Read Standing Up: New York Times' David Carr Comes Home to a Changed Media Landscape

Growing up in Hopkins, Minnesota, David Carr observed his dad’s morning ritual, which involved toast and a copy of the Star Tribune. "This, I thought, is what it means to be a grown-up,” he wrote in a January column for The New York Times. "You eat your food standing up, and you read the newspaper. So I did the same thing when I turned 13.”

Today, having moved from editor of the now-defunct Twin Cities Reader in the mid-1990s to editor of Washington, D.C.’s City Paper, to his current job as a blogger and media writer for the Times, he still reads his morning paper that way. But his family, as he notes in that essay, doesn't: his kids are checking text-messages, Facebook, or the mail for Netflix arrivals, while his wife heads to work with iPod earbuds in place.

In Minneapolis this week, Carr witnessed the local impact of this technological shift away from the "paper artifacts" he grew up reading. He covered the protest on Thursday by Star Tribune employees facing buyouts and reassignments. And he characterized the legal feud sparked by Par Ridder's jump from publisher of the Pioneer Press to the top job at the Star Tribune as a distraction for companies that should be battling to stay alive: the fight, he wrote, is as if "two men, hanging off the cliff by the fingernails of one hand, decided to have a knife fight with the other hand."

Before he gave the keynote at the Society of Professional Journalists Page One Awards banquet Tuesday night, Carr spent a few minutes with Minnesota Monitor discussing how such shifts are affecting the Twin Cities. He weighed in on local media players, including former City Pages editor Steve Perry (praiseworthy as an editor, less so as an individual) and Nancy Barnes, the Star Tribune editor who seems "plenty sincere," but finds herself "playing out of George Orwell’s playbook" in spinning newsroom cuts as a "renewed focus." And, in considering the Times' successes, offered a bit of advice for managers who are pondering deeper cuts at area papers.

"I don’t think that staffing appropriately to come up with compelling content is a luxury," he said. "I think it’s a necessity. I don’t think you can cut your way to excellence or cut your way to viability."

As past editor of the Twin Cities resident and editor who's now a New York Times media columnist, you have an interesting insider/outsider vantage point. With what’s gone on here with Village Voice Media and City Pages, the Pioneer Press lawsuit and the layoffs that preceded it, and the Star Tribune’s restructuring, what does it look like from where you sit?

I picked up a copy of City Pages this week as I always do, and compared to other alternatives, it’s a really good paper. I still have hurt feelings about City Pages eventually running the Twin Cities Reader out of business. I wasn’t here but I still felt it. ...I’ve never much liked [former editor Steve Perry] or his approach. But I think as an editor, he really had few peers, in his ability to attract and sustain really, really great writers.

People like to talk about his superciliousness or his politics. The test is on the page. For years I’ve been coming back and seeing that paper, and I see papers all over the country. It’s a great paper. Or has been. And the idea that Village Voice Media didn’t have worse problems on their hands, I think is a joke. When you’ve got people like Britt Robson, Dave Schimke, Terri Sutton. Come on! Those are super-talented people.

Some say the New Times purchase of the Village Voice chain will lead to a more libertarian and less liberal — or perhaps more apolitical — kind of writing.

I share politics, probably, with Steve Perry, but I share newspaper approaches with [Village Voice Media]. I’ve always been, at both the Twin Cities Reader and at City Pages, equal opportunity in terms of choosing opponents and choosing targets. I’ve felt my job is to hold up a rigorous and true mirror that allows readers to make their own judgments. So I don’t know if that makes me a libertarian. I think it makes me a newspaperman.

I never wanted to work on an op-ed page. The other thing: [Village Voice Media] papers in general are far superior to most weeklies, and they fund great journalism, pay a living wage, pay healthcare. So many times the weeklies talk about how bad the dailies are, and I always think to myself: “Have you looked at your own paper lately? This thing sucks!”

What about the metro dailies? The lawsuit, the downsizing plans at the Star Tribune? What does that look like from your office at the New York Times?

I’m a person who grew up reading both those papers. My heroes worked at both those papers.

Who were some of those heroes?

I watched Eric Black, Tom Hamburger, Stormy Greener, Dane Smith at both papers, and I mean not just to restrict it to them. Local journalism in general was great: Eric Eskola [of WCCO and TPT], Pat Kessler [at WCCO], you name it. These people were giants to me. So, to watch papers — first the Pioneer Press -- cut right to the bone and foregoing their ambitions is sad.

I loved how the Pioneer Press was positioned as a feisty, nimble, fairly muscular competitor. The Star Tribune I don’t think has been trending well as a media organization. I think it’s a fairly safe paper. It’s far too focused on what they think the reader wants, as opposed to covering what they do. But they’re still within the bandwidth – plenty of great journalism: Paul McEnroe, Jon Tevlin, you name it.

To watch newspaper reporters out marching like steelworkers and raising their fists at the building they work in was scary and frightening to me. I don’t think there’s a boat high enough to really – you shouldn’t position me as being in a perch at the New York Times. You know, the people at the Wall Street Journal thought they had a pretty good perch two weeks ago. All the sticks are up in the air, and I don’t think anybody should feel too smug about what they’re doing. The regionals got problems. The nationals got problems. Small local dailies with monopolies still seem to be OK.

The question is how do they get from one ledge to the other? If there is a digital future how do they get there and still have the branded, quality, local content that gives them the edge?

What about local? A lot of what Nancy Barnes, the editor of the Strib, has said, and much of what we’ve heard since the 2005 redesign, is about “local, local” -- that we can make a difference by being intensely local. But I’ve also heard a lot of criticism about what might be left out -- world and national news that people need to be engaged civic participants – of that equation.

The Star Tribune gave up on a lot of that slowly over time. They had two people in their national bureau, really good ones, and now they’re going to one. The fact that there’s going to be no Duluth bureau, that somehow not having Larry Oakes in Duluth is good? I mean, c’mon! Duluth is a huge news bed. It’s a port city; it’s a place where you can jump off and cover the other half of the state. That can’t be good for the state. It can’t be good for the readers. It can’t be good for democracy.

She is saying these things partly because she has to, partly because she has to believe it. I talked to her the other day. She seems plenty sincere, but any editor who’s selling cutbacks as a renewed focus is going to be playing out of George Orwell’s playbook: more is less, less is more. You know what I mean? You have to engage in doublespeak, because you can’t step up to the mike and say, “You know what? This really sucks.”

It seems there’s a lot of injustice to many of the workers who’ve been at the paper a long time, have developed an expertise, and now are being assigned out of their jobs. But, on the other hand, there are some harsh financial realities—

You bring up a great point. We’ve always written without much emotion about job cuts or job reassignments in other industries, and now that it comes around to our industry, we’re squealing like a pig. I do think there’s an increased sensitivity and awareness because it’s our ox that’s being gored. And I do not doubt there are people that doubt the direness of the financial situation. But when you’re talking about classifieds down 30 percent year over year, that is a significant business problem. But you cannot work only the cost side to fix that.

Gary Gilson, head of the Minnesota News Council, recently praised a piece you wrote about changes at The New Republic. “It seems to me that people interested in journalistic standards could have a rich discussion about objectivity if they focused on a story such as Carr’s,” he wrote. “What I loved about Carr’s storytelling was the fact that he convinced me that he KNEW what he was talking about and he TOLD us, instead of hiding behind the journalistic convention of having to attribute every idea to some authoritative source.”

He seems to be saying you wrote with attitude and edge, rather than that here’s-one-side/here’s-the-other kind of scientific method—

What’s funny about that: that was my first straight news story coming off the blog, and I’d been blogging for four months. That was a blog hangover where I was just stepping up and writing what I thought. When I used to work here, I think it was Richard Broderick who said, “Truth is not the hole in the middle of the donut.” It’s on the donut somewhere.

