Tag: media

When he’s right he’s right, and Nick Coleman makes a spot-on point in this morning’s column. Minnesota, like much of the rest of the country, is digging itself deeper and deeper into a very serious infra-structure repair deficit, in no small part due to fear of so-called “taxpayer advocacy” groups who force/blackmail cowardly and cynical politicians into signing “no new taxes pledges” and avoiding the basic responsibilities of governance.

When the final report is in, the collapse of the 35-W bridge may be tagged to something no one has yet imagined. Maybe Osama bin Laden did order a hit on Minneapolis. But all early signs point to garden variety, duly noted age and inadequate maintenance, both of which, you can argue are a consequence of, as Nick says, politicians’ on-going, craven attempts to govern “on the cheap.” As though the world we live in getting less and less expensive — rather than the reality that confronts the rest of us every day.

Few reactions are more unappealing than your average “progressive” candidate tucking his tail between his legs at the thought of taking heat for making a stand for adequate funding — i.e. new taxes. Never mind it may be for some indisputably vital, relevant cause — like major infrastructure repair — which, by the way, can’t be out-sourced to China, and rattles nicely around the local, middle-class economy.

Who and what are they afraid of, largely? Op-ed pieces in either paper? Give me a break. What they fear are the knee-jerk acolytes of mass media demagogues, people who will camp out at their intellectual masters’ microphones for hours every day and robotically fire off angry letters denouncing every peril — mostly imagined and mostly paranoid — of “big government,” the first among them being any kind of taxation (usually because of the way liberals waste money on lesser classes of citizens).

Maybe it takes something as enormous and grotesque as the collapse of a major freeway bridge to remind this stunningly self-absorbed crowd that even their lives are imperiled by the steady rot of arteries we all depend upon, and that the last time I checked, “private initiative” has re-built very few freeways in this country.

Anyway, nice job, Nicky Boy. Not badly written either. Although, a la any New York Times piece the Strib handles, another half-dozen editors might have tightened it up here and there.

My ingestion of Hurricane Charleys (vodka, mint leaves, some blue stuff, some green stuff) was rudely interrupted around 7:30 EDT last night by the first phone calls from home bringing news of the 35W bridge collapse.

Within the first hour of coverage the familiar patterns of tragedy-reporting, both good and bad, were playing … incessantly.

The good:

The pictures. Chopper coverage via Twin Cities affiliates on CNN, MSNBC, and CNN Headline provided the visual basics, which pretty much amounted to one extended, “Holy shit!” This is the essential value of TV news. As in, “Let me see what has happened and I’ll figure out half the story all by myself.”

But within the first hour the repetition — always necessary for viewers tuning in late — produced the usual unintentionally iconic images — like the big, bald, shirtless guy with a bandaged abdomen being led — apparently back and forth by first responders. Footage of the guy ran so often on cable you’d be forgiven for thinking he was the single most important survivor. (A corollary was footage of a very beefy Virginia cop running across a lawn after the Virginia Tech shootings. It ran every three minutes for hours in the early reporting.)

With all the footage pouring in from their local “partners” you wonder why the cable channels re-re-re-run loops of the same rather more mundane stuff?

More to that point, with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Dan Abrams, anchoring non-stop coverage, the cable news bible says the anchors must maintain high levels of screen time, even if, in the interest of getting a fuller first impression of the event they might be better off parceling more time to the affiliates.

The bad:

The inability of phone-in witnesses and experts to answer a basic question. Never mind the mistake of saying the bridge “Connects Minneapolis to St. Paul,” which CNN had up way past the point somebody could have told them otherwise. How about local news types’ inability to even offer a reasonable guesstimate of the river’s depth, a question likely on every viewer’s mind. My guess was 25-30 feet. I’ve since read a 9′ minimum channel is maintained. But when asked on CNN, one local news man instead wandered off into the design of the damn thing, about which he also knew nothing.

Blitzer, who can flail to fill as badly as anyone, also allowed himself to be held captive by a caller who admitted he had driven over the thing 10 MINUTES before it collapsed and was buying a sandwich when it actually dropped. Who vets those calls? Why was he even on the air? Didn’t WCCO or KARE have anything fresher than that?

One shining light of news basics was my good buddy, Jim Leinfelder, an MSNBC freelancer working the story. Jim maintained enough presence of mind to give Olbermann direct, succinct answers to questions. Thank you, my man.

