Inflamed.

Justin points out this piece by David Goldes, in which a grid of 300 matches is ignited.

Pazz & Jop: The local angle

Every year, top music critics compile a massive poll on the best music from the previous year. This year's Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll tallies votes from 494 music writers to come up with a list of the best albums and singles of 2006. From the involvement of local writers Chris Riemenschneider and Jon Bream (both from the Star Tribune) to Minnesota-born Bob Dylan taking top album honors for Modern Times, our fair state gets its due.

Bands with Minnesota connections getting top album votes include: The Hold Steady at number four (featuring members of the former TC band Lifter Puller) for Boys and Girls in America; at 137, Tapes 'n Tapes for their breakthrough album The Loon; and, fresh off his Super Bowl rockfest, Minneapolis' finest, Prince at #142 for 3121.

Other locally affiliated vote-getters for best album:

154. Golden Smog, featuring members of Soul Asylum and The Jayhawks, for Another Fine Day

161. P.O.S., a Rhymesayers up-and-comer, for Audition

399. (TIE) Soul Asylum, The Silver Lining

530. (TIE) Paul Westerberg, Music for Open Season; and Alan Sparhawk of Low for Solo Guitar

720. (TIE) Zebulon Pike, Zebulon Pike II: The Deafening Twilight

756. (TIE) Jessy Greene, A Demon and Her Lovers; and STNNNG, who played at the Walker's Summer Music & Movies in '06, for Fake Fake

Fox's "Border War" coverage draws fire from immigrant advocates

A few days after Fox News CEO Rupert Murdoch admitted that his network tried to shape the agenda around the Iraq war and "basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East", Minneapolis affiliate KMSP began running teasers for a Feb. 5 "Fox 9 Investigators" report on Minnesota National Guard troops stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border. The promos — a blur of camouflage and night-vision goggle views — suggested the piece might again be promoting the Bush administration's agenda: in covering Bush's border-control project Operation: Jump Start, Fox 9 sent reporter Jeff Baillon to be "embedded" with Minnesota troops on the "front line" of the "border war."

War has not been declared against Mexico or illegal immigrants, so naturally the two-segment piece took on a different tenor than promised: It linked illegal border crossings with drug crimes here in Minnesota — to the dismay of area immigrants' rights advocates.

The first segment, "Catch 'Em if They Can" [video], which aired during the 9 p.m. newscast Feb. 5, began with an ominous voice-over: "In the secret underworld of Twin Cities drug trafficking, most roads lead south — to Mexico." Then a man in a suit — he's never identified, but viewers might infer he's with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the only organization named in the intro — tells of an illegal immigrant who was arrested locally in a recent sting for trying to sell "Mexican-made meth." While he was arrested, a voice-over tells us, "It's only a matter of time before someone else sneaks over the border to pick up where he left off."

Cut to: the Mexican border, where, as Baillon said in overdub, "in some places the only thing separating the two countries is an old cattle fence." Eighty National Guard troops from Minnesota work daily surveilling the border with high-tech equipment. But their days are fairly humdrum: In off hours, they play pool and hang out in barracks where, says one soldier, "contracted cleaners come in and clean everything up for us." They commute two to three hours from their base to their surveillance stations. And should they see an attempted border crossing, they're instructed to call the border control as they have no authority. (One soldier gets in a jab at the Bush administration: "The National Guard is finally doing a national mission. We're not overseas, we're over here taking care of the people we're supposed to be taking care of.")

The second piece, "Cat and Mouse Game" [video], aired during Monday's 10 p.m. newscast, had nothing to do with the Minnesota National Guard, but instead attempted to establish a link between illegal immigrants from Mexico and Minnesota's drug crimes. The unnamed man in the suit appears again in this segment, stating that "75 to 80 percent of the drugs consumed in the state of Minnesota come from across the Mexican or Southwest border. Unlike the first report, in which Baillon referred to illegal immigrants as "illegals" four times, he only did so once in the second, which focused on the tricks both smugglers and border agents use in their "game of chess" to outsmart each other. Minnesota content merely bookended the main story, which outlined the creative ways drug smugglers get their product from Juarez to El Paso and, ultimately, to "our twin towns."

So what's the problem?