I think part of the Strib's problem is that they’re so concerned with being even-handed and the perception that, because their editorial page is liberal, that they’re somehow a liberal paper. I think they’re far too careful in their discourse. You have to make a good reasoned argument, you have to be completely fair, you have to be able to back up everything you say with efficacious reporting, but achieving some sort of formal balance I think is a little bit of an archaic news concept and it reads as such. It reads, sort of... boring.

As a somewhat younger reader, I liked the tone you established. Papers like the Strib say that to stay afloat, they need to figure out how to engage these younger audiences, and maybe that writing style is one way to do it.

There's been a slow, creeping but very definite innovation in tone and content at the New York Times for some time. People say, how can you get away with writing what you want? It’s not an issue. What’s an issue is if you get it wrong, than flying monkeys come out of the ceiling and kill you.

To be modern, to be engaging, to do as you pointed out, to reach out to audiences in demographic terms -- not philosophical terms -- you have to do a direct address to the readers, and that’s not about what you think. It’s about what you’ve found out. I don’t write about the space between my ears. I’m a reporter all the way. Even though I do a media column, it’s extremely reported.

I interviewed Steve Perry awhile back and he said watching mainstream media like the Star Tribune trying to adapt to new technology and relate to readers is like "seeing your grandma in stretch pants, doing The Robot." I feel like, finally, they’re catching on, with Buzz.mn and blogs like Eric Black’s where readers can have conversations, but it seems they have so far to go to adapt to this online environment.

People like you need to think what you do is magical and effable and tough to do, and it’s not. We’ve got 27 blogs at the New York Times, and we have a lot of business on our blogs. You’d like to think it’s big and mysterious and so hard to do. It’s not really. It’s having the permission from ownership to experiment. A lot of times at the New York Times what we’re doing is saying, “Let’s give it a whirl.” ...Because we have such a tight feedback loop with our audience and we’re not up on Olympus, we find out fairly quickly what works and what does not.

Do you think you could do that if you had to cut your newsroom by 20 percent like the Strib is doing?

We’ve had significant buyouts. But there’s no question I live an entitled existence in terms of the level of staffing. But you’ve got to keep in mind that with all those people comes a great ambition to not just cover a city, not just cover a state, not just cover a country, but cover a world. There’s not many Scrabble players at The New York Times. There’s not many people who stroke their beards. Everybody is engaged. I don’t think that staffing appropriately to come up with compelling content is a luxury. I think it’s a necessity. I don’t think you can cut your way to excellence or cut your way to viability.

We’re insulated by our two-tiered staff structure, but so is Dow Jones, and it seems like there’s some kind of questions about that. I do think that so far private equity as an owner of a newspaper, with their need for high margins and quick exits, have been a flop so far. Who knows?

Do you long for the Cowles days, the private ownership days?

Yeah, I do. I prefer to work with people I have values in common with. [Times publisher] Arthur Sulzberger and I don’t have a lot in common in terms of background, but we share values up and down. I don’t spend a lot of time talking to the guy, but when I see him, I think we both are oddly bullish about the newspaper business.

We’re growing audience. We’re diversifying into online businesses in meaningful ways. But when you belong to public markets or you belong to private equity, the clock ticks at a rate where it’s very difficult to innovate your way to the future. No one wants to hear about five quarters. They want to know what’s going to happen this quarter.

You can’t blame them. I mean, money has no conscience.

[Cross-posted at Minnesota Monitor.]

Beyond "Black Monday" at the Star Tribune

Dubbed "Black Monday," the May 7 announcement that the Minneapolis Star Tribune is aiming to eliminate 145 positions including 50 in the newsroom, was followed by "Blue Tuesday," an emotional day in which newsroom employees were called in one-by-one to learn their fate. Many reporters will be assigned to new beats, some columnists will revert to reporting, and at least one has learned he'll be let go. And the unofficial word in the newsroom is that the editorial page staff will be cut to seven people.

The Rake's Brian Lambert reports that TV writer Neal Justin will be given the opportunity to "compete" with Deborah Rybak for a non-column reporting job; Linda Mack will be reassigned away from architecture coverage; and writer Sara Glassman will likely be losing her fashion beat.

Many longtime reporters are considering the buyout offer, which would offer two weeks of pay for each year of service, up to 52 weeks, plus six months of paid health insurance (the March buyout offer capped payouts at 40 weeks). The Newspaper Guild must approve the offer before its members can sign on.

Reached yesterday before she met with editors, Sharon Schmickle, an international reporter and 1995 Pulitzer Prize finalist, said, "It might be too strong to say I'm seriously considering TAKING a buyout. What I'm doing right now is using the occasion to explore a lot of options, to think about where the newspaper is going and whether I want to steer in the same direction or try something different."

She said, despite all the "gloomy analysis" about the future of print journalism, she's somewhat hopeful about new opportunities in the field, citing the online multimedia package on Liberia she worked on earlier this year.

"It was so cool to be able to add the power of audio and video to that report, and I'm eager to do more of it," she said. "On the other hand, I'm not sure how much interest there will be at the Star Tribune of the future in covering Liberia. The interest may be there. Nancy Barnes was very supportive of the project, and she committed the time and resources I needed to make it happen. I just don't know whether she could do the same in the future."

Pam Miller, at the Strib's Guild blog, wrote of the meetings, "People winced and wept upon learning that nonunion colleagues and friends were being abruptly let go. (We now work at a newspaper where someone like Par Ridder stays, and someone like Rob Daves goes?? Up is down, and down is up.)"

The paper's Matt McKinney reported Tuesday that the paper "gave an involuntary buyout" to Daves, longtime director of the Minnesota Poll and part-time manager of Buzz.mn. Daves said he was too busy at the moment to comment on what he admitted was "shocking" news of his firing. He's preparing for a high-profile address he's giving next week at the national conference for the American Association for Public Opinion Research. He's the organization's president.

[Cross-posted at Minnesota Monitor.]

Spider-Man Scales Front Page at Pioneer Press

Spider-Man took over the front page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press on Friday -- and not the benevolent, good-guy superhero. Or so it seemed: Peter Parker's black-suited alter ego took up a quarter of the cover space, and the crouching web-slinger's ominous visage even obscured the name of the newspaper. The subhead read, "More villains, more action, more romance."

City Pages' Paul Demko seemed to think they left a line out: "More whoring ourselves out to advertisers."

True, the paper dedicated considerable space to the Sony Pictures film, opening May 4. In addition to 25 percent of the cover, half of the front of the Daily Life section went to the film review, the story was continued on 2E, and a full-color, 1/6-page ad for the movie appeared on 3E. (Across the river, the Star Tribune included a small photo teaser for the film on its cover, plus a review on the cover of its Scene section. Curiously, both print editions had a near-identical "Tangled Web" headline. I blame Par Ridder.)

Pioneer Press editor Thom Fladung said no ad dollars were involved in the decision to give the film such prominence. So why the hype?

"It's a huge movie opening tonight," he said. "On a day when we didn't have big compelling breaking news, I thought it was a way to make the front-page look distinctive."

But given Pioneer Press critic Chris Hewitt's rave-free review -- he said the film was "bloated," "a bust," "a real yawner," and "about as thrilling as walking into a cobweb" -- wasn't that action/romance/villains headline a bit of a bait-and-switch?

"Did it feel that way to you?" Fladung asked. "It didn't feel that way to me."

