The Rake Magazine

Tag: MinnPost

  • Legal Lolitas

    I have always wondered why certain cars remain off limits to men of a particular age.

    What makes a Red Corvette more age-appropriate than a Mini Cooper? (Forgetting the conventional wisdom that posits the Corvette as "gold chain"—a sentiment unmasked as a simple prejudice with the Z06, a true American Beauty in red.)

    Or, for that matter a Mazdaspeed 3? Or the brand-new Mercedes SLK?

    While I am barely beyond a sophomoric mindset (seething, Kersten-kudoing hatred of video games notwithstanding including filthy games like Donkey Kong) I can appreciate certain rides for what they are. That is why I am currently fixated on a turbo VW bug in black.

    This car has a lot of issues.

    It is not the fastest 180 HP turbo on the market, its handling is a little spongy and it will choke and die on the dust of a Mazdaspeed 3.

    It does pack one little asset however–the simple to chip 1.8 liter turbo. I have seen this chipped to a cool 250+HP without extensive modifications to the drivetrain or suspension. You can also take full advantage of the superb after-market upgrades that exist for VW/Audi and even Porsche vehicles.

    Not that you, given your age and gender, would take advantage of a situation like this. Not with your misplaced longing for a Jag (not.) Not with this black bug possessing an equally black rag top (yes, its a convertible.)

    What would this do to your rug?

     

     

  • All the News That Fits—and Then Some

    There’s an awful lot of talk about the news lately, but not, unfortunately, the sort of constructive conversation that promotes critical thinking and engages people with their neighborhoods, their country, or their world. No, what people are talking about is the media, or, more specifically, and more onerously, the business of media. The Star Tribune is losing readers, pages, and staff. (Did that venture-capital firm buy it just for its prime downtown real estate?) The Pioneer Press is facing the same challenges, and rumors have been circulating for over a year that it will cease to exist altogether. The corporate hijacking of local “alt weekly” City Pages seems finally to have succeeded, at least in a manner of speaking. (New Times indeed—just who the hell is this Hoffman character, anyway?) And it’s not just with these outlets. Almost everywhere you turn the quality of news is being questioned as resources and profits continue to dwindle. It’s just too expensive, it seems, to chase meaningful stories these days, and the competition has never been fiercer for advertising dollars.

    Enter the internet, the longtime boogeyman and sworn enemy of print media everywhere. As it turns out, it just might be the best tool any news reporter, storyteller, or publisher ever dreamed of. With more than half the U.S. now online—and two-thirds of them getting their news online—the web is suddenly a sexy proposition for all sorts of formerly hidebound print junkies. The venture capitalists are intrigued as well—you’d have to suppose that in a recessive industry, not having to pay for ink, paper, press operators, and distribution would bode well for the bottom line.

    And so, with (undoubtedly) noble thoughts and high aspirations, many Twin Cities newsies have been turning to the web as a panacea for a host of the ailments currently bedeviling the news media. Former Strib publisher and editor Joel Kramer got the attention of media insiders across the country when he launched MinnPost, his long-anticipated online news site, in November. At about the same time, erstwhile City Pages editor Steve Perry debuted his own site, The Daily Mole, which he mothballed last month after a frustrating three-month run; now he is taking the reins at the Minnesota Monitor. Perry’s new employer, like a number of other local sites (including Twin Cities Daily Planet, the Minnesota Monitor, Cursor, and MNSpeak), had been up and running on the web long before that pair of high-profile upstarts made their splash at the tail end of 2007.

    It turns out that the web, with its atmosphere of almost unbridled democracy (a sort of anarchic egalitarian free-for-all, if such a thing is possible), has breathed new life into the moribund American Dream. Freedom of speech. Free exchange of ideas. Anybody can play. People with a little bit (or a lot) of hubris can barge their way online and plant their flags. Every citizen (or non-) can put his (or her) voice out there. And anyone can hit the jackpot, which is, of course, measured in mouse clicks. (You can be sure even the gal blogging about what she had for breakfast is watching her numbers.) In the online world, clicks mean dollars.

    The trouble, of course, comes in setting up a new online economy. How many clicks for how many dollars? What’s the rate of exchange? In a world where Britney has been the top search term for six of the past seven years, and where information is expected to be free, how can anyone make news financially viable?


    Making a play with traditional journalism

    Determined to uphold professional distinction above all else (presumed translation: no Britney stories), Joel Kramer latched on to a stable of reporters cast off in the recent newsroom purges on both sides of the river and set out to create a quality local news source. With the exception of a few videos and slideshows, MinnPost’s editorial model is little more than traditional newspaper journalism distributed online (in fact, until a few weeks ago, Kramer insisted on distributing fifteen-hundred Xeroxed printouts for those committed to words on paper).