Being out of town I can’t say much about local coverage, although early e-mail and phone flow this morning is giving KSTP, Channel 5, the nod for best coverage, never mind being largely shut out from the CNN-MSNBC coverage. (KSTP’s ratings problems have never had much to do with their reporting performance.)

Despite attempts by the usual nutballs to insinuate some kind of terror meme, the cable(rs) accepted the word of local officials that it was what it appeared to be, a structural failure. (My curiosity: What has been the effect of 40 years of de-icing chemicals on the support girders?)

Even from the coast of SW Florida I get the feeling of KG overkill in Twin Cities media. Nothing like a blockbuster sports deal in the dog days.

I count myself among the “fans” who pretty much ignored the Timberwolves start to finish last season. I don’t recall (TM … Albert Gonzales, Dick Cheney) listening to one turn-over of a Woofies game on radio and caught only fractions of TV games. Boredom. Ennui. Fatigue. Indifference. It’s all kind of the same thing. Even with Garnett the team wasn’t doing anything but taking a steady drift downward, and worse, they we’re taking that downward drift with what seemed to a part-time fan like me to be minimum intensity.

I did, however, read a lot of Steve Aschburner’s stuff as the Strib’s pro basketball guy. Tight, punchy, well-sourced. Aschburner’s copy was better than any Woofies offense.

As some of you may know Aschburner accepted a Strib buy-out offer while on a Woofes roadtrip in early March, then quickly pulled it back, only to have Strib management insist on “honoring” his original request.

Aschburner, who was President of the Pro Basketball Writers Association when the Strib made sure he left the paper, has a piece on the Garnett deal up on sportsillustrated.cnn.co. . And this morning, another on AOL Sports.

Says Aschburner of KG: “He was the pearl among swine, so goes the popular perception, a silk purse among sows’ ears (and other butcher cuts)… .”

That’s about right.

Keep it coming, Steve.

I feel like the guy sweeping up after the elephants. Only I’m also the elephant.

My lovely bride and I are enjoying a little beach time with family in sweltering, blustery Florida this week: Captiva Island — where, before you start building, a quarter acre of limestone gravel with no view of either the Gulf or Pine Island Sound — and even less breeze — will set you back $1.3 million.

Anyway, in my Sunday evening post about reporter Matt Peiken leaving the Pioneer Press I both dropped it and stepped in it.

CORRECTIONS!! As Peiken himself hurriedly corrected, the name of his proposed video project on northern tier suburbs was Suburban Safari. “SAFARI,” not “Satanic” — which is what my aging ears, calloused from a minimum of 40 Who concerts, thought they heard him say, and what my hand wrote down as my brain thought, “Peiken, you audacious, in-your-face [bleeper]!”

Anyway, “satanic” was some inner voice speaking … to me, not Peiken, who obviously has a much better sense of what the PiPress’s internal market will bear than I do, or ever did.

So, my apologies to Mr. Peiken. (Although, now that he’s out of the grey, mainstream world of daily newspapers, he ought to consider, “Suburban Satanic” for a new video project. I mean, tell me there isn’t an audience for something like that?)

Next up … the Star Tribune’s Burnsville bureau. I said neither the Strib nor the PiPress had any brick and mortar bureaus in any suburb. Wrong. The Strib has one in Burnsville.

This, of course, has me wondering how many staffers are aware of this, since I must have grazed past the topic a dozen times in recent months in conversations with Strib reporters, as the Bloomington-Bloomington-Bloomington hysteria ratcheted up, and never did anyone say, “Well, we do have that one in Burnsville.”

Oh, well. Wrong is wrong. So my apologies to visionary Strib management for actually putting staff WHERE THE BEAT IS, so they can interact regularly … FACE-TO-FACE … with local shopkeepers, business people, school officials, etc. Now, when they and the PiPress also set up shop in say, Eden Prairie, Maple Grove, Blaine, Forest Lake, Stillwater, and Cottage Grove, deploying a full complement of writers and photographers to each, as the Strib has done in Burnsville (since last winter), I’ll be inclined to take both papers’ much hyped “commitment” to the suburban audience far more seriously.

Finally, former PiPress colleague Dave Hanners takes me to task for suggesting that creativity is waning at the paper.