Related: "Front & Center: Metro Dailies Quietly Put Ads on Section Covers"

The Voluntary Buyout That Wasn't: Strib Denies Sports Writer's Bid to Keep Working

Ninety-seven seconds before midnight on March 10, Star Tribune sports writer Steve Aschburner emailed his managers telling them he wanted to take a voluntary buyout of his contract. He was on the road, covering a Timberwolves game in Atlanta, and his decision came at the very end of a five-day window in which employees could choose to leave the paper in exchange for a payout for time served.

Aschburner quickly regretted his decision, recognizing it as an "impulsive, stressed-out thing" complicated by personal issues and the "ticking bomb" nature of the five-day clause, and within four days he told his editor he wanted to stay. For the past six weeks he's been pleading with Star Tribune managers to let him keep doing a job he loves -- but what he's found is that management sees his buyout as anything but voluntary.

For 13 of his nearly 21 years at the Star Tribune, Aschburner's beat has been the NBA, and the Minnesota Timberwolves in particular, and in that time he has earned praise from fans -- including one who hailed his ability to work the word "vomitorium" into a piece on a Timberwolves' loss -- and colleagues alike (he recently finished a two-year stint as president of the Professional Basketball Writers Association). And while he couched his successes in modest terms, he admitted, "I really loved my job, and I think I made [the Star Tribune's NBA coverage] into a brand."

But in the five days after the Star Tribune sale to Avista Capital Partners was finalized, he found himself facing a "perfect storm" that fueled his decision to leave his job: "The grind of the season, the isolation of the road, some miscommunication with my wife and then the shock and scare of a friend's and peer's death." A sudden heart attack killed his colleague, the seemingly healthy 55-year-old Hartford Courant sports reporter Alan Greenberg, and seeing himself as out-of-shape, he wondered if he was next. Combined, these factors left him "in no position to be making a life-altering decision."

But the long view is this: he loves his job and has no problems with the paper's new management. His desire to stay isn't about a change of heart. Instead, his fleeting wish to leave was a "hiccup" in judgement, but now the paper is viewing that mistake as the norm and his the two decades of eager service as an anomaly, he said. The Star Tribune denied his request to rescind his buyout application, citing budget concerns, according to a letter sent to publisher Par Ridder by members of the paper's Newspaper Guild unit.

Referencing conversations with Aschburner and letters from his doctor, Guild members Jaime Chismar, Pam Miller, and Chris Serres wrote that they believed Aschburner was under "emotional duress" when he indicated his interest in the buyout, and that he was in no condition to "reflect clearly on how leaving the Star Tribune would affect his career and family." They continued:

To deny Steve the opportunity to continue his career at this newspaper, especially in light of the anxiety he was under at the time of the resignation deadline, seems senseless and cruel. We urge compassion and respect for a dedicated journalist who loved the Star Tribune and is prepared to remain a productive contributor for many years to come.

Aschburner has also received unexpected and unsought support from sportwriting colleagues. Phil Jasner of the Philadelphia Daily News and Doug Smith of the Toronto Star have both written letters to Aschburner's editor urging his reinstatement.After finishing out the Timberwolves' season, Aschburner's last day of work was Friday, April 20, and he has not yet considered what he'll do next. He said he won't pursue legal action against the Star Tribune and isn't bitter about management's decision, but he still holds out hope for a change of heart.

"Someone is going to have to cover that team and league going forward, and no one on staff wants it or has experience," he said. "I am dying to stay on the job."

In times when the paper is in upheaval after the departures of 23 other newsroom staffers, continuing budget concerns, and the turmoil of a new publisher accused of swiping business secrets and staffers from his old employer, the Pioneer Press, why is the Star Tribune refusing to welcome back a popular, well-recognized and, above all, enthusiastic member of its team?

[Cross-posted at Minnesota Monitor. Photo: Aschburner presents Kevin Garnett the 2005-2006 J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award, via Garnett Tribute.]

Who Owns the J-Word: Videoblogger's Jailing Raises Questions for Journalists

Ever since Josh Wolf was thrown in jail in August of 2006, a debate has raged about his job title. Is Wolf -- the 24-year-old freelance videographer, blogger, and activist who was jailed for refusing to hand over footage of a 2005 anarchist protest in San Francisco -- a "journalist"? Imprisoned for 226 days, longer than any other American journalist facing similar accusations, Wolf was released April 3 after complying with a subpoena and posting the (rather unremarkable) video on his website. That didn't calm questions about whether Wolf is a journalist and, therefore, whether he should've been protected by California's "shield" law which protects journalists who are trying to keep unnamed sources or interview notes private.

Local experts, including the St. Cloud-based chair of Wolf's defense fund at the national Society for Professional Journalists, think he is, and they see his case, problematic as it may be, as a key fight to defend journalistic ethics -- and a reporter now defying a handover request from a judge in Mankato, Minn.

On July 8, 2005, Wolf grabbed his video camera to document a rally in San Francisco's Mission district held by local anarchists to coincide with a globalization conference happening concurrently in Scotland. During the protest, a police officer's skull was fractured, and there was allegedly an attempt to torch a police car. Wolf sold some of his footage of the day to local TV stations.

In the investigation that followed, a grand jury subpoenaed Wolf to turn over raw video footage and testify before the grand jury about its contents. (Around 65 subpoenas for journalists have been approved by the U.S. Attorney General since 2001.) Citing the First Amendment, his commitment to protecting the confidentiality of sources, and a belief that the media shouldn't be a tool of law enforcement, he refused -- and wound up in jail.

So. Is Wolf a "journalist" deserving protection under shield laws? Or does his unabashed activism and identification as an anarchist mean he's crossed the line between objectivity, the journalist's professed stock and trade, and advocacy.

Anthony Lappe of the progressive Guerrilla News Network said that Wolf's "oeuvre as a journalist, radical or not, is thin" consisting mainly of "online rants and what I call 'protest porn' -- contextless video of radical protests." And the conservative San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders renders verdict in a piece with a title that says it all: "A journalist in his own mind."

She writes:

The issue here is whether Wolf should be protected by shield laws designed to protect real journalists who need to protect their sources. In Wolf's ideal world, he would qualify, not because he follows journalistic practices, but because he disseminates information to the public.

Of course, Wolf's cause appeals to the liberal sensibilities of the Special City. If a kid anarchist is willing to go to jail because he thinks he's a journalist, he must be a journalist. He feels so strongly about it. Damn the consequences.

Except a federal shield law that would protect Wolf also would protect an anti-abortion activist with a camera who attends an anti-abortion demonstration that turns violent and tapes activists as they pummel abortion clinic workers.

I asked Wolf: Should an anti-abortion blogger be able to use a shield law to protect the identity of an activist who beat up a clinic worker? He answered, "There should be some level of protection, yes."

The editorial board at Saunders' paper disagreed with her assessment. "The fact that Josh Wolf has strong political views does not disqualify him from being a journalist any more than the fact that I am an editorial page editor and have opinions disqualifies me from being a journalist," said John Diaz of the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview with Kevin Sites. "The fact is, he was out at that rally, collecting information to disseminate to the public. I think that makes him a journalist."

Press freedom groups like Reporters without Borders and the Society of Professional Journalists -- an organization that, through its northern California chapter, nominated Wolf Journalist of the Year -- agree. The SPJ gave $31,000 to Wolf's legal defense, its largest donation ever for such a case, according to Dave Aiekens, a 13-year reporter at the St. Cloud Times and chair of the national defense fund. "The case is far from perfect," he acknowledged, "but they never are."While the SPJ stood firmly behind Wolf, it has no interest in the is-he-a-journalist question.

“The minute you start defining who’s a journalist you go down a tricky path of the government licensing journalists," Aiekens said. "We don’t think the government should have anything to say about it."

He added that because Wolf was shooting video and providing it to TV news stations, and has an established history of doing so, that qualifies him as a journalist.

