The Rake Magazine

Tag: Strib

  • Mr. Smith Goes to Kenwood

    Dane Smith is back, and he’s back with
    the panache that only serious money can sustain. Is this a good thing?
    As per Rupert Murdoch’s Pravda West, you decide!

    When last we saw our hometown hero, March of 2007, Dane Smith was walking the plank at the Newsreel of the Twin Cities,
    where the new spew of hard-edged gossiping, gay-bashing,
    Muslim-bashing, Kersten-style investigative journalism has dragged
    Strib reader’s average IQ down yet another 20 or 30 points. (When IQ
    approaches zero it’s a basic math problem; check out renormalization. If you find this stuff difficult, you’re reading too much Strib).

    Back
    to our story, shouldn’t we feel sorry for Smith, who coughed up a
    20-plus-year career of determinedly non-partisan political reporting in
    favor of getting out "while a good buyout offer was available"?

    No, we shouldn’t. Smith quickly re-invented himself, jumping the shark
    onto the career path of a politician who’s been around long enough to
    know what principles to sacrifice, and when. He followed the money.

    A
    mere month from his Strib swanbyline, Smith was "found" for the
    self-identified "progressive economic think tank" Growth and Justice in a "search" conducted by DFL mover and perennial candidate Rebecca Yanisch. This hookup paired Smith with ex-Strib crony and DFL candidate (do I sense a trend?) Joel Kramer, in a deal which looks chummier than a Wild night in the penalty box.

    Politicians
    leaving office are inclined to tap their Rolodexes, those arteries
    through which political influence and big money run fastest, for
    whatever purposes motivate them. Smith is now the poster boy for an epidemic of similar vascular incursions by exiting political journalists.

    What
    brings this all to mind is that, on Wednesday past, Smith and his pals,
    self-appointed keepers of Minnesota’s moral and electoral rectitude,
    treated us to a gloriously righteous fit of profitable indignation, the
    Worst Political Advertising in America Awards Ceremony. The event was, more or less, the political set’s version of the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. Or something.

    Smith’s pre-event spiel
    touted an "Academy Awards style event," but admitted the content was
    just the baddest stuff of a few intern-hours’ search on YouTube. He
    proposed "marketing it as a way for people to blow off steam" in a
    "non-partisan, multi-partisan setting," but that’s where it gets even
    harder to believe.

    What it is, really is, is a feel good dollar hook for Growth and Justice, Smith’s we’re-not-very-partisan lobby. Smith’s real message is "send me money!"

    Growth and Justice has only one identifiable BOD Republican (Arlen Erdahl). The case makes itself that G&J is "nothing more than a front group for the DFL."
    Nevertheless, Smith, like most partisan Democrats, has handed over to
    the right the right to be openly partisan about anything. Like Dems in
    general, he’s scared to death of the word.

    Wednesday,
    in exchange for the paper-thin political cover of having kicked-out
    (Ron Erhardt) and forgotten (Charlie Weaver) Republicans,
    self-promoters (Mitch Pearlstein) desperate for their thoughts to be
    remembered, and US Senators (some guy named Coleman) desperate for
    their acts to be forgot, all act as award co-presenters, along with a
    bevy of the DFL’s Kenwood elite, Smith and G&J happily conceded Democratic ads to be just as stupid, dishonest, and downright evil as Republicans’.

    Irony
    the First is that Smith’s methods, indeed his very position, are those
    he so recently decried. His portentously perverse parting proposition
    for a Strib successor: "Always pay attention to who’s getting what and
    why    . I’ve always liked the old saw about comforting the afflicted and
    afflicting the comfortable." Today no powerful or desirous Minnesota politician is too comfortable to sit in the shade of the G&J umbrella.

    And let’s not mention that, as an entrenched media elitist, Smith has no trouble convincing MSM (see here, and here) to spring for free space ("earned media," in political parlance) to promote his fund raising activities.

    To
    be fair (must I?), Smith and his cronies are emulating a right wing
    strategy of years’ proven effectiveness. For as long as memory, the
    Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute and
    other unabashed cash laundries have ecstatically catapulted Republican
    candidates and causes upon us from behind the invisible shield of non-profit tax deductions. Left-wingers are finally catching on, and G&J is but one of a rapidly flocking coterie of port side dollar decoys.

    But the impartiality illusion must be maintained.

    G&J’s
    complaints about Dem ads are fatuous at best. Growth and Justice
    cheerily Swift-boats national Democrats, declaring the DNC’s smooth,
    smart Valentine’s Day 2008 "Sweetheart Deal" to be the bad ad equal to North Carolina lunatic fringer Vernon Robinson’s 2004 "Twilight Zone v. Leave It To Beaver." "Sweetheart Deal," tapped as a "guilt by association" ad, wins G&J’s Daisy Award for Dems bashing Republicans, while "Twilight Zone" wins the Willie Award for the reverse. But there’s a qualitative difference between the two.

