialed the edit board to urge nuance on their tax editorials. And yes, I love a good conspiracy. You know where powerful, well-connected people talk to each other privately, like peers. So I’m thinking somebody — someone here — contacted Harte first, urging him to urge his paper to dial back on … yadda yadda. But who? Who would have the most to gain from the Star Tribune “nuancing” down from gas tax, to “a range of other options”?

And I’m sorry. I don’t even have ninth-hand as to who that might be.