For the sake of argument, would terrorists who videotape beheadings and bombings and send the footage to broadcast outlets then fall into that category? I'd argue no. While the subjects Wolf has taped often are masked, Wolf isn't. He posts his videos and sells footage to news stations under his own name, and the activities he's recorded -- at least in the case of the disputed clips of the San Francisco rally, which include no imagery of arson or violence -- conceal nothing criminal, as far as I can tell.

The burden of proof should fall on those who wish to disprove Wolf is a journalist. And who should do that? Certainly not the government, as Aiekens said. Jane Kirtley, director of the University of Minnesota's Silha Center for Media Ethics & Law and a board member of SPJ's chapter for Minnesta professional journalists, concurs.

"We don't have government licensing [for journalists] in the US," she said, adding, "There are many situations in which access to some event or other is restricted to 'accredited' journalists. Even the House and Senate Press Galleries engage in trying to decide whether or not someone is a 'journalist' in order to qualify for a press pass-- which is another example of journalists themselves deciding who is 'one of us.' I think we can't blind ourselves to the reality that in the past, there have been occasions when journalists have closed out by other journalists. So I guess the question is, in an ideal world, should anybody decide 'who is a journalist,' other than the 'journalist' him or herself?"

The case highlights a need, said Aiekens, for a federal shield law. Thirty-two states, including Minnesota and California have such laws, but a federal provision was shot down in 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-to-4 against the premise that a "reporter's privilege" to keep sources confidential is implied by the First Amendment. (California has a shield law, but it doesn't apply to Wolf. The alleged arson attempt on the police car makes it a federal case because, in a weird twist of legal logic, the SFPD receives some Homeland Security funds.)

"We felt if we made a big splash with [the SPJ's donation to Wolf's defense] we could get some momentum behind a federal shield law," Aiekens said. The law would "force the government to have a higher standard of evidence" in proving that information about crimes, for example, can only be obtained through reporter's unpublished notes.

He added that this kind of case "can happen anywhere, to anyone."

In fact, in Mankato, Minn., a veteran reporter is resisting requests by a judge and law enforcement to turn over interview notes.

On December 23, four hours into a police standoff with a man in the town of Amboy, Mankato Free Press reporter Dan Nienaber still had no details from police about the nature of the case, which began when police responded to a domestic disturbance call. And, according to the paper, readers were calling in, alarmed at rumors that five people had been murdered.

Nienaber grabbed his cellphone and began calling numbers in the area, ending up, by accident, on the line with Jeffrey Alan Skjervold, the man at the center of the standoff. There weren't five murders; Skjervold told the reporter he'd shot two officers and was bleeding from a gunshot in his stomach. Eventually he turned the gun on himself.

Nienaber mentioned the call in his report, and even though law enforcement agreed that Skjervold took his own life and that no other suspect was being considered in the crime, still sought Nienaber's notes. Prosecutors won't say what they want them for, but the paper said it believes this is an attempt to intimidate reporters and the paper. (Contacted last month, Nienaber said he couldn't comment as the case was "still in the courts.")

I find myself in agreement with everyone I quoted here -- and with Wolf. Lappe is right on when he says Wolf's journalistic cred is a bit flimsy. Kirtley and Aeikens are right that journalists should be free from government definitions of "journalist," and therefore Saunders is right that Wolf is a journalist simply because he says he is. The price of entry, admittedly, is pretty low. But given what's at stake -- news coverage we can trust as independent from the motives of government and law enforcement -- it seems a fair trade.

Maybe that's what Alexis de Toqueville had in mind when he wrote, "In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils that it creates."

Update: This piece won a 2007 Frank Premack Public Affairs Journalism Award from the University of Minnesota School of Journalism, the first time the prize has gone to an online journalist.

[Cross-posted at Minnesota Monitor.]

Beyond Newspapers: Steve Perry on Web Journalism

For several weeks, former City Pages editor Steve Perry and I have been having a back-and-forth email interview -- his first interview since leaving the Minneapolis altweekly in February -- on the Twin Cities media scene, the state of newspapers in the US, and net neutrality. The entire thing's online at Minnesota Monitor, but here's the last part:

Talking about the bright side of newspapers now is like trying to name the cheeriest thing about mass suicide. In its hour of deepest crisis, the industry is gutting its own resources in the interest of next quarter's bottom line. As a friend of mine put it, they're all being run like financial companies when they are in fact manufacturing companies that need to be looking out for their productive resources.

Most of the fun, and the sense of discovery, is on the web. Obviously. I mean, you've got tens of thousands of blogs that engage "the news" in some way. And although the vast majority just cannibalize workaday media and lay on a dollop of partisan cant, blogs have also produced a new generation of voices doing good, distinctive, original political analysis and media criticism, two huge blind spots of mainstream media.

The internet is also pressing newsgatherers to involve their readers in a more dynamic way, to let them in on interpreting and elaborating and sometimes even defining "the news." The challenge is to find ways to do that without letting the inmates run the asylum -- without letting the conversation descend to unverifiable claims, stupid in-jokes, and lumpen flame wars. Unmoderated is bad, n'kay?

The main issue for journalism is still monetizing the web, making a web platform pay for the kind of staffing that can produce useful original reporting. I have no idea how that will happen, but the smartest people I know on the marketing side of the internet think part of the answer will be elements of paid content. I know that's heresy to most users -- who doesn't like content that's all free all the time? But it's not all bad from the readers' standpoint, either. There's nothing like making people pay for content to ratchet up the pressure to make it ambitious.

It's impossible to say what the web is going to be like five years from now. There are political and commercial pressures in play that mainstream media has done an atrocious job of covering. What percentage of Americans has even heard the term "net neutrality," I wonder? How many people know that there's a lobbying movement afoot to create a two-tier internet in which the highest-speed connectivity is reserved for big companies that can pay a premium for it? Far too few. Most people regard the internet as a tool for entertaining themselves and shopping, and assume that the hand of the market will only make it more flashy, more fun, more powerful. They think it's essentially just another consumer product. Even among media critics, there's too little recognition that it's a new communication medium that's still in its Wild West phase, making itself up as it goes.

And beyond the pressures to make it a more exclusive tool of corporate commerce, there is also a lot of political anxiety about how wide-open dialogue and dissent can be on the internet. Do you remember the phrase the late Samuel Huntington coined to describe the political tumult surrounding Vietnam? He called it a "crisis of democracy," meaning there was too damn much democracy, too many voices demanding to be heard. The internet is a continual crisis of democracy in that sense, and it's naive to suppose it will stay as open in the future without political fights. There are those people who deem it unthinkable, or even technologically impossible, to limit American citizens' access to information on the web, but they're just plain wrong. (Every new communications medium spawns this kind of utopianism -- there were people in the '20s who thought radio would bring the revolution, and people in the '50s who thought TV would increase civic participation. Heh.) It's not impossible to hamstring web users. The best thing I've read on the subject is Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu's book, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World. You have to read it if you haven't.

So in a sense, any speculation about the future of the web and of news media on the web has an asterisk at the end of every sentence. It's possible, for instance, to revamp the web to give a huge advantage to the usual cartel of well-capitalized media companies, and make it much tougher for small sites, amateur or professional, to draw traffic and to serve multimedia. It's possible, in other words, to more or less restore the old order in a new medium.

But it hasn't happened yet, and it's not entirely inevitable. At minimum, there's a lot of fun to be had in the meantime. Is there a downside to mainstream media's efforts to mimic what bloggers do? Yeah, if not understanding the spirit of the endeavor counts as a downside. I hasten to add that there are now a *lot* of good blogs scattered around daily newspaper sites, but the news business in general remains hampered on the web by the assumptions it makes about reporters as senders and readers as passive receivers. Watching newspapers try to "relate" with readers is still vaguely embarrassing much of the time -- this odd combination of unctuous and patronizing at the same time. Kind of like seeing your grandma in stretch pants, doing The Robot.