    Robinson,
    who has lost Republican primaries in multiple NC Congressional districts,
    takes on Islamic extremists, homosexuals, lesbians, feminists, liberal
    judges, burning American flags, killing a million babies, the ten
    commandments, God, black children born out of wedlock, Jesse Jackson,
    Al Sharpton, racial quotas, aliens (with and without spaceships) and
    the unguarded Mexican border, in 59 seconds flat. He’s an avenging
    angel, and there are a lot of us on his hit list. McCain and Bush may
    not be peas in every issue’s pod, as "Sweetheart Deal" hints, but
    they’re from adjacent rows of the same vegetable garden, and the ad
    uses McCain’s own audio to make that point. The DNC MO isn’t guilt by
    association; it’s association by guilt. Don’t bother trying to decode
    this one. It’s tautological.

    Smith’s
    supreme intellectual insult, though, for those whose IQ numbers still
    require sock removal (see paragraph 2), doesn’t even have a
    (non-)partisan point. It’s a shame shame about using sex to sell
    politics. Smith/G&J cite a clever tongue and cheek (sic) show by porn actress and political opportunist Mary Carey,
    demonstrating her qualifications to command the office of Governor of
    California, and whatever else might arise. How opportune! Mr. Smith, to
    lure us to your very own fund raiser by flashing a hint of porn. C’mon,
    Dane, who’s zoomin’ who?

    To
    entertain a rumsfeldian dialogue, is the growth of Growth and Justice
    justifiable? No. Is it necessary to balance the political equation?
    Yes. Will American politics improve, as Democrats catch up with
    Republicans in the Think Tank Wars? I doubt it. Is there a better
    way? You tell me!

     

  • …leaving community hurt, too

    Here’s the headline from yesterday’s Strib: "Girl, 6, is grazed by bullet, leaving community hurt, too."

    It’s tempting just to let that stand as one more blob in the insipid lump of goo that is the Star Tribune. OK, I will, but with just one comment: Doesn’t every bullet that hits a six-year-old hurt our community?

    I wish I had such an overstaffed news room that I could send a reporter out to the scene of a shooting to ask everyone who lives near the incident what they think of a little girl getting shot. What do they expect people to say? "Hey, no big deal. People get shot here all the time. What really makes me mad is the Twins letting Johan Santana get away."

    Actually, there was one detail of the Strib story that’s kind of funny. The assailant’s gun went off because his pants were so loose that the gun slipped down his pants leg and discharged when it hit the floor. How much funnier would the headline have been if the gun had hit with the muzzle pointed straight up?

    "Man, 20 or so, grazed by bullet, leaving future generations hurt, too."

  • If I were king of the fore-e-e-est

    I hope you all noticed the bold initiative of the Star Tribune, as expressed on their editorial page on Sunday. Yup, they put their heads together, snorted and wheezed with the Herculean effort, pressed hard on their temples to concentrate the intellect, and made their endorsement regarding tomorrow’s "Super Tuesday" nationwide primaries and caucuses.

    And you thought they were too timid to actually make an endorsement without doing a focus group first of what they could get away with without offending their ever shrinking base of readers and advertisers.

    Well, the joke’s on you. The Strib editorial board ain’t afraid of nobody or no thing. Not nobody. Not nohow.

    And just to prove that, they threw caution to the wind, damned the torpedoes, hurled themselves once more into the breach and endorsed…voting.

    As they put it, "Super Tuesday, Too important to miss." If that weren’t endorsement enough, they even said,"It could be a transformative moment in American politics."

    That’s some bold talkin’ there.

    So whatever you do, don’t miss Super Tuesday. It’s too important AND it could be transformative.

    And speaking of "Super", how ’bout them Giants? They made the top of the Strib’s front page today, right above the coverage of the candidates.

  • Lost Files of the Star Trib Readers' Rep

    Sunday morning’s aren’t nearly as much fun anymore. Not long ago I’d heft the Strib off the doorstep, chuck out the ads, the news and the sports and dig right into my favorite column, "The Readers’ Representative." Having worked for a decade and a half at a daily newspaper, I miss hearing first hand the way self-criticism is transformed in to self-congratulation, the way dense curtains fall over assurances of transparency, the way anyone and everyone higher up the company ladder is not only always right, but right and brave. And especially I missed the way a big, high-profile media company saved a bundle on PR flackery by having a compliant middle manager wallpaper over the corpses hanging in the living room.