Dave is probably right that as the staff and the operating budget diminish, those left have to be more and more creative just to deliver the basic goods of a daily newspaper. But I don’t know that the equivalent of a duct tape and bailing wire job on a sputtering engine is the same thing as creating a news product for the fully-converged 21st century.

Frankly, on the level of group psychology, I’m often struck by what borders on every denial when it comes to those surviving these now regular purges. In my experience, with each budget slashing and forced exodus of staff, managers … insist … upon the hoary old “leaner and meaner” attitude from their underlings — an attitude that not only ignores the losses but emphasizes the belief that the paper is going to be “even better” — in other words, an implausible half-time pep talk to a team trailing by four touchdowns.

I always thought that sort of thing was a tough sell to a group of trained, professional skeptics. But it is something that mid-level managers are under strict orders to sell.

Dave accuses me of “demeaning” those who remain at the PiPress by suggesting that creativity is waning. I suppose I could argue that I’m not demeaning those people. But it is more accurate to say I’m not intending to demean them. That said, I stand by my view that there is simply no way that either newspaper can be as creative — in terms of seeking out, testing, and offering new types of stories with new technologies — as they were able to be when they had 30%-40% more staff and newsroom budget.

It’s the difference between realpolitik and wishfully whistling past the graveyard.

Among the 14 Pioneer Press employees who took the latest buy-out and departed last Friday was Matt Peiken. Perhaps not a household name like Joe Soucheray or Bob Sansevere, Peiken, 44, is the sort of character who shouldn’t be completely out of step with modern newspapers, but is.

I first met him in 2000, not long after he joined the PiPress. Back when papers like the one in St. Paul had full-time employees to cover things like classical music and books and TV, Peiken was installed as a kind of general assignment “arts writer,” something that today is an unheard of luxury. Not being particularly alert, I couldn’t figure out what he was covering from week to week, only that he had a hell of a lot of opinions on how things ought to be going down in the PiPress and the A&E/features department.

Like most staffs we had weekly meetings to get things on the schedule and supposedly dissect each other’s work. That last part always went over like a cast iron balloon. For myself and a few others who liked the idea of getting in, scheduling the next “feature” (translation: 18″ preview), grabbing our mail, and getting back to work, we were regularly thwarted by Peiken, who, as I said, had an astonishing lot to say about everything … TV, pop music, comedy, theater, bio-science, Boolean valued function, bo-tox, you name it. Most of it was kind of amusing and not entirely irrelevant. But there were times I wanted to strangle the bastard.

What was unequivocal was that Peiken cared. He was sincerely passionate about doing stories that were different and would draw an audience. Like so many others now migrating out of newspaper work, Peiken had a subversive streak that he employed to put a novel spin on the rote and ordinary stories he was assigned and to keep himself fresh.

I called him last Friday as he was packing up. How, I wondered, did he judge his creative satisfaction over his last years at the Pioneer Press as that paper, following the lead of so many others, elevated predictability to a high virtue?

“I tried to make it work,” he said. “I really did. And really that’s all [taking the buy-out] is about. I was close to taking it the last time [Thanksgiving ’06]. But this time my gut was screaming for me to take it. So I did. Because, the way I see it, it really is all about me asking how much faith I have in myself?”

In 2005 Peiken was transfered out of the arts writer job into something called an “urban reporter,” which in fairness, was somebody’s idea of letting Peiken’s innate idiosyncrasy stir up stories from wherever he found them in the city. That lasted a little over a year, at which point he was sent over to the editorial pages, which had been decimated to the point where today it is literally a one person staff, veteran Jim Ragsdale.

“That business with the editorial board was really just through the election cycle,” Peiken explains.

With the campaigns over, the airlock began to slide shut. Peiken was assigned to the suburbs, specifically 12 cities in northern Ramsey county. No matter how much smoke publishers and editors pump, the reality of suburban coverage is that A) Papers don’t have the staff to cover the suburbs adequately; B) As they pretend to cover 12 cities with one or two reporters they are pulling resources away and neglecting topics of interest to almost everyone; and C) Since they’re faking “coverage” with skeleton staffs they will most often settle for rote and predictable coverage of school boards, cops, and developers. Very few suburban reporters get either time and/or encouragement to take time mining and writing stories outside the formula.