    While web-based businesses across the globe save on rent by having staff work from home, Kramer resists this as well. He is proud of MinnPost’s old-school newsroom, which features open space to encourage dialogue, an office for the business staff, and conference rooms and workstations around the perimeter. Just as newspaper reporters rush to meet an evening deadline, MinnPost contributors—drawn from a pool of fifty-six freelancers—submit stories each morning so that web editor Corey Anderson can post them online at 11 a.m. This also runs counter to standard web protocol, where news is live twenty-four-hours and reporters bypass editors by posting their stories directly on the website. “Our goal is not to exploit the web,” explained Kramer, “but to provide quality journalism.”

    Can MinnPost make profitable use of an online medium without fully engaging its resources? Nora Paul, Director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the U of M, says no. “[Kramer] hasn’t embraced what’s interesting about online,” she argued, “which is the ability to create packages with a shelf-life, and that will have utility for a long time.” According to Paul, online news organizations need to find new and compelling ways to tell stories, and develop creative ways to pull together data. While most local online news sources have not availed themselves of Paul’s expertise, newspapers across the country are turning to her for the winning formula. Last month, eleven top newspapers, including The New York Times and the Washington Post, met with Paul (and five graduate students) to formulate questions they want answered about offering news on the web. What’s the best way to display video? Do news crawlers attract more clicks than breaking news digests? What’s the most engaging way to tell a story?

    Above all, the web offers flexibility. “Online, the walls should be much more porous,” explained Paul, “so that you have an evolving story-telling space.” In other words, there’s no excuse for anything static. Online news is more a process than a product; it’s created through interaction and various points of view, so stories build up almost organically, with varied perspectives, in varied forms, from varied arenas. Ideally, the end result is a much broader picture, and arguably a more compelling story than we’ve been reading on paper for centuries.

  • Kicking the Reading Habit

    The wailing and gnashing of teeth continues unabated at the Strib and other print publications these days. A report from ABC, the company that audits the circulation of the Strib and most other daily newspapers, just noted that most daily newspapers’ circulation was down again. The Strib was down over six percent.

    Editor Nancy Barnes had a folksy take on the whole thing in her column on November 11. (I could show you a link to it on the Strib’s website, but the link to the story goes nowhere, which could be a small part of the Strib’s problem.) At any rate, Barnes, after noting that her college-age daughter “gets all the news and information she needs online,” wrote, “I, on the other hand, cannot start my day without coffee and at least one newspaper,” and then continued to describe the daily’s efforts to choose stories her readers want to read.

    Probably since I am much nearer Barnes’s age than her daughter’s, I can also not conceive of starting my day without coffee and three newspapers. Unfortunately, of the three that arrive on my porch every morning, one doesn’t have enough in it to last me through my cup of coffee. And when the dog needs his walk, and I have to choose how to spend my time before work, the one at the bottom of the pile never makes it to the top.

    At MinnPost.com, a new web-based newspaper that will further damage the Strib’s circulation, David Brauer wrote a piece that quoted the Strib’s circulation director as saying the main cause of declining circulation was not the Strib’s editorial “fluffiness” (as Brauer called it) but rather “no time” to devote to the paper.

    Somebody in the circ department needs to send Barnes a memo to shorten stories and make them faster to read. Oh wait, they’ve already done that. So what could be the answer?

    Here’s an idea, and I have to admit I’m just guessing here: the real answer is not that readers have “no time.” It’s that they have no time for drivel, or a newspaper that churns it out as a matter of course. And if anybody thinks the Strib isn’t in the business of turning out drivel, what exactly do you call it when its media columnist lists one of his ambitions as “bowling alongside Cyndy Brucato”?

    Oh, that’s just coy self-deprecation, you tell yourself. But you’re wrong, because he follows that up with a startling exposé of the cordial relationship between WCCO anchormen Frank Vascellaro and Don Shelby.

    Sure, they’ve got serious articles in the Strib, too. For example, they’ve got all kinds of items about Russia, and Pakistan, and sometimes even Iowa. Unfortunately, they are usually things I read yesterday in the New York Times, the newspaper at the top of my coffee-stained pile.

    Even when the Strib does serious journalism all by itself, where is it?