For one, that use of "illegals," said Alondra Espejel, communications organizer at the Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network. "For our community, it's a very derogatory term — like using the N-word is for the African-American community. We are indigenous people from this continent. It wasn't until white settlers came in and made laws that anyone could be considered illegal. But we don't believe human beings can ever be called illegal."

On Tuesday, Espejel issued a "media action alert" on the broadcast to the Freedom Network's list-serv outlining the organization's other concerns, including a lack of balance ("all of the people interviewed represented the voice of the authorities") and a connection between immigrants and drugs backed up only by "unproven and sensationalistic statements." She wrote:

It is stories like this [...] that create more problems in our society by fueling xenophobia and negative stereotypes of our communities. If the story contained any real information for folks to be more informed about, it was unfortunately overshadowed by the combat-style images, the negative stereotyping of immigrants as tied to crime, and the lack of a balanced representation of the subject. Indeed, the very "subject" of this report is still unclear to us as many complex themes were whimsically tied together in a journalistically unresponsible manner.

Indeed, Fox's "Fair and Balanced" motto didn't seem to be in evidence anywhere: No immigrants or immigrants-rights activists were interviewed.

Espejel acknowledged Fox 9 approached her organization, but they declined to be interviewed, because, in part, "television has not been good to our community." She recalled how another local TV station, KSTP, treated immigration attorney Susana de Leon in a June 2006 story. Espejel said de Leon was approached courteously by a KSTP reporter and told what the news segment was to include, but when the camera turned on, the story changed. "The questions were very problematic. They put her on the spot in ways no professional journalist would. They got it all on film and used it to craft a very anti-immigration, sensationalized piece that twisted her words." (KSTP no longer hosts the story on its website, but a version of the piece and the station's response to criticisms are cached here and here.)

Why, she asks, didn't Fox ask for comment from one of the scores of "white ally" organizations that work on immigration issues, groups from Affirm and the Office for Social Justice to the Catholic Church's Hispanic Ministries and the American Immigration Lawyers Association?

While the sensational — and militarized — nature of the story and its promo might have more to do with February sweeps, Espejel says there may be something to the notion that the news program is tied to Bush administration goals. Stories like these, she said, like the recent immigration raids at the Swift Co. plant in Worthington, are "very much tied to this idea that certain parties want to make it seem like something's being done. It's as if the Bush administration is saying, 'The immigration system didn't break under us, but we're doing something for it.'"

But the biggest complaint Espejel has is the most direct — and commonplace. The report used a "sensationalised series of images" to embrace an equation that groups like hers have long fought: "people of color" equals "crime."

"We've been hit over the head with it again and again," she said. "You'd think people in the mainstream media would figure it out."

Fox 9 would not reveal how many complaints the station has received and would not respond to key questions I posed: Who is the unnamed man who serves to vouch for the link between illegal immigrants and Twin Cities drug crime? How do they explain the "border war" promotions or the use of terms like "illegals"? Why didn't the report offer "fair and balanced" coverage by including the perspective of immigrants? Who says 75 to 80 percent of Minnesota's illegal drugs come from south of the border?

Reporter Jeff Baillon didn't reply to Minnesota Monitor's interview request, and KMSP's manager of investigations, Kim Kruger, forwarded a query to Bill Dallman, the station's vice president of news.

His reply, which was relayed through a representative at Fox's New York office, in its entirety:

"Fox 9 stands by its reporting."

[Cross-posted at Minnesota Monitor.]

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.]

What Minneapolis can learn from contrite killers

With three murders committed during the first 11 days of this year, Minneapolis is on pace to quadruple last year’s 60 homicides. The brunt of the victims—and suspects—were African Americans.

Facing that grim statistic, around 150 people gathered at the Urban League in North Minneapolis Thursday night to not only keep the death toll down, but to let the youth know the immense consequences of a murder. So, they enlisted the help of four unusual experts: convicted murderers serving sentences at the Stillwater prison.

The four men, Adoniyah Israel, Joseph Spann, Leon Perry, and Vava Kuaddafi, all young and black, appeared with City Council member Don Samuels and Urban League president Clarence Hightower via video satellite uplink, and shared sometimes chilling, sometimes moving stories about their crimes, prison life, and the conditions that led to their incarceration.