There are exceptions of course. But the exceptions will almost always prove the rule.

“I want to be clear. I am not angry, and I’m not a victim,” says Peiken. “In fact, when they told me I was going to the suburbs I told them they had the wrong guy. Obviously I could cover it. But the stories I like to do take more time than a couple days. But they said, ‘We need bodies out there.’ So I went.”

Unlike some suburban reporters Peiken says he actually drove around his area looking for something other than just cops and schools material. (Despite the urgency of their focus on the suburbs neither the Star Tribune nor the Pioneer Press has anything resembling a bureau in any suburb. Suburban reporters mostly cover their beat by phone from their desks downtown.)

[[CORRECTION: This just in from Star Tribune designer Chandra Akkari: The Star Tribune does operate a bureau for its South section in Burnsville, near the Heart of the City development. An editor, three reporters, and one photographer work out of this bureau four days per week, and the office has been in use since November of 2006. Star Tribune South is available Wednesdays inside the Star Tribune in suburbs south of the Minnesota River. The section was started in October 2003. There are also two other suburban weekly sections, North and West, though there are no bureaus at this time for those staffers. The combined circulation of the suburban weeklies is about 120,000.]]

It didn’t work out so well for Peiken. As a guy who, in addition to editing a website for performance poetry has performed in the Fringe Festival, in a show based on a smarmy self-help guru character he wrote a book around, Peiken got jazzed by the talk (“talk,” mind you) of on-line newspapering with all the video bells and whistles. Driving around led him to whip together a couple videos he dubbed “Suburban Satanic,” clearly off-beat takes on life in ‘burbia.

He says he played them for his superiors at the PiPress. And … “They never went anywhere.”

Since Peiken doesn’t strike me as a guy who works blue I’m wondering how bad they could have been that the PiPress wouldn’t … at least … say, “Not bad. But what if we do this.” I mean, don’t you say something to encourage the rare guy who goes and cooks up something entirely on his own time and dime?

Instead, it was the all too-familiar sound of nothingness. No feedback. Nothing. Or in the unspoken … “Cops, schools, developers.”

“That was a sign to me that I had to move on.”

Peiken says he has found the first flush of freedom, “Really exciting. I’ve got all these ideas of things I want to do, a couple non-fiction book proposals, other writing, that it just didn’t make sense any more to stay with the paper. It’s not like I’m wealthy, but for me writing for the paper was always about something more than the check. And for whatever the reasons, my personality didn’t match up with where the paper is going.”

Peiken reiterates that he doesn’t feel like he was pushed out. Rather the institutional voice and perspective of the Pioneer Press was evolving further and further away from what kept him intellectually refreshed and eager to write.

In other words, “A bad fit,” as every manager says who resents spending time getting square pegs to fit in round holes.

Peiken, who will also be attending poker-dealing school, believes this quarter’s PiPress buy-outs will likely require the paper’s management to raid more from what is left of the paper’s features section, in further pursuit of suburban “coverage.”

Maybe the most interesting thing Peiken said was an aside: “You know, never once in all the time I was there, not once, did my editor ever come up to me and ask, ‘What do you think of this?’ I think that’s kind of odd, don’t you?”

Yeah, I do. Maybe they didn’t ask because the loquacious Peiken already told them. But I’m guessing it is something else. Something blander, duller and resigned. Curiosity — or just simple cross-checking — used to be a virtue in newspapers.

OK. Here’s a pop quiz. Which of the following headlines strikes you as the most routine, to the point of no longer even being newsworthy?

“Mideast in Turmoil”
“Bush Says Surge is Working”
“Gonzales Can Not Recall His Own Name”
“Rumors of Firings and Low Morale Wrack Ch. 5”

I know. I know. The trivia at Caribou is tougher.

The first calls came a couple weeks ago, and the story, for someone who covered the ups but mostly downs of KSTP-TV news for 15 years, was familiar to the point of being pure deja vu. As in … “Wha? Huh? Where’s Stan Turner?!”

“No, really. This is the worst it has been in 15 years,” said one KSTP employee. “I know you’ve heard that before, but this time the place has really jumped the tracks.”

Conversations with several more sources — all asking for anonymity in what they see as an unusually wretched climate — corroborated the basics of the rumors. (How’s that for solid?)