    A good piece by Stribber Tom Meersman on November 12, about the draining of small prairie ponds, was at the bottom of the front page, right under the story about Viking Adrian Peterson straining his knee and another about soccer star David Beckham’s appearance in Minneapolis. Illustrating the Beckham story was a four-column front-page photo of ten-year-old girls with cameras waiting to take his picture. The story itself was longer than the prairie ponds story. While the ponds story was interesting and important for anyone who wants to know whether we might have drinkable water for our children, the Beckham story amounted to a series of quotes from people who went to the game, which provided insight on the level of “teen girls feel the same way about Beckham as Frank Vascellaro does about Don Shelby, except Beckham has his own fragrance and Shelby just has a special way of tying his tie.”

    I guess Barnes put the Beckham story on the front page because, as she says, she is looking for “the right balance in today’s wired world.” Part of that balance must consist of the nine photos on the Strib‘s website of Beckham’s appearance, including one of him with his shirt off, that must have revved up girls even older than ten. The link to that story, thank God, was working.

    Figured in, too, must be Barnes’ belief that she’s laying down a solid foundation to attract the readers of the future. I can hear all the ten-year-old girls in their fifth-grade classes today: “Sally, did you see that cool story on Becks in today’s Star Tribune? When I get old enough to decide what I want to make time to read, I’m gonna get a subscription.”

  • MinnPost Debut: A "Thoughtful" Approach to News

    RYBAK: Sigh.

    For some time, I’ve put off writing a post about today’s 11 a.m. debut of what’s being touted in some circles as the divine answer to the Twin Cities’ current Crisis in Journalism. I’m referring, of course, to the launch of MinnPost.com, the online newspaper creation of Joel Kramer, the former Star Tribune editor-turned-publisher-turned journalistic manumitter.

    Kramer stepped forward this summer to, I guess, rescue the Twin Cities from the ravages of PiPress owner Dean Singleton and the faceless Avista-owned Star Tribune. Both, you see, have condensed news, bought off and spit out reporters at such an alarming rate (well, alarming if you’re a reporter), that it seems Kramer decided it was his sacred duty to restore Twin Cities journalism to its illustrious past.

    I want to put some emphasis on the word “sacred.” It contributes to the fact that—as much as I’m trying to keep an open mind about MinnPost and as much as I would like to see it succeed as a kick-ass publication—the whole undertaking makes my teeth hurt.

    As Kramer makes clear in his rather dry lectures–um, presentations– (one of which I recently attended) that there will be nothing frivolous about MinnPost. No sports scores, no stocks, no movie, music or theater reviews. No oddball, newsy feature stories that gave newspapers of old their vibrancy. Instead, Kramer emphasized, his new publication is designed to attract “news-intense,” “civically-engaged” readers, the sort of readers “who like to read The Economist,” and who value news written by “high quality” “professional” reporters “who care about Minnesota.”

    Hence, his new publication’s motto: “A Thoughtful Approach to News.”

    That’s where my hackles really start heading north.

    Let’s talk about how Thoughtful it is to tout this new online/new media approach, then, just to be on the safe side, announce that you’ll be passing out 2,000 printed copies of the paper every day. They won’t look like a paper, mind you, (just eight sheets of 8×11 paper stapled together) and they’ll be handed out on street corners in downtown Minneapolis, St. Paul, the 494 strip and Edina. How Thoughtful is it, when you’re operating on a shoestring and paying only your editors full-time wages, to be spending 20 cents a copy on that endeavor, for a total of $104,000 per year? Oh, and then brag about the fact that, as a non-profit, you’ve already raised about $120,000. Guess we know where those Thoughtfully-donated dollars will be going.

    It just doesn’t make sense.

    Nor does it make sense to tout yourself as an online version of the extraordinarily popular Slate and Salon online journals where little similarity exists. Kramer has taken pains to distance his Thoughtful Approach to News from Thoughtless, opinionated outfits (well, like ours). However, Slate was just described recently in the New York Observer (probably not a Thoughtful enough publication to suit Kramer) as a fixture of “opinion journalism.” The San Francisco-based Salon is an online magazine (as opposed to a collection of tiny posts or news stories) which prominently features reviews and articles about music, books, and films.

    LAMBERT: Damn, talk about a tough crowd. I knew I needed a little sharper knife when I was alone in here, but you, girl, are one hard sell. Do you heckle funeral eulogies? … not to make any connection between funerals and the arrival of MinnPost.I’ve listened to more than a few of Kramer’s presentations, and I concede they aren’t exactly 20 minutes of Chris Rock. And I’m assuming he will steer MinnPost in a direction I wouldn’t go … entirely.

    But before anyone accuses me of being closed off and utterly negative to MinnPost I have to say I admire and will root for anyone who can deliver more credible content into the public news diet. Too many people consume too much fact-free bullshit. Anyone who is working to re-balance that situation has my support. Moreover, I admire someone who is willing to stick $250k of his own money into the venture and actively work at it, as Kramer has and is.