Or a Kate Parry column.

Read "Black and White and Dead All Over: Steve Perry on the Pauperization of Newspaper and the Promise of the Internet"

Zine Publisher: "Debt is America's social safety net"

It's a weird kind of fortune that greets Tobin Brogunier's new publication, Creditland. A free tabloid distributed in the Twin Cities and Brooklyn, N.Y., its launch coincides with a spike in awareness of credit debt brought on by a meltdown in the subprime lending market and the premiere of the award-winning documentary film Maxed Out by James Scurlock (showing, until recently, at the Lagoon Cinema in Minneapolis). But the publication's origins have little to do with such luck.

A Minneapolis-based documentary photographer, Brogunier was living in Brooklyn five years ago when, saddled by five-digits worth of business-related credit card debt, he filed for bankruptcy. As he worked to rebuild his financial life, he pondered the psychology of lenders who kept extending him credit, even as his ability to pay diminished. Creditland, a chronicle of the practices and effects of America's credit-card companies, is the repository of some of his findings.

The inaugural issue, which hit the streets March 30, includes transcripts of personal stories about debt, a glossary of economic terms used by lenders and short fiction. The design of the four-page publication, like the theme it addresses, seems maxed out: Text is everywhere, jammed to the margins, with little breathing room offered via white space. Brogunier said the design matches the economy of the subject: "Paper is valuable." But much of the content is rich, especially the cover story, an interview Brogunier conducted with "Maxed Out" director Scurlock. (Full disclosure: I first met Brogunier at a February forum on predatory lending, and my recording of the event is the basis for the transcript of state Rep. Jim Davnie's talk at that event, which appears in Creditland).

The next issue will focus on the rebuilding of New Orleans and the struggles of African-American homeowners in the hurricane-struck region. He also hopes to begin collecting first-person narratives on debt (and welcomes "Debtor of the Month" columnists) and verbatim transcripts of phone calls with representatives from credit-card companies.

Brogunier hopes the publication will reach people affected by credit-card debt -- whether they are the visible urban poor or the seemingly well-to-do but secretly over-extended borrowers in wealthier suburbs -- and demonstrate the shared effects of the "mindless consumption binge" he says America has been on for 25 years.

"Some people do well in that system," he said. "They make enough money that they can buy things and it works and the global economy keeps going, and that’s great. Other people aspire to do that, and if they’re aspiring to do that and they don’t have the cash, credit cards come in as a stopgap measure. In an ownership society — as George Bush calls it — you end up being compelled to keep up with the Joneses, and what you end up owning is a lot of debt."

The social critique embedded in Creditland is aimed as much at the U.S. government as at the opportunistic credit-card companies, Brogunier said. "Debt I consider to be America’s version of a social safety net," he said. "We don’t cover health care, we don’t cover child care, so when the expenses get to be too much, it’s credit debt that comes in. It’s like a government subsidy, except it’s not the government, it’s privatized."

But while Creditland has built-in criticism, he emphasized that the publication's title shouldn't be read as an indictment of America, but instead as a call to ethics, which he defines as "doing the right thing."

"I have no problem with America. America is a very enterprising place. If you have an idea, America is the place to produce it," he said. "This country is extremely rewarding of ideas that work, and I want this to be an idea that works. This is an American magazine that way."

You could say Creditland is un-American in another way, though: while Americans are reaching record debt levels -- in 2006, we owed $12.8 trillion in mortgage and consumer loans (135% of disposable income) -- Brogunier says he won't use credit to keep the ad-supported magazine going.

Practicing what he preaches, he doesn't even own a credit card.

Fundamentalism on the Covers

In the April 2 issue of Time, Americans get treated to a different cover story than the rest of the world. The global editions report on the situation in Pakistan just across the Afghanistan border: "young religious extremists have overrun scores of towns and villages in the border areas, with the intention of imposing their strict interpretation of Islam on a population unable to fight back." Such jihadists, writes Time, are providing cover for al-Qaeda leaders who are training new recruits, and Osama bin Laden is thought to have hidden in these tribal lands, dubbed Talibanistan.

U.S. readers, however, get a cover story called "The Case for Teaching the Bible." The story is teased using this blurb:

Should the Holy Book be taught in public schools? Yes. It's the bedrock of Western culture. And when taught right, it's even constitutional.

It's officially a trend: in September, Newsweek chose to shield American readers from distressing stories about the Taliban, which appeared on the cover of its international editions, instead offering a cover story on celebrity photographer Annie Liebovitz.

Curry's courage

NBC's Ann Curry on why she's returned to Darfur, Sudan, for the third time in 12 months:

“The real reason, to be perfectly honest, is that as a child when I first learned that there were people who risked their own lives and even the lives of their children, their families, to save Jews during the Holocaust, it was a profound moment for me. It made me question whether I am the kind of human being who would take such risks.”

Who's minding the story in D.C.? Strib takes issues with McCollum's departures email

When U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum sent out her weekly e-mail newsletter on March 5, the Minnesota Democrat included a farewell to the paper's longtime Washington reporters, who will continue working for the Strib's former owner, McClatchy.

"I want to thank Rob Hotakainen and Kevin Diaz for more than 20 years of service each with the Star Tribune and wish them well in their new assignments," wrote the fourth-term representative. "I and the rest of the Minnesota congressional delegation look forward to working with the Star Tribune's intern, Brady Averill, who will now be responsible for covering the news from our nation's capitol."

The sentiment didn't sit well with Star Tribune reader's representative Kate Parry, who received "a note of concern" from a reader about it. She called and e-mailed McCollum's chief of staff, Bill Harper, and said McCollum's words left "the misimpression that the Star Tribune will now be covering Congress only with an intern. This is not the Star Tribune's plan for Washington coverage."

Two days later, McCollum's office sent out the clarification Parry requested -- prefaced with a note that in fact the paper's intern will be the paper's only Washington staffer "until an unspecified future date when they plan to 'hire at least one new correspondent,' according to a Star Tribune article on March 6." The exchange highlights that the paper hasn't been entirely clear about when and how it will replace these Washington reporters.

And it suggests a larger question: in these days of shrinking newsrooms nationwide (including the Star Tribune, where 24 newsroom employees took voluntary buyouts this week) and Walter Reed-sized scandals making headlines, how will the Minneapolis paper maintain the "vitality," as Harper puts it, that is "critical to ensure that citizens are informed" until its Washington office is fully staffed?

Parry's answer to that question: Averill will be "bolstered by reporters here and our continuing access to Washington coverage provided by the McClatchy newswire," she wrote.

Plans beyond that aren't very firm. Will they hire two positions or one? Will one be hired on as the bureau chief? When do they expect these new staffers to be in place? Strib nation/world editor Dave Peters, who oversees Averill's Washington work, couldn't answer any of these questions. Managing editor Scott Gillespie did not return Minnesota Monitor's request for an interview, and Averill declined comment.

But Peters acknowledged his desire to have more reporters in D.C. "I wish we didn’t have this disruption," he said. "I liked working with Kevin and Rob. They’re good. But for whatever reason, we’re having to change gears and naturally there’s a little bit of a hitch in there, but we’ll come out in a good place in the end, I’m confident."

In fact, neither Diaz nor Hotakainen wanted to leave the Star Tribune either, but the pay package offered by Avista, the paper's new owner, presented them few options.