    But now I just miss the Reader’s Rep. Back in early October the kids up the ladder decided that, gosh, they were just so committed to giving us the latest health news — not so much on dark, complicated stuff like how local health insurance billionaires have goosed the cost of medical care and our collective stress level — but rather the importance of eating vegetables and getting annual exams, they "reassigned" the old Readers’ Rep to the health section and replaced her with … well nobody, apparently.

    The last two Sundays have featured columns by the Strib’s top editor, Nancy Barnes. In the first one she displayed a lot of comaraderie with veterans like Paul McEnroe, a.k.a. "Mac", as she called him, much like she does when they bowl together every Tuesday and Thursday night, I’m guessing. This week she gave out a number that’ll connect you to an editor somewhere in the building (maybe) whenever you’re pissed off at Nick Coleman, want to give Katherine Kersten a wet kiss or point out that someone, maybe one of the new (and cheaper) hires on the suburban team had Stillwater on the banks of the Mississippi in the morning’s East Metro edition.

    Somehow this isn’t as appealing to me. Obviously the old Readers’ Rep wasn’t actually "representing" readers so much as she was taking bullets for her paymasters, the now beached Par Ridder in particular. Not that Mr. Ridder’s myriad problems; a near complete lack of awareness of business ethics being just one, were ever addressed mind you. But the sheer spectacle of the Readers’ Rep’s elephant-in-the-room avoidance and the frenetic patter of her happy feet scurrying back and forth in search of any vantage point to laud the wisdom and bravery of her colleagues was reliably entertaining. You could read her and think to yourself, "Goddamit, I may have to spend eight hours in a cubicle working for psychotic nerds, but at least I don’t have to sign my name to that!"

     

     

     

  • Spare the Rod, Spoil the Newspaper

    I made a mistake the other day and accidentally tuned in to KTLK and whatever right-wing boob they have on during the late morning. With a little checking after I got back to the office, I found his name is Dan Conry, and he has, like so many of his ilk, the IQ and eloquence of a doorknob…or of Katherine Kersten, whichever is higher.

    For he was haranguing about Kersten’s column of Monday, in which she asserted (surprise) that the government was out to take your kids and brainwash them.

    The impetus for these two nitwits with access to the media was the recent hearing before the state Supreme Court of the case of Gerard Fraser.

    Here’s the case in a nutshell: Gerard, 12 years old and 195 pounds (for some reason the Strib thought his weight was relevant) is the son of Shawn and Natalie Fraser, who are described as “devout Christians.” Gerard was (surprise) rebelling against his parents’ devout Christian discipline. Shawn and Natalie tried to communicate with Gerard grounding him and withholding privileges. They even went so far as to paste Bible quotes on the refrigerator. When this didn’t work, the devout Christians did what any devout Christians who are steeped in Deuteronomy would do, they paddled Gerard—36 blows with a wooden paddle.

    Subsequently, Gerard ran away. He was picked up by police as he was walking along the road. He told the police his parents were hitting him. Surprisingly, police (as they are required to do when there is an allegation of child abuse) turned it over to Hennepin County, who removed Shawn and his brother from his parents’ home while they investigated.

    Somehow, none of these details made it into Kersten’s column. Of course, if there had been any explanation of how Gerard came to the county’s attention, it might have undermined the impression Kersten was trying to leave–that Big Brother was watching and waiting for any excuse to swoop in and snatch your kids.

    Anyway, as Kersten then wrote, the Frasers sued the county to get the kids back, and were “finally vindicated” when the state Appeals Court (which is packed with Pawlenty appointees) returned Gerard to his devoutly Christian parents. Gerard, by the way, is now shipped off to a devoutly Christian boarding school in Utah. According to Kersten, the tuition at this school is $50,000, which is more than Harvard. The Frasers raised the money by refinancing their house.

    I can only hope the Frasers can’t make the payments when their full interest rate kicks in and they end up homeless, just like Jesus. I wouldn’t mind the same fate for the Strib editors who uncritically let Kersten inflame the rabble with this drivel, and don’t even demand that she include the very basic question of how this kid came to the attention of the authorities in the first place.

  • Randy, The Reader's Rep …

    (A semi-regular Q&A with "Randy" the new Star Tribune Reader’s Representative, most frequently found on the corner stool at the Dry Dock roadhouse, in the shadow of the big microwave tower, Chaffey, Wisconsin.)

    Randy, Your Reader’s Rep: Dang but stuff piles up. I come back from baitin’ a few bear traps, havin’ a couple beers and getting old Jonsered ready for cuttin’ season and look at all this mail. Sheeeit. When the Star Tribune hired me back, I had no idea they really meant a weekly gig. I thought with little Par out sun-bathin’ it’d quiet down.