The essence of it all is this: News director Chris Berg will likely leave soon after the first of the month, (the end of the July ratings period), at least one veteran on-air personality, possibly weatherman Dave Dahl, may also leave, maybe on his own maybe otherwise, and the door may stay open for others.

What each source asserted independently is that they believe it is unfair to blame Berg, who many apparently have come to like and respect. Berg is a guy who induced snickers when he took over four and a half years ago for his cornball-tough “new sheriff in town” poses but who I’m told mellowed with age. The oft-repeated picture has Berg “beating his head against a wall”. A wall built of chronically bad advice by Frank N. Magid Associates, Inc. Hubbard Broadcasting’s inexplicably long-term consultant.

Only Dick Cheney could be as flat out dead wrong as often as Magid Associates and still be getting a check.

For years, almost as far back as the last days of Ron Magers, Magid has billed Stanley Hubbard, the family’s patriarch for research on who to replace in anchor chairs and how to brand and style KSTP’s news. The results are pretty indisputable. Ratings have cratered to the point where only Bush’s and Cheney’s are lower. Simultaneous with steady erosion in audience levels down to what amounts to fourth place status in local news, the station has watched characters as often bizarre as Randall Carlisle, Harris Faulkner, Kent Ninomiya, Chris Conangla and on and on do quick, highly-mannered spins in the anchor chairs before being flung out the back door, all while a stream of news directors were hired and whacked nearly as often.

With each departure there was another round of employees (those canned AND those surviving) blaming Magid for yet another round of clueless, stale ideas and Magid in turn blaming THEM for poor execution of what Magid presumably assures Stanley Hubbard are superbly researched and expertly diagrammed game plans.

I’m told a recent Magid Inc. visit with their usual research presentation and “interaction” with newsroom staff went rather badly, with KSTP reporters in something close to “open rebellion”. (I am allowing for hyperbole there.)

An accelerating factor in this latest meltdown is — again as corroborated by multiple independent sources — the apparent inability of Berg’s boss, Rob Hubbard, (Stanley’s son and General Manager), to assert any kind of positive influence over his news department.

“The guy never says anything positive or supportive of anything we do,” groused one long term employee. “I don’t need to be patted on the head every time I do my job. But don’t come down to the newsroom if all you’re ever going to do is shit all over us and blame us for the ratings. Clean up your own act.”

Calls to Dave Dahl, Chris Berg and Rob Hubbard have not been returned.

Those of us with any interest at all in the immediate future of radio are highly skeptical — to the point of fatally suspicious — of the proposed merger of the two satellite radio companies, XM and Sirius, AND the regular promises by terrestrial radio giants, like Clear Channel, that High Definition radio will … real soon … be all things to all people. Rather than new choices, we see a lot more of the same.

Yesterday, Mel Karmazin, former president of CBS, Inc. (he left in ’04 after one too many blow-outs with Viacom tycoon, Sumner Redstone), told the National Press Club that — in an obvious concession to Republican FCC chairman, Kevin Martin — he would allow subscribers to proposed the XM/Sirius combination to buy programming “a la carte”, something cable TV companies are loathe to offer their customers. (Martin wants to see a la carte in cable and satellite TV, too).

Here is a link to Karmazin’s official proposal. It’s pretty eye-glazing, and I don’t even want to think about the HMO-like sub-clauses, fine(r) print and penalties. But none of this, or any of the stories I read yesterday challenged Karmazin on what for me, and I strongly believe other radio consumers, regard as a primary deal-killer. Namely, commercials. Karmazin has left the door wide open to piling commercials into heretofore commercial-free satellite systems, and frankly, given the debt loads of XM/Sirius … like most other media corporations, there isn’t any other way for them to deliver significant profit unless they do.

Karmazin is, first and foremost, a “super salesman”, a guy who looks in the mirror every morning and wonders why he can’t sell advertising space on his incisors. His idea of great radio is a five minute block of commercials every four minutes.

Chairman Martin is on the right track with a la carte programming. It makes perfect consumer sense … on radio and cable TV. But what, I ask, is the consumer interest in BOTH paying a monthly subscription fee for whatever programming they choose AND listening to 20-25 minutes of commercials every hour, we are forced to do on terrestrial radio? (HiDef radio is free.)