Hotakainen, the Strib's bureau chief who just started as Washington correspondent for the McClatchy-owned Kansas City Star, wrote in an email to Minnesota Monitor, "It was an easy decision: Stay with McClatchy at full salary or take a pay cut to work for the Star Tribune."

Diaz said he "didn't relish" leaving Minnesota politics behind, especially with the treasure trove of material, from Al Franken running for Senate to Michele Bachmann and Keith Ellision in the House, the Republican National Convention in 2008 to Minnesota congressmen chairing influential committees.

"This was not a good time to leave," he said. "But new management really gave me no choice. The alternative was to give back every performance pay raise I've received since I came to Washington in 2000."

The same financial matters that lost the Star Tribune its veteran Washington writers may affect the hiring of their replacements as well. The paper's classified ad for the job(s) named a $60,000 to $75,000 pay range. Is that competitive, considering the expertise and connections required of a D.C. correspondent, not to mention that city's cost of living and the responsibilities that come with the title "bureau chief?"

Tom Hamburger, a Washington reporter for the Los Angeles Times, chose not to weigh in on those questions, but instead said he'd look to a broader issue, the "bleeding of quality" the situation in Washington suggests. When he began his ten-year stint at the Strib's Washington bureau in 1989, he was one of five reporters, one intern and four full-time journalists.

"This appears to be a sign of reduced commitment to Washington coverage by the paper," he said. "The most significant signs are the continued reduction in staff in the bureau and the failure to keep experienced people -- who knew what they were doing, knew how to cover Washington, and were doing an excellent job -- in their jobs."

Hamburger added that the staff he worked with continued the bureau's long tradition of reporting regional news while breaking national stories, like reporter Frank Wright's Nixon-era stories on the scandal over milk price supports, Finley Lewis' coverage of Walter Mondale's presidential run, and, more recently, revelations about the role of Minnesotans like Vin Weber in the rise of the modern conservative movement in the 1990s. (Hamburger didn't mention the story he co-wrote with Star Tribune reporter Sharon Schmickle about questionable gift receipts by members of the U.S. Supreme Court, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.) He's disappointed that the bureau is, even temporarily, reduced to a single intern.

"It's part of a general sadness that I find with what's happened to regional newspapers," he said. "But it's particularly insulting to those of us who worked at the Star Tribune for so many years. I worked there when the Cowles family owned the paper, and they were really trying to do a good job of maintaining the paper's legacy when they sold it to McClatchy. And it just hasn't worked out."

While Hotakainen admitted he has mixed feelings about leaving the paper he's worked at for more than two decades, he doesn't take anything personally. "It's simply a desire by the new owners to cut costs." He added that he suspects publisher Par Ridder and interim publisher Chris Harte won't be around in three to five years, at which point "a new managemenet team will come in and pick up the pieces."

As for the future, Strib editor Peters hesitated to predict when the Washington bureau would be fully staffed (its ad posted at JournalismJobs.com has a closing date of April 6), but said he's optimistic. "It’s going well. We’re getting good applications. I can say that much."

McCollum's press secretary, Bryan Collinsworth, hopes so. He said there's so much going on in Washington over the next few weeks that Minnesotans need to know about; topping that list, he said, is a key Iraq vote now in committee that will likely get a floor vote next week.

"You could say this is one of the most important times to have good coverage in Washington in years," he said.

Hamburger concurred. "This is an enormously busy, news-filled time in Washington: new Congress, an administration that’s on the ropes, a war that’s going poorly, the economy’s shaken," he said. "Those will still be covered. How Minnesota's congressional delegation responds is going to be covered less thoroughly. It has to be, not because the intern’s not competent -- I've met her, and I think she's very good -- but because they’ve taken away the experienced professionals who were covering it previously. That’s a loss for Minnesota."

Diaz's conclusion was more succinct. "Welcome to the modern American newsroom."

[Cross-posted at Minnesota Monitor.]

Scooter Libby guilty, unless you're watching Fox

Fox News goes Clintonian: of course, Scooter Libby was found guilty on four of five charges leveled against him. He faces up to 25 years in prison. But Fox chooses to accentuate the positive, that fifth charge he was acquitted of. (Via Reddit.)

Strib Stress: Meditating on a Newspaper Sale

Yesterday's Minnesota Monitor column:

A reporter's job is a tough one any day -- the Sisyphean churn of deadlines, the public scrutiny, the pace -- but those working in the Star Tribune newsroom can add another layer to the stress: on Monday, the paper's sale to Avista Capital Partners, a company known more for standards of investing than journalism, is expected to go through. So, who can blame veteran reporter Randy Furst for needing a special trick to keep his professional and personal ducks in a row?

Possibly the paper’s management.

On the morning of February 20, Furst set out at around 10 for a familiar ritual. He found an empty conference room on the second floor at 425 Portland Avenue, found a chair he hoped would be out of eyeshot of those passing by the room's window, leaned back, and took a breath. Some days these meditations would mean Furst counting back from 100 to 1. Others, he'd reflect on a passage from literature that, he said, "will get me closer to my higher power." He always has his PDA, and he ends up jotting down thoughts and a to-do list for the day.

"I'm a senior reporter here, and I need to try to get real clarity about what I need to do on a given day," he said. "It makes me a better journalist."

But on that Tuesday morning, his ritual was cut short. A woman Furst didn't recognize interrupted him and told him, "There's a meeting going on and you'll have to leave."

He did, thinking nothing of it, and ended up back at his desk digging into a story. In early afternoon, he was told by a newsroom manager that there was an “important” 2:30 p.m. meeting he needed to be at. “Make sure you've got a union representative with you,” he was told, because the meeting might result in disciplinary action.

At the 2:30 meeting, with two representatives of the Minnesota Newspaper Guild in tow, he sat slackjawed as management grilled him. "They told me I'd been spotted by a senior member of management of the company with my ear against the wall, listening to what was going on in another conference room. It was a real shocker," he said. "Did I know who was meeting in the next room, they asked. I told them I didn't, and I didn't care, because I was there to meditate. They told me the top executives in the company were there and they were meeting with some major people from New York."

When word got around the newsroom that Furst, who has worked for the paper since 1973, was being questioned as a spy, there was disbelief. "The whole thing is bizarre," said Chris Serres, a Star Tribune reporter. "Initially we thought it was a joke that he'd been accused of eavesdropping. Randy is probably the most respected journalist at the Star Tribune."

But then the anger came: one reporter, upon hearing the allegation, punched a wall and nearly broke his hand, Serres said. "The newsroom is a cauldron. There's already a high degree of tension over the sale."

Management’s recent announcement that it won’t fill positions vacated by staffers who take contract buyouts didn’t help. There's a clause in the paper's Newspaper Guild contract that states that in the event of a sale to an outside buyer, Guild members can choose to resign and receive two weeks of pay for every year worked, with a 40-week cap. According to Serres, who is vice chair of the paper's Guild unit, between 15 and 30 employees are expected to take buyouts. On Monday, staffers can start submitting letters of resignation; Friday is the last day to do so.

On Monday of this week, management told Furst they believed he wasn't eavesdropping and that he had a strong reputation for honesty. His employee file would have no mention of the accusation.

Serres sounded relieved. "Had they pursued this investigation, the newsroom would've erupted. The union doesn't need a battle like this," he added. "We want to focus on the work ahead, and we don't need ridiculous distractions to get in the way."

Fallout from the sale tops the union’s to-do list. A key task will be monitoring workloads to make sure employees don’t burn out from covering jobs once done by those who take buyouts.

Layoffs are another worry. He fears staff cuts will affect the quality of the Star Tribune's journalism -- and it's long-term viability. Those at risk for layoffs, he said, are reporters without seniority. "Layoffs will hit younger people hardest," he said, the same people who tend to eager and educated on the new online journalism practices touted by management. Low in seniority, too, he added, are minority reporters who are representing traditionally under-represented populations.