    Guess not. So here goes.

    Question: I heard that the staff at the Star Tribune all got flu shots the other
    day? Is this true? Where did this happen? Were these shots administered in a sanitary way? And did the top executives
    join in?

    Randy, Your Reader’s Rep: That is definitely true. Flu season is coming on pretty strong, and Avista Capital Partners, the really fine folks that own the paper want all their Full Time Employee Units running like a big pack of Dodge Hemis. There are a lot of very big stories that are going to mean plenty to the Avista folks’ year-end numbers. Like for example, ‘Who is going to buy them damned parking lots?’, and whether the folks in Eveleth and Granite Falls are going to pitch in to build a new stadium for the Vi-Queens, which would mean Avista might have half a chance of selling the main building to what’s his name, the billionaire dude from New Jersey.

    As for "where it happened"; it wasn’t in the butt, Bob.

    I know. I know. I heard some pretty risque jokes about everyone standing up, dropping trow and bending over at their desks while Chris Harte went down the line pokin’ tushies. But the truth is everyone took it in the arm.

    Don’t know about the sanitary thing. I suppose a bunch of $4 coffee drinkers like that crowd used … ooooo … pre-moistened towelettes, like you get at Famous Dave’s. But I’m not sure. I mean, hell, I usually just wave a butane lighter under my buck knife to cut out slivers.

    But yeah. Chris Harte himself took a pokin’. Right there in line like he was a normal person or something. Ain’t that something?

    Funny though how happy and agreeable everyone was for the rest of the day.

    Question: I was reading that bastard Nick Coleman’s column a couple days ago and I noticed that right next to his little picture, the one where he doesn’t look anything like George Clooney, it said, "One view". Was that a typo or something? I mean, he’s writing a column, right? Who else’s view were we supposed to think it was? And does this mean that all the other columnists, like Katherine Kersten and C.J. and Sid Hartman and Reusse are going to have "One View" next to their pictures. (And none of them look much like George Clooney, either.)

    Randy, Your Reader’s Rep: That’s a good question. Tell you the truth, I didn’t notice until you brought it up. So I sent a note asking what the deal was. Nobody wrote back. But I hear through the old company grapevine that no one told Coleman about it and no one knew who put it there. But come on, there are so many brave and courageous editors at the Star Tribune doing so many important things to, you know, enhance the quality of life in the better zip codes of Minneapolis they probably just overlooked it.

    My guess is all whoever stuck it there meant to say is that, "This is that commie prick Coleman’s view, not our view." In fact, I gotta check and see if it says, "Our View" next to Kersten’s and Sid’s pictures the next time they write.

    Question: That blonde Republican babe, Sarah Janecek, wrote a story this week saying how a couple of your reporters used some pretty foul language talking to the MnDOT people. Those guys McEnroe and Kennedy sounded like jerks. I suppose they were pretty ashamed when that story came out, and they must really be pissed that people know how obnoxious they are.

    Randy, Your Reader’s Rep: Oh yeah, and how. I tell you, nothing
    makes those two stick their tales between their legs more than everyone in town knowing they shout in the phone and use words like, "bullshit". I don’t know what they were smiling about after that thing ran.

    Because, we have a very strict policy about bad language here at the Star Tribune. Penalties, too. If you’re heard saying, "This place is total bullshit", you have to put a dollar in the Save Par jar. If you say, "I’m going to cap the next a**hole who assigns me an Eagan Sewer Commission story", you have put in $5. Of course if you say something like, "These Avista douche bags wouldn’t know a paragraph from a parsnip," you have a choice between hurling yourself off the roof or editing a Katherine Kersten column.

    Question: I see that you are starting to run more editorials supporting a new Vikings stadium, which would be built practically right next door and most likely goose up your real estate value pretty nicely. Don’t you think you need to at least mention that fact every time you write opinion pieces? You know, maybe a standard little box at the top that says something like, "If you stupid chumps bite on this deal we’ll make a shitload of dough."

    Randy, Your Reader’s Rep: Man, I’ve heard cynical. But you about take the jelly donut. You got something against football? You want to see a place without a team I suggest you come up to Superior, because that’s what you’re going to end up with if you don’t close ranks and play to win, pally.

    The folks at Avista Capital Partners, some of whom have even heard of Green Bay, are actually doing you one shiny ripe favor. They are looking out for your interests when obviously you won’t. They are family people just like you, and they know that special feeling fans get when they contribute a little bit extra out of every pay check to have a place where, you know, if they cut their coupons and save up a couple months they might be able to take their kid to see a game. Three months if they want to park and have a beer.