I continue to argue that satellite’s future is in commercial-free programming, not necessarily three more channels of Howard Stern with 28 minutes worth of ads per hour. (Karmazin BTW was the radio executive most responsible for Stern’s rise.)

Here’s a “lay person’s guide” to the differences between satellite and Hi-Def.

Any radio manager who is candid — and few are on this topic — will tell you the single biggest complaint from listeners is … commercial load. The fact that this complaint plays simultaneous with the dawn of satellite radio with 200 or more channels and HiDef, which allows each licensed signal playing today to triplicate itself, is, at least on one hand, not reassuring to station owners. An extra three channels sounds like fun. But even if they can control the fragmentation, how do they sell all that? And at what price?

I won’t belabor this. My real intention here is to tie the “fragmentation” problems afflicting newspapers and TV to radio as well … and point out that like traditional newspapers and traditional television, traditional radio is preparing to protect its’ future with … more of the same tired business plan. The same programming with the same rate of “clutter” (jargon for ads and everything else that interrupts what people tune in to get.)

HiDef radio exists in the Twin Cities, but only as a kind of stale (but “clearer”) “repeater” process for existing stations. Radio giants will remain reluctant to introduce content on HiDef that might shave any kind of significant margin off their existing cash cows. The irony here is that with paradigm-shaking technologies like satellite and HiDef so tightly controlled by the very same people that rigorously market the bland and treadworn formats of old-fashion terrestrial radio, why should any consumer look to these new toys with any great eagerness?

As I’ve said before, Apple hasn’t sold 125 million iPods because
music (and podcast) lovers are satisfied with radio programming as it exists today.

The betting is that the likelihood of FCC approval of the XM/Sirius merger increased with Karmazin’s promise to offer a la carte.

Several times in recent weeks I have mentioned that as bad as this moment is for newspapers, local TV stations, by some key measurements, are even worse off. Ratings for Twin Cities late news shows are down 15 percent from May ’06 to May ’07, a greater decline than circulation at either of our benighted newspapers.

The reasons for this slide are many, and depending where you are in the TV news food chain … station manager, reporter, scurrilous critic … you tend to saddle up one particular reason and ride it hard.

Me, I’m flogging the notion that, like the standard daily newspaper, local TV news is under such tremendous pressure to produce revenue that it is locking itself deeper and deeper into stale, traditional, audience-appealing formulas, and being far too timid and near-sighted in creating the kind of value important to the most key of “key demographics.” And by that I mean the audience that is looking not just for “news” (car crashes, shootings) — but what the news means in a meaningful, relevant context.

I got off on this tangent again the other night watching Pat Kessler’s latest Reality Check segment on WCCO’s 6 p.m. newscast. I’ve been a fan of Reality Check since WCCO started it and have always had the same complaint: “What’s the problem with making this longer?”

Last week’s segment was devoted to Congressman Keith Ellison’s allegedly incendiary talk before a local atheist group, in which — if you listen to local talk radio and read the usual hysterical blogs — he called George W. Bush the next Hitler. Standard news reporting would state that Ellison was under fire from local Republicans for making a comment comparing Bush to Hitler … before a group of atheists … and this would be buttressed by a comment from some Republican mouthpiece and then balanced by a response from Ellison or one of his mouthpieces. And that would be that. A good day at the office. Mission accomplished, and we’re onto the next story.

The great value of Reality Check is that even at a woefully compacted 80 to 90 seconds, it (Kessler) demonstrates enough instinct for context to include actual original tape, in this case of Ellison calmly and coherently explaining that post-Reichstag Hitler and the Nazis exploited the emotions of the moment to impose rigid and invasive controls on civil liberties similar to what Bush/Cheney have done post 9/11.

OK, so Jason Lewis doesn’t agree with that analogy. But it’s a debatable point that deserves something better than hysterical spin and/or lazy “balance.”

But as Kessler wrapped the segment, I thought what I almost always think: “Come on, Kessler. I’ve got at least three more questions for you to play with. What’s your damned hurry? It’s the middle of July. You got something better than this? Or maybe you gotta go because Douglas has to tell us it’s hot, or maybe Rosen’s got a scoop on the Twins’ latest call-up from Rochester?”

Kessler, of course, is merely a salary slave at WCCO. Decisions on the running time of Reality Check are made out of WCCO news director Jeff Kiernan’s office.