"You'll get a monolithic point of view that doesn't represent the community," he said.

Over the next week, as McClatchy hands the keys over to Avista, and some of the friends Furst has made over 34 years at the paper decide to say so long, one senior reporter will likely be scoping out empty conference rooms where he can breathe deeply and pin down invading thoughts in a PDA. Perhaps he won’t be the only one. Stribbers following Furst’s path might heed the joking advice of a newsroom colleague: make sure the adjacent rooms are empty -- and be sure to bring along a Guild representative.

Campaign 2.0: Obama's Social Network

According to the Federal Elections Commission, 109 people had filed to run for president before the end of 2006. Of those, how many have a clue about Web-based campaigning?

Over the next weeks, I'll be looking at the Web sites of major-party candidates who are considering running for president. I'll look at the trends and technology, design and branding. I'll track puns (Mrs. Clinton calls her faithful "Hillraisers," while Chris Dodd commands "The Dodd Squad.") and patriots (Tommy Thompson and Mitt Romney appear in heroic relief against the flapping furls of the flag), the ominous (Tom Vilsack's flying V logo) and the oblivious (Tom Tancredo goes all Ted Stevens on us, confusing a Web page for an e-mail: "Dear Friend, I am writing to you as a fellow believer in the cause of securing America's borders.")

First up, Barack Obama's site...

If you don't believe Barack Obama is a contender, check out his Web site. It's million-dollar look (and, I'm guessing, development budget), is crisp and clear, filled with some of Web 2.0's best doodads, but thankfully without the telltale Web 2.0 design cues (i.e., his name isn't Obamr^TM and the word Beta appears nowhere). The logo is all heartland chic: patriotic, rural and optimistic without wrapping itself in the flag; it conjures a "morning in America" feel as Obama's "O" rises over plow furrows that double as flag stripes. The look is restrained and tasteful — in sharp contrast to the man he hopes to succeed, whose tough-guy design has mimicked an interstate highway sign, NASCAR motifs, the colors of local NFL teams (at a Wisconsin rally, Bush's campaign signs took on Packer green and gold, while here in Minnesota they shifted to VikPublishings purple), and a bold flying W.

But what's most impressive is the site's technology. The Obama campaign appears to be using custom-designed, proprietary social-networking software that falls under that favorite Web 2.0 prefix, My.BarackObama.com (interestingly, while Obama has a mySpace account, there seems to be no link to the Rupert Murdoch-owned networking site anywhere on his home page: coincidence?). After users create a free account, they can start a blog, invite friends, publicize events, and — get this — do "personal fundraising" for the candidate. That is, you can customize a page, complete with a fundraising thermometer and room for a photo you can upload (my test-page, entitled "Let's Go Sledding!," features my frantic dog chasing my wife and I down a winter hill), and invite people to pitch in for Barack.

Users can create groups, and according to the site's blog, more than 1,000 groups already exist, from the Pasadena-based Macs for Barack (for Apple users) to the local Minnesotans for Obama. With a nod to hipsters and open-sourcers, there's a Creative Commons bug at the bottom; for the youngsters, a link to Obama's Facebook and Flickr sites. For the deeply interactive, there's YouTube; for the literary, speech transcripts; for the non-voter, a link to a registration site. Truly, whatever way you want to access information, this rich site has it: XML syndication; a store, where one can buy union-made T-shirts for the cutesy price of $20.08 apiece; and a campaign blog that gets both updated and comments, lots of 'em.

Conclusion: Obama's site is excellent, aesthetically and tactically. For a young candidate early in his political career, it's filled with rich content, from his political platform (available in mulitiple formats) to videos where voters can get a feel for less content-based factors like his demeanor and body language. For voters turned off by the Bush Republicans' machismo, it offer a stark distinction, nodding to national pride without veering into flag-waving, lapel-pin patriotism. And, while it uses the tools of pop culture, it doesn't dumb down politics. Best of all, it leverages the social networking phenomenon (and relationship marketing practices) Obama's campaign has already benefitted from: his fans have created numerous Wikis for him, he's got nearly 50,000 MySpace friends, and supporters have created several Draft Obama sites. That last group needn't waste its energy: the site makes it clear, this isn't an exploratory committee site, it's an online campaign hub.

[Cross-posted at Minnesota Monitor.]

"News."

Cartoon by M.e. Cohen

[via]

Utne Re-Reader: A "progressive brand" reclaims its roots--and name

Given how media shakeups have been racking up headlines of late--from the sales of both metro dailies to editorial oustings at City Pages and The Rake--it's no surprise that progressive stalwart Utne has kept a low profile about change of its own. With its November/December 2006 issue, the magazine quietly rolled out a new tagline and a new--or, rather, old--name. Its cover once again bears the title it did when it was founded 23 years ago, Utne Reader. And "Understanding the next evolution" has been replaced with the simpler, "Thinking ahead."

Editor in chief David Schimke says the decision has a lot to do with another big change, last spring's sale of the magazine to Ogden Publications, the Kansas-based company that prints Grit, Steam Traction, and Mother Earth News, among others. With so many other upheavals, including two new editors in two years and a complete redesign of the publication last year, he says he didn't want to confuse readers or suggest that the sale had altered the essence of the magazine.

In fact, the change signals a return to the very heart of where Utne Reader began.

While Utne Reader remains "one of the top recognized progressive brands," according to Schimke, the standalone Utne never caught on.

The revised masthead signals a shift away from Utne's lifestyle focus of recent years. When Eric Utne retired from the magazine and his wife Nina took over, she concluded that in an internet age, the function of culling the best of alternative media might not be as relevant, so she dropped Reader. But Schimke and the new owners had a different idea. "Because of the internet, there’s even more need to cull, digest and filter," Schimke says. "And it seems like nobody in print is applying journalistic standards to the stuff that's turning up." The full title references the magazine's informal motto from years back: "The Reader's Digest of the alternative press."

Refocused, the magazine will also tackle political issues more directly and reduce the personal growth emphasis of recent years. Schimke says the old theme of "good news for bad times," used in Utne's publicity materials, will take on a "news that matters" feel, focused on giving exposure to under-represented ideas and news.

"We don't want to be just another progressive magazine," he says. "We want to use the alternative press to create an engaging conversation. We don't want to be didactic. We want to draw from libertarian sources, from liberal sources, from conservative sources.”

He adds that of the two places readers usually find Utne on a newsstand--beside Yoga Journal or next to Harper's--he'd prefer ending up beside the famed political magazine.

Utne Reader has seen its share of financial ups and downs, but these days its story seems a bit more like that discarded publicity slogan: its stability after the Ogden sale is a case of "good news for bad times." Bucking industry trends, Utne's subscriptions are holding steady at 225,000 and newsstand sales have increased slightly to 40,000 copies per issue.

"Given all possible scenarios, we couldn't have hoped for a better situation," he says of the Ogden sale. "They believe in the magazine, and if anything, they want us to be more aggressive and more topical. Of all the media upheaval in the last year, locally, I think we fared the best. I don’t want to gloat about it. In fact, I'm humbled by it. But the owners are smart. They get the magazine. And they're willing to give us the time to establish ourselves again."

[Cross-posted at Minnesota Monitor.]

Who's counting? Stats blur Strib's redesign story

Early this week, Rake media writer Brian Lambert published an e-mail sent to City Pages' "letters" address by Monica Moses, Executive Director of Product Innovation at the Star Tribune and the manager of the paper's redesign, seeking to "correct some of the biggest leaps of logic in City Pages' recent coverage of the Star Tribune sale."