    Until next time. Think transparent thoughts.

  • Banana Republic Fades into the Sunset

    Damn! Over here I keep a list of great story ideas and names of people I’ve really got to get around to catching up with, just to see what their story is today. Like MPR’s Bill Kling. Like all the guys who played in The Warheads years ago. And like Kirk Anderson, the former cartoonist for the Pioneer Press whose heave-ho in April 2003 was early, solid confirmation that "local, local" was going to have more to do with "money, money" and "innocuous, innocuous" than reader appeal.

    So what happens? That bastard, David Brauer at MinnPost.com, posts the news that Anderson’s weekly, spot-on evisceration of the myriad Bush follies, "Banana Republic: Adventures in Amnesia" is being dropped by the Star Tribune. (Brauer likes being called a bastard when he beats someone on a story.)

    Much to my disappointment, when I called Anderson was not raging against the machine. "It had to happen sooner or later," he said. "I’m thankful to the Star Tribune for giving me the opportunity." And, "I wish that it could have gone on endlessly." Well, you and me both, Kirk.

    With 70% of the public saying they believe the country has jumped the rails and is wandering in a profoundly bad direction (not to mention seriously considering a 180 degree change next year) you would assume the topics Anderson was trading in — gross abuse of executive power, officially sanctioned torture, the decline of our international reputation, etc. — would be thoroughly mainstream fare — and in a novel, entertaining concept.

    Obviously the quarter page the Strib had been giving Anderson will not go to a Denny Hecker ad — (but let’s not give them ideas) — and most likely will be filled with … well what? More deep thoughts from Debra Saunders and Jonah Goldberg?

    Anderson is very complimentary to opinion exchange editor, Eric Ringham. The feeling is mutuial.

    "I think Kirk’s a genius," says Ringham. "I really hope we can find a way to work together again. I just wish his fans were more vocal than they were. I loved it. But I didn’t hear the kind of buzz I wanted to hear. But the decision was strictly about money."

    Being a classier guy than me Anderson wouldn’t
    divulge how much the Strib was paying him, (I’m guessing
    somewhere between a free-lance music review and a quarter the monster
    salary of one of those sweet old switchboard ladies). He did put it in
    perspective saying that he and his wife aren’t big spenders and "pretty
    much live like college kids".

    Ringham likewise insists that the decision to drop, "Banana Republic" was, "not content driven." And, as for the money involved, the intention, he says, really is to hire a part time writer with the Anderson money, someone who will have to be paid at Guild rates. (If Captain Fishsticks or John Hinderaker gets the job the Strib will take unholy hell from this quarter.)

    As Ringham describes it he approached Anderson around the time of the Strib’s expensive re-design with the idea of doing some kind of "graphic novel", (as Brauer also pointed out). "In very short order Kirk brought back four different proposals, all of them very professional."

    The decision to drop "Banana Republic", he says, was made by interim editor for the editorial page, Scott Gillespie, who was recently elevated (some say "pushed") into the Op-Ed department in the wake of the paper’s not exactly cheery parting with Susan Albright.

    "But," says Ringham, "I don’t know that I fault him for the decision, and I may very well have made the same decision were it mine to make."

    It is my opinion that Steve Sack does a very good job as the paper’s official cartoonist. But in an age of declining readership … yadda yadda .. when papers are supposedly on high alert for topics and concepts that attract the mythical "younger reader", the decision to drop a sharp-edged, "Daily Show"-worthy weekly cartoon strip/graphic novel arouses suspicions (again) that the new, "local, local, hyper-local" Strib’s idea of irresistible fare for "younger readers" and people hip to "new media" are celebrity consumer features on Hannah Montana, reviews of "Halo 3" and of course, the latest sighting of Josh Hartnett.

    Anderson also has no bitter rip for the PiPress, although literally everyone who might have had a hand in "right-sizing" him out of that building in ’03 are now gone themselves. (For all intents and purposes the PiPress editorial "department" has been reduced to a staff of one, Jim Ragsdale. He’ll be local enough.) Neither paper, Anderson says, rode him hard to mushify his cartoons, even in the run-up to the war in ’03, when almost every paper in the country (with the notable exception of deputy editor Jim Boyd at the Strib) was swallowing the Bush administration bit and charging hard for freedom and glory, shock and awe.

    "Of course," he says, "as a staffer at the Pioneer Press my cartoon ideas got shaped a lot more than as a freelancer for the Star Tribune. I’d be told to ‘tweak this’ and ‘change that’. But it wasn’t that bad. I look at some of the ideas I had and I’m grateful they said, ‘No’."