    I attended his open house, too. Remember? I was the one encouraging hugs between you and my old drinking buddy, Neal Justin, (who we told we were going to rip for his new Monday column, and which we did a couple days ago). The concept and the cost of this 2,000 stapled copies thing strikes me as kind of funky. The sort of thing that could be the first item red-lined when someone screams, “belt-tightening!” But I do recall Kramer talking about some kind of feature/analysis style sports coverage.

    In fact, one of the more interesting conversations I had over at the MinnPost office was with ex-Strib Timberwolves beat writer, Steve Aschburner, who will contribute stories to the site. Steve’s separation from the Strib was one of the most hamhanded of many hamhanded episodes. But he seems philosophical about it now.He said two things that I found interesting. One, he sees in Kramer – for all his wonkiness and lack of hip-hop cred – “an actual leader,” as he put it. A much overlooked factor in the struggles of modern newsrooms is that while the staffs may be aging-to-aged veterans, middle level editing/managing jobs – thankless eye-glazing jobs — are often handled by comparatively inexperienced people for whom budget control is as high or higher a priority than quality writing and reporting. Too many, in my experience, don’t even qualify as avid newspaper readers themselves. I’m paraphrasing here, but Aschburner’s view was that, “I’m tired of being told to respect and follow somebody just because they’ve been handed a title. With Joel, I have no proble
    m following his direction because he’s proven he can lead.”

    The other thing Aschburner mentioned was that as a sports writer he doubts he’ll have the difficulty making the transition to the less formal and freer style of the Web. Sports departments everywhere have long had a special license for language, attitude and commentary that newsroom managers in other departments – some for reasons of inexperience, others for reasons of incompetence and/or timidity – don’t allow their staffs.

    RYBAK: I truly am sorry. I don’t mean to be so nasty. But as a ratty-ass reporter, undue pretentiousness beckons like an overfull balloon to a pinholder. Oops, there I go again, not being Thoughtful.

    I want to say something nice about J-Kram, so you’ll get off my butt. I wasn’t working at the Strib when Joel was in the building. But my homies say that he was one of the finest editors the paper ever had during his days in the newsroom. A guy you wanted looking over your shoulder as you wrote. The best.

    Once he ascended to the publisher’s suite, however, opinion shifts. Kramer the publisher, in order to save journalism back in the mid-1990s, implemented procedures at the Strib that remain laughable to this day.

    He divided its reporters into “teams,” (which totally Balkanized the newsroom), and engaged in a whole bunch of newsroom renaming: Subscribers became “reader-customers,” the managing editor became the “news leader,” and the newspaper became “perhaps the most ridiculed newspaper in the country,” according to a New York Times article about the Strib written in 1995. Kramer, the once-accessible editor dug in his heels and stubbornly defended his rampant jargonism, which was dismantled after he left the paper.

    I see Joel the editor in his commitment to an ambitious undertaking like this and in seeking to bring some legitimate news gathering back to the marketplace, even if I think he is severely underpaying the talent. There are some real standouts among the reporters he’s signed up and I look forward to seeing their bylines regularly.

    However, I see Joel the publisher in his stubborn belief that he knows better than anyone else when it comes to the Internet. If he really believed in the Internet, he wouldn’t be messing around with handing out expensive stapled copies of an online paper. If he really understood the Internet, I think MinnPost would be a lot more Daily Mole and a lot less refried mainstream media.

    That said, I’ll be reading with great interest.

    LAMBERT: The other issue that caught my attention was when he declared that MinnPost, with people like Doug Grow, Britt Robson, Susan Albright, David Brauer, my old buddy Sarah Janecek, G.R. Anderson and Steve Berg, to mention just a few, would not be offering political endorsements … on the advice of his attorneys and their interpretation of the 501(c)3 statutes.

    I don’t get this.

    As it is, MinnPost might be tilted more heavily left-of-center than the old Strib – Sarah can’t do all the righty lifting – but other than porn and Britney Spears (a redundancy, I suppose) nothing drives traffic like politics, and a fair and open Op-Ed board-style discussion of candidates and referendums would be pretty damned interesting.

    This will be a fascinating test of the appetites and affinities of web users, web-intense users. Will Kramer appeal to an MPR quality audience with a product that goes only a little bit further than the existing daily papers? Or will he find that the stories/posts that earn the largest audience – and hold out the greatest potential for ad revenue – point in him a different direction, possibly more Slate and Salon than StarTribune.com?

    I wish him and his crew the best.