As I laid it out to Kiernan — for the umpteenth time, going back to when Reality Check started — the segment is clearly very popular, particularly with avid news consumers, all of whom I strongly suspect immediately identify it with WCCO-TV … in a highly positive way. (In my view this is a crowd you want to keep satisfied with your product.) The concept of cutting through spin and making credible judgments on hot button topics — particularly those bowdlerized by commercial demagogues — is, or should be, a fundamental process of journalism.

Beyond that, as I pointed out, WCCO is currently devoting far more time — close to five minutes each — to purely promotional Rewind segments in which … its anchors interview and profile each other. Now THAT is dog days programming.

There’s a back story to my Reality Check curiosity that made Kiernan insist on staying off record. But the nut of his defense is that, while Reality Check is popular, there is a balancing act to play. The intramural anchor profile gimmick is, as I read it, part of that balance.

“Those stories,” said Kiernan on the record, “have been a fun way for our viewers to see the people they’ve come to know and respect.”

My argument is that the promotional/personality/celebrity shtick of local TV news is now so well understood, certainly by those aforementioned avid news consumers, that it is veering dangerously close to Simpsons-like parody, and the inflated presence of “stories” like this Rewind stuff, in contrast to the obvious time constraints still placed on Reality Check so long after it has established both its credibility and value leads … a scurrilous critic … to ask if maybe someone hasn’t become a prisoner of a rapidly atrophying formula?

Kiernan, who I regard as a smart, reasonably candid guy, didn’t want to say “yes” to that. But he couldn’t bring himself to flatly and emphatically say “no” either. His job depends on producing a product that returns very high profit levels to Viacom, Inc. The gamble is that he — and his counterparts in local TV news all over the country — can continue supplying those fat profits even as their business gets gets hammered and fragmented by on-line video news and, in the very near future, the convergence of internet and television.

More to the point, the dilemma you can feel ratcheting tighter and tighter with each passing quarter is the consequence of a sort of Faustian bargain. Namely, holding a mass audience with celebrity foo-foo and the stale conventions of cops, mayhem and sports scores, while risking the migration of avid news consumers to sites where they are assured of getting the added value of spin and smoke-cutting analysis.

Finally, a facet of Reality Check I particularly admire is the segment’s willingness to risk the wrath of the trolls. The campy levels of self-promotion sustaining local TV news are all designed to avoid offense, to present every topic — save crime and tragedy — as weirdly neutral. As much as anything the intent is to sustain the personal appeal of the anchors reading such news. By daring to make some kind of conclusive judgment, Reality Check actively invites the predictable barrage of correspondence from whichever camp got gored.

If all this needs a slogan, try, “News with Guts.” Tell me the society soccer moms of Eden Prairie wouldn’t respond to THAT.

Oh, one more thing. If Kessler/Reality Check/WCCO really want to wade into a taboo topic that badly needs an objective assessment, how about a clear-eyed piece on local atheists? With books like Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and now Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great — all enjoying broad readership in an age of roiling religious fanaticism — what kind of guts would it take for a local TV news operation, with their “Please love us, please” promotional mentality, to do a sophisticated feature on that “trend”?

If they dare, they might need more than 80 seconds.

Do I put all the full disclosures in the lede?

I admit: I have in years past been approached to write “the definitive CJ piece.” CJ, Strib gossip columnist (although I gather she objects to that description), was for a time a competitor, in that we both feasted the flame-outs of Twin Cities media “celebrities” — and, obviously, I’m writing this for a publication other than the one that chose to profile her so lavishly and uncritically. Is that all? I’m not sure.

Anyway, here at the Lambert double-wide we observe strict gender protocol when it comes to life-style magazines. They arrive in the mail. I ignore them. My wife on the other hand, gathers them up, plops herself into her favorite chair, and happily leafs through them, ogling the ads for pricey hand-bags, chi-chi restaurants, $40 wine, boutique beauty salons, more upscale restaurants, and, oh yeah, the occasional story.

Every so often I get the alert from the front room. As in, “Oh my God, you have got to read THIS.”

So it was with Minnesota Monthly’s piece — now on the stands — titled, “The Power of One” (inside) and “Hot Gossip: Why CJ Is Swearing Off Sex” (on the cover). Heavens! What would the legacy doyennes of all things, Minnesota Public Radio, think of such salaciously exploitative hucksterism?! (MN Monthly is part of the MPR empire.)