While the subject line read "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," Moses' note to CP editor Steve Perry wasn't private: she cc'd eight others on the communique, from columnists and reporters like Doug Grow and Rochelle Olson to former editor Anders Gyllenhaal. The tone of the several-email exchange bordered on downright snotty, generating a heated comment thread at the Rake's online property, MNSpeak, and a follow-up post by Lambert.

But while the back-and-forth banter has drawn attention, little has been said about Moses' mathematics.

Calling it "tiresome" to correct what she says are factual errors in City Pages' coverage, Moses explains to Perry why her words weren't meant for public consumption:

[Y]our publication has not proven itself to be honorable in accepting criticism and looking at facts that don't fit a preconceived, predictable, cynical, narrow portrait of the Star Tribune. Your motives are not pure. You can't be trusted to do the right thing with the information.

Perry's response: "I've always heard that you were a first-rate suck-up."

Perhaps Moses' sensitivity comes from her role overseeing the paper's cover-to-cover redesign, launched October 2005 (above, the Star Tribune, before and after). Some tie readership trends to the new look, and, in sharing hopes for what ownership by Avista Capital Partners might mean, an unnamed Strib reporter gave City Pages this stinging assessment of Moses' project: "There's some hope that they'll reverse the dumbing-down trend from the redesign. Maybe they'll recognize the need for depth and investigative reporting and stop the comic-book aspect of what our newspaper has become."

In one of the emails to Perry, Moses, who said she couldn't go on record because she's not an official Strib spokesperson, backed up the readership statistics she supplied Perry with confident assurance: "I have absolute faith in my argument."

One such statistic she offered:

Readership increased 2.3 percentage points, or 6 percent in the six months following the redesign, according to Scarborough Research.

Not understanding readership calculations, nor how 2.3 percent equals 6 percent, I e-mailed Moses, and she replied with this clarification: "2.3 is the number of percentage POINTS. On a 30-some original readership rating, the gain of 2.3 points amounts to 6 percent."

OK, but a statement in her official Star Tribune bio states something else altogether:

In the six months after the remake, readership rose 4.4 percentage points, according to Scarborough research -- the first such increase in six years.

Asked about this, her reply, which seems to arrive not from absolute certainty (but, perhaps, absolute faith), was: "I think 4.4 refers to daily and 2.3 refers to Sunday."

A few hours later, Moses emailed again, providing text "from our archives citing Scarborough research." The May 9, 2006 Strib article she included does little to clarify her conflicting statistics. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the article states, in the six months ended March 2006 daily circulation fell 2.9% and Sunday circulation fell 7.4% (the piece also mentions growth of Pioneer Press circulation by 6 and 3.6 percent for daily and Sunday editions for the same timespan).

The story did, as Moses says, reference a 4.4% increase in readership, but that figure only applied to adult readers of the weekday version. Its source? Not Scarborough Research--which isn't mentioned at all--but Ben Taylor, Star Tribune senior vice president for marketing and communications.

[Cross-posted at Minnesota Monitor.]

Media Monitor: January 14

• McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt tells Editor & Publisher Avista Capital Partners wasn't the only company interested in buying the Star Tribune, but he wouldn't disclose names of other bidders, nor would he comment on whether any Minnesota-based firms made offers. His response to a City Pages article titled after a Strib staffer's assessment "Pruitt is a joke": "I would feel worse if they were happy that we were selling them."

• As if following the lead of e-democracy's Minnesota gubernatorial e-debate this fall, The Huffington Post announced it'll be hosting the first ever presidential online debates.

• Bill Moyers, who returns to PBS with the weekly public affairs show April 25, evoked Martin Luther King's legacy in his keynote at the National Conference on Media Reform this weekend, comparing "big media corporations to plantation owners and American media consumers to their slaves." [YouTube].

One speech, four networks

During tonight's speech by Bush, three networks ran the identical on-screen super: "Presidential Address on Iraq." PBS was even more declarative: "Live from the White House Library." Long accused of coziness with the White House's communications team, here's how the local Fox affiliate tagged the speech:

Media Monitor: January 10

Today's post from Minnesota Monitor:

Model T Journalism: The best--and saddest--quote from City Pages' coverage of the Avista purchase of the Star Tribune comes from reporter Mike Kaszuba:

A lot of us here, a core group, are too young to be eligible for Social Security and too old to be considered young. We need to squeeze out another 10 years to stay in this industry. And you sit back and say, wow, I wonder if there is another 10 years left in this industry? We are the Watergate babies, from back when it was cool and sexy to be a journalist. We were naive, goofy idealists in a way. Now it is about dollars and cents. The thing I got into it for, I'm not sure it's even among the top five reasons this place runs anymore. Your best day is publishing a story that you'd really like to have your name on top of, for all the right reasons. And you look around and wonder how many people who are around here anymore share that need to put out a paper that matters. Then you see what McClatchy paid for us and what they sold it for and you think, my god, I am sitting in a Model-T here.

Surge prep: Even though a large majority of readers in an unscientific Star Tribune online poll say they won't watch George W. Bush's speech tonight, Eric Black offers an excellent primer on what to look for in the speech, while the Pioneer Press has front-page coverage (same placement as Black's print piece) on what state officials hope to hear tonight.

Speaking of Eric Black: Why doesn't his boss, Doug Tice, just get his own blog already? Some of the Strib's blogs haven't been updated in months--SeeSaw hasn't been updated since October, and two others don't yet have 2007 posts--yet Tice has already been a featured guest poster at Black's The Big Question three times this year, January 4, 6, and 9.

Is MySpace a free-speech zone? In 2004, media mogul and Fox owner Rupert Murdoch petitioned the Federal Communications Commission complaining that proposed rules on media consolidation violated the free speech rights of companies. In a funny turn of events, the Murdoch-owned MySpace is refusing to run ads on its site for Common Cause's anti-media consolidation campaign. See--and host on your blog--the offending ad.

Media Monitor: January 5

• Hubbard's hardship: KSTP owner Rob Hubbard's dispute with the Department of Natural Resources is heating up: he wants to tear down an 800 s.f. cabin in Lakeland to build a 16,000 s.f. mansion with pristine views of the federally protected St. Croix River, in violation of DNR rules enforcing a 40-foot setback for such projects. Lakeland's City Council approved a variance so the 5-bedroom mansion and 4-car garage could be built, but the DNR says there's no "hardship" to warrant it; that is, the terrain and size of the lot present no physical obstacle for Hubbard conforming with the rules. "I'm not making any threats," Hubbard told the Pioneer Press, "but I've lived on the river my entire life. I intend to raise my family there. I don't think the Department of Natural Resources should have the ability to tell me that I can't rebuild a structure that is there." Hubbard is appealing the decision.

• Coleman stands by Kiffmeyer quote: In my interview published Tuesday, former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer said a reporter "cobbled together" sections of her speech at a 2004 event "to say something I didn’t say." The journalist was the Star Tribune's Nick Coleman, who wrote on the event in a March 31, 2006, column:

When I attended a prayer breakfast in 2004, Minnesota's Living Flag, Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer, told the faithful that the "five most destructive words" she knows are " Separation of church and state."

When emailed about Kiffmeyer's accusation that he misquoted her, Coleman stood by the quote's accuracy, stating, "She uttered that infamous phrase at a National Day of Prayer breakfast in Plymouth in 2004. I was there. I have written about it or alluded to it several times. Amy Klobuchar, who also was there, can attest to the accuracy of it." Sen. Klobuchar, presumably otherwise occupied, hasn't yet responded to an email asking for confirmation.

• Sell, sell, sell: Via the Securities and Exchange Commission, here's the official purchase agreement for the Star Tribune; Snowboard Acquisition is a corporation formed by Avista Capital Partners.