    This despite the prevailing mood at the recent Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, where, he says, most of the complaining was about "the push toward the mushy middle" and the "local, local" gimmick, the latter of which — as has often been said — serves to discreetly remove the biggest and most provocative themes and material of the moment from the playlist of editorial writers and satirists.

    "The war in Iraq is a huge national story and provides a lot of ideas," says Anderson, who by the way is free to re-launch "Banana Republic" anywhere he chooses. "It’s tougher doing a cartoon on the Chamber of Commerce. It’s not nearly as juicy."

    No kidding.

     

     

  • 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.”

  • Meet the New Readers' Rep. — Same as the Old

    RYBAK: Oh gosh, that Nancy Barnes. How does the girl do it? She’s editor of the Star Tribune and still found time these past two weeks to write a Sunday column filling us in on all the neat goings-on at the paper, just like the old readers’ reps used to do.

    Why, last week she introduced to some of the nice people still on her staff. Like Paul McEnroe, who has been there for almost 30 years.

    And then this Sunday, that thoughtful Nancy took us up on our suggestion of a month ago (because we try to be caring, helpful Scouts here at Slaughter Central) and printed all the names and phone numbers of the Strib’s assistant managing editors so that readers with questions could call them directly. She mentioned that maybe a lot of readers were mad that she didn’t do that earlier. Nancy also wrote about another reporter, Pam Louwagie, and said Pam’s story was just so neat, it was her very favorite of the day.

    I guess Nancy was so excited about Paul McEnroe, Pam Louwagie and all those other swell, talented people she works with that she just plain forgot the other big news that happened in the Star Tribune yesterday. That would be the fact that there was no weekly TV guide. Why? Because Nancy Barnes killed it off. I guess maybe she didn’t think anyone would notice.

    It was funny, though, because they did. They noticed so much that the paper had to bring in extra news assistants on Monday to answer all the phone calls that poured in from the angry readers. Uh, oh.

    Well, at least Nancy was smart enough to print the phone number of the new Features editor, Christine Ledbetter, because the readers sure liked calling her, too—so much that they crashed her voicemail.

    But gee, Nancy is so darn busy in that important job of hers that I don’t think we can blame her. But, you know, I think she probably could use the help of a new readers’ rep.

    Brian, tell our nice readers what we found.

    LAMBERT: I’ll get to that in just a minute. But first, I can tell you from personal experience that as much as you hear readers complain about crazed, whiny liberals and boring Minnetonka city council stories nothing … NOTHING … sets them off like when you mess with the weekly TV guide. Basically, you order up 50 more rent-a-cops just to protect you from irate senior citizens.

    But I have to get something off my chest. As an avid newspaper reader, I’m finding that Sunday mornings aren’t nearly as much fun anymore. Not long ago I’d heft the Strib off the doorstep, toss aside the ads, the news and the sports, and dig right into my favorite column, "The Readers’ Representative." Damn, it was always good stuff.

    It’s weird, but after 15 years at a daily newspaper, I actually miss hearing first-hand the way self-criticism is transformed into self-congratulation, the way thick, dense curtains fall over assurances of transparency, the way anyone and everyone higher up the company ladder was not only always right, but right and brave. And especially I missed the way a big, high-profile newspaper company could save a bundle on PR flackery by having a compliant middle-manager wallpaper over the corpses hanging in the living room.

    But you know what, Deborah? Now I just miss the Readers’ Rep. Back in early October the kids in Strib management decided that, gosh, they were just so committed to giving us the latest health news — not so much news about dark, complicated stuff like the ways local health insurance billionaires have gamed the cost of medical care and with it our collective stress level, but rather the importance of eating vegetables and getting annual exams — that they "reassigned" the old Readers’ Rep to the health section and replaced her with—well–nobody and everybody.

    As you say, the last two Sundays have featured columns by the Strib’s current top editor, Nancy Barnes. In the first one, I enjoyed her display of camaraderie with veterans like Paul McEnroe. I like the way she called him "Mac," just like she does when they bowl together every Tuesday and Thursday night, I’m guessing. Then this week she gave out numbers that’ll supposedly connect you to an editor somewhere in the building (maybe) every time you get pissed off at Nick Coleman, or want to give Katherine Kersten a wet kiss or point out that someone, maybe one of the new (and cheaper) hires on the suburban team managed to re-locate Stillwater to the banks of the Mississippi in the morning’s East Metro edition.