By the time my lovely bride got through three of her summer crime novels, four catalogs, and the latest issues of rival Mpls./St.Paul Magazine, I had already received a handful of e-mails alerting me to the MN Monthly story.

I placed a call to the magazine’s new editor, Andrew Putz, but have yet to hear back. My curiosity focuses on whether, or how much, he ever considered the “definitive” angle on CJ, or Cheryl, as I still foolishly call her. (She objects to Cheryl, too.) When the idea of a CJ feature was brought up to me, primary points of interest were NOT focused on her begin single, black, female, or celibate. (Although, I gotta tell you, that part was news to me. Maybe too much news.) My angle was a lot wonkier, probably duller, and likely of little interest to lifestyle magazine gourmands.

What intrigued me has always been what seemed from a distance a very unique, special relationship she has been allowed to have with the canons of old school journalism as practiced so assiduously everywhere else at the Star Tribune. Who signed off on that? I had curiosity because of the stories that kept being retold in my direction over the years — stories of editors supposedly “terrified” of her and unwilling to apply the normal controls to the way she did her business, or rework her copy, or counsel her on interactions with the rest of the Strib staff.

What the reality of any of the complaints was, I am still not sure. But the stories are pervasive and fairly consistent. Beyond that — here comes the mewling critic part of this post — I always thought her column should be funnier. A lot funnier. I mean, screw the scolding shtick, girl. (Hell, screw the whole “Whitney Houston changed planes at MSP” shtick). Have a damned laugh occasionally at the expense of Twin Cities “celebrities,” of the media persuasion and otherwise.

In my much more limited (and constrained) experience, most of them can take it. Like Frank Vascellaro and Amelia Santaniello. Nice people. Fairly hip to the business. They can take a zinging on matters of more significance than Frank’s helmet hair. Is it really necessary to treat them like your philanthropic cousins?

It’s not like I, or those who had fleeting interest in me writing a piece about CJ, don’t understand the special role of a gossip columnist. MN Monthly’s story, written by Carol Ratelle Leach — who died suddenly before the story was published — seems accurate, and pleasantly written.

While at the Pioneer Press I often heard tell of research showing that CJ and Sid Hartman were regularly neck and neck for the best-read columns in the Strib. (I backed myself deeper and deeper into the PiPress managers’ dog house by suggesting that instead of constantly aping the grayest aspects of our much larger rival we ought to get our own gossip columnist. Sour stares. Bad idea. I should learn to keep my mouth shut.)

So why didn’t the people approaching me pull the trigger on the “definitive CJ story”? A lot of reasons, I suppose. But not the least of them was the obvious minefield of questioning whether or not a well-known minority woman had ever, in any way, abused her employers’ fear of being publicly charged with discrimination in the wake of behavior that would have gotten anyone else disciplined. You could never find out if any such thing had happened without asking, and asking was fraught with peril.

This is the point where I say I’ve always been amused by her, personally. She’s ALWAYS working a story, and always playing the role. I have enough trouble with the reality of a bungling dumbshit. Hell, she even put my kid in a column once. Now THAT was a slow celebrity news day. And I can appreciate that growing up black and female in Alabama, and then moving up here — and getting the racist crap phone calls and mail I don’t doubt for a second she gets — has certainly made her life path tougher than mine.

But I always thought there was a way to tell a more interesting, complex story of a woman like her surviving, especially now, in a time in the life of newspapers when, unions withstanding, it really is every man and woman for themselves.

At what point do you get a pass for playing the toughest, wiliest, “don’t f**k with me, or else” game you can to hold on to what you’ve got? Would I, or any of the other kicked-out, bought-out newspaper types, do any differently if we were in her situation? Don’t know. But I thought it was worth asking the questions.

Not that Cheryl … heh, heh, heh … would talk to me about it.

I had to laugh at this paragraph:

“Scaredy cat media people are endlessly entertaining,” CJ says. “I get a kick out of those who don’t want to return calls — but themselves count on people to return calls.”

I laugh because I’m still waiting for her to call me back from that week this Spring when it looked like the Star Tribune was going to trim back from four to two columnists. I think somebody was scared.