    I don’t like this Barnes-itorial Valentine thing. It isn’t as appealing to me. Obviously the last Readers’ Rep wasn’t actually "representing" readers as much as she was taking bullets for her paymasters, in particular the now beached Par Ridder. And it wasn’t like Mr. Ridder’s myriad problems — a near complete lack of awareness of business ethics being just one — were ever addressed by her. But that was part of the fun. The denial. The sheer spectacle of the Readers’ Rep avoiding the elephant in the room and the frenetic patter of her happy feet scurrying back and forth in search of any vantage point from which to laud the wisdom and bravery of her colleagues was pretty damned amusing. You could read her and think to yourself, "Goddammit, I may have to spend eight hours in a cubicle working for psychotic nerds, but at least I don’t have to sign my name to that!"

    So what we have to tell folks is that, here at the Slaughter, we too wondered about whatever happened to all those letters to the editor about young Par’s ethics problems, and all those calls to the Readers’ Rep asking when she was going to say something about the fiasco, other than, you know, how hard she and other editors were working to report great news in a great paper for a great community. So, we started poking around. We looked into the whereabouts of all those questions and, quite frankly, what we found shocked us.

    We were aware of the various jobs and departments the new Strib — your local, local, hyper-local paper — has outsourced to India, not to mention the way young Par whacked those sweet old ladies who used to answer the telephones. But after scouring the phone logs, we were stunned to see an extended, expensive series of calls between the Star Tribune and a pay phone at a roadhouse called the Dry Dock Bar in Chaffey, Wisconsin.

    That’s right. Wis-f**kin’-consin.

    Home of cheeseheads, the world’s sickest serial killers and turpentine-swilling bear baiters. WTF?

    One call connected us to a gentleman–we’ll call him “Randy”– who confirmed to our satisfaction that for beer money he in fact took over for the Strib’s exhausted Readers’ Rep last summer, about the time Par was taking a dive over in Ramsey County Court. She was strung out and mumbling in the hallways. It seems Randy actually "ghost dictated" the column for months, right up until it was killed off completely. He had some credentials, too: Apparently he was good at handling complaints for the septic company he works at, and his brother built a deer stand for a Strib sales guy hunting up north last fall. Moreover, he said he’d happily do it all again. "That was easy money," he told us. "You ain’t seen pissed until you got a guy with six inches of shit backed up in his basement."

    This time, though, he demanded enough cash up front for a hunting license and a differential flush for his ’89 F-250. We tapped the Rake hedge fund account and called it a deal. We told Randy to get back to work ASAP. Here’s his first report.

    Question: Hi. I’m wondering when you’re going to say anything about the behavior of your publisher, Mr. Ridder? The way I always thought it was supposed to go, a big city newspaper like yours was in the business of digging up dirt on politicians and business scoundrels, uncovering people ripping off the system and making life tougher for the average guy. T
    hen after you reported it, you were supposed to analyze and comment the hell out of it, and then your editorial department was supposed to write a few tut-tutting pieces wondering what in the name of Enron the world was coming to when crass punks like this end up in positions of such influence? But, I gotta tell you, other than the usual perfunctory who, what and where stories, I haven’t read any editorials or anything else really from you. What gives? I mean, if I can’t trust you to be completely candid about the dirt in your own house, why should I trust you to be honest about the dirt in anyone else’s?

    Randy, Your Readers’ Rep: Look dude, I don’t know what you do for a living, but where I come from there isn’t much upside to ripping the boss. Mr. Ridder had a pretty bad summer. You want to pile on, go ahead. But I got a trailer payment, two ATV payments, a bass boat and alimony to cover. I ain’t kickin’ him while he’s down.

    What’s more, the last time I checked, this whole thing boiled down to the opinion of one guy — some judge in St. Paul — against the opinion of a bunch of other guys, namely Mr. Ridder and his lawyers. More importantly, this is an ongoing legal matter. Which means, if I have to spell it out for you, that I can’t say anything until it gets all resolved out, and that’ll only happen when that Dean Singleton guy in Colorado gets handed a fat ass check to shut up and go away. Then, at that point, the whole thing will switch from an ongoing legal matter to "old news" and something we’re "putting behind us" as we "move forward."

    Ka-peach-ay?

    And as for tut-tutting from the editorial department, well, we’re a little under-gunned right now. One little downside to Mr. Ridder’s courageous "right-sizing" campaign, (i.e. "Less for you, but more for Avista Capital Partners"), is that we’ve thinned out about two-thirds of the deadwood up there, and the two who are left have been pretty busy re-thinking their brave but well, you know, hysterical editorials calling for a reliable funding process for roads and bridges. They’ve been told to look for something that doesn’t raise taxes on any of the Avista Capital Partners team or those lawyers at Powerline.

    Question: I am a big, big fan of Katherine Kersten. I can’t tell you how overdue the Red Star was in getting someone in there who understands regular Minnesotans, people who change their own oil, play snowmobile poker, don’t buy all the liberal claptrap about melting glaciers and practice small animal taxidermy in their basements. People like me have had it with these rich, elitist, ivory tower pricks like Nick Coleman constantly taking pot shots at hard-working guys like Carl Pohlad and Bill Cooper. So thanks for Katherine. She is a breath of fresh air.

    But as I read her story titled, "Pariahs on Campus", the one where all these clean cut kids are getting beat over the heads with leftover hippie liberal bullshit about habeas corpses, mal-distribution of wealth (whatever that means) and French ticklers, I kept thinking about that Bethany Dorobiala kid Katherine mentioned. I know her, and I think Katherine’s story would have been a lot stronger if she had mentioned that Bethany is no run of the mill kid. She’s the goddam chairman of Minnesota College Republicans! I mean, come on. Bethany’s one smart little lady. She’s hip to all the liberal tricks. You might even say she is on "high alert" for their crap. I think saying right out front that Bethany was a big cheese with every kid who still loves freedom would have been a knock-out punch for that story. So where are your editors? How come someone didn’t get that kind of important detail in Katherine’s story?

    Randy, Your Readers’ Rep: You make many excellent points. It goes without saying that Katherine, as the only person on our staff that anyone north of 694 can relate to, has a special mission, namely to point out the shocking conflicts of interest and bias … in liberal professors and kids. But in the case of straight-ahead, unbiased kids like Bethany, pointing out details like her titles in some campus club is kind of irrelevant isn’t it? I mean, what else? Do readers need to know if she prefers Pepsi or Coke?

    In fairness to Katherine, who works so very very hard drawing readers’ attention to the often murky terroristic links between the Flying Imams, anarchist bicycle groups and public schools, there’s only so much of her to go around. We agree though that she is a jewel. Kind of like that bracelet I won for my wife out of that machine down at Hole in the Wall in Danbury.

    Question: I hear odd rumors all the time. But this latest one seems pretty unfair. It says that your new editor, what’s her name, Lacey Barnes? wants to blow this frozen popstand and get back on track with an actual newspaper company, and that she’s decided her ticket out of Avista Cap … I mean, Minnesota, is winning a Pulitzer for your coverage of the bridge collapse. I’ve read a lot of your stories and they’re pretty good. But I don’t think they are exactly the New Orleans Times-Picayune covering Katrina. You know what I mean? Don’t you think you need a blockbuster? If so, can you hint at anything that might be in the pipeline?

    Randy, Your Readers’ Rep: Our very courageous editor’s name is Nancy Barnes, and she has not said anything directly to the staff about being pissed off at the McClatchy gang for leaving her marooned in Minnesota while Anders Gyllenhaal is catting around Coconut Grove in Miami. I know I couldn’t blame her if she was a little PO’d. I mean, try finding a decent mojito up here, and by "up here" I mean Minneapolis, not Superior. What’s with all that syrup crap? Besides, as she’s said before, she hates that people here look at her funny when she runs around in her favorite summer short-shorts.

    As for possible Pulitzers, we fully expect that several of our bravest, hardest-working teams will be major contenders for next year’s awards. The team that handles Sid Hartman should be in the running for his series of exclusives with Zygi Wilf, and the courageous editors shaping Kneel Justin’s new Monday media columns, especially the one where he got Frank Vascellaro to break his long, self-imposed silence will also be given serious consideration.

    As far as our bridge coverage goes, we’re working courageously and tenaciously digging for the smoking gun. Obviously we’d love nothing more than for someone out there in the public to come forward with a grainy cellphone photo, or, hell, rank hearsay showing a tax and spend liberal with 10 sticks of dynamite and a plunger next to the bridge last August. But even if it’s just video of Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau jumping up and down on the overloaded bridge deck, we’ll take it. After that the awards will take care of themselves.

    (A favor though, if I could. If you or anyone you know is down in Miami this winter and spot something for sale on the Intracoastal, maybe Fisher or Star Island, please don’t hesitate to drop Nancy a note, at nbarnes@startribune.com. Thanks.)

    Question: I’m 83 years old. Where in hell is the TV Weekly, and what is this cable crap you’re always talking about?

    Randy, Your Readers’ Rep: Our editors made two brave and courageous decisons. One, they killed, I mean they "right-sized" the TV Weekly, and two, they didn’t say anything about it. Cable is a kind of sweater. Up here we go with the dish.

    If you have questions for Randy, the Star Tribune’s Readers’ Rep, please feel free to submit them here at Lambert & Rybak to the Slaughter. (E-mail addresses are visible next to this blog. We’ll make sure they’re passed on … before the big Sunday All You Can Drink NASCAR Happy Hour.)