While common threads emerged—all four were raised by single parents, all four were involved with gangs—the individual stories had the most power.

Kuaddafi, 38, says that of his 23 years in Minnesota, he spent 21 years in prison. He said that he’d been molested as a boy and that he merely wanted to “inflict pain, like it was done to me. I knew it was wrong, but someone had to pay for my pain…Gang life, that was my religion, and that’s how I lived,” he said.

Others recounted long idle periods and lack of supervision that led to an urge to do something, which often turned a crime.

Perry, 34, recalls endless hours he spent as a youth at North Commons’ Hospitality House. He said, “No one asked why we hung out there all day.”

Spann,30, said he was “a follower… a people pleaser.” His older brother was his role model. But when the brother stopped crimes, “I kept on going…. that led me to here.”

“Being poor, not having much, you want things: excitement, to be known, a reputation, to be popular.”

And Israel, 35, who lamented “ a lot of times these kids are out there raising themselves,” said that he was “carried away with the hype and glamour of things.”

The Solution?

All four men, who were repeatedly commended for coming out, said that they are in a better position to warn the youth of the menaces in the street.

Israel: “Parents: listen to young people about how they want to spend time. Figure out what’s important to these kids—ask them—and work from there. “

Kuaddafi: “Interrupt isolation. Don’t be angry. I was angry and arrogant person.”

Spann: “Know you’ve a purpose in life. Learn how to listen.”

Perry: Focus. Come up with a vision. Know God.”

That last statement drew a round of applause and “hallelujahs!”

The men said they often think—and express remorse—about their victims. Israel stabbed his girlfriend to death. Spann and Kuaddafi killed grocery clerks during separate robberies. Perry murdered an acquaintance in a parked car.

”Mending the nest”

The program was labeled “Mending the Nest,” a monthly discussion hosted by the Urban League. It was started by Urban League president Clarence Hightower after 16-year-old Courtney Brown was murdered over a sports jersey he was wearing.

The aim is to cut the homicide rate in half in 2007, reduce the number of African Americans going to prison by 20 percent, and increase the number of African American youth enrolled in both summer employment programs and post-secondary education.

Boise Jones, project manager at Pillsbury United Communities entrepreneur training program, said that 35 percent of those released from prison end up back in jail, not because they re-offend, but because they can’t meet the basic conditions of parole—to find stable work and housing within 30 to 60 days of release. His formula—“Increase opportunity, decrease crime”—would focus on these “institutional barriers” that prevent smooth reintegration for former prisoners.

Todd Barnes, a consultant with the Urban League, said that the purpose of the discussion was “high drama.”

“It’s how do you stop people from pulling the trigger.”

The message, he said, is a sense of hope: “Listen, process, come to the table when you’ve issues.”

Looking around the room, the mostly African American crowd was filled with familiar faces: Al Flowers, Spike Moss, Rev. Jerry McAfee, councilmember Betsy Hodges and MAD DADs founder VJ Smith, organizer James Everett, and Kim Ellison.

[This story was cowritten with Abdi Aynte for Minnesota Monitor. Image: Joseph Spann addresses the audience as MAD DADS members look on.]

The Year in Media: Print pales amid (another) online boom

Which do you think George Allen regrets more, his use of the word "macaca," or the invention of YouTube?

It's a tossup, I suppose. As demonstrated by his story (or that of a possibly bigger YouTubed boob, Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens) and its rapid dissemination across the internet, the definitive media story of 2006 was the rise of citizen media, and the vehicles like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, blogs, and scores of others that can be used, for free, to spread memes worldwide in less time than it takes to say "santorum."

The flip side of that story, of course, is old media's fumbling attempts to stay relevant in this new environment. Indeed, it's a curious state of affairs when TIME, one of the grand-daddies of old media, declares "You"--meaning me and you and all the other personal media producers out there--"Person of the Year." My friend Siva Vaidhyanathan, writing at MSNBC, chortles at TIME's backslapping for those of use who spent 2006 "seizing the reins of the global media... and beating the pros at their own game":

Well, thank you, Time, for hyping me, overvaluing me, using me to sell my image back to me, profiling me, flattering me, and failing to pay me. As soon as I saw myself on my local newsstand, I had to buy a copy of Time.

But 2006 was the year that saw print pale and online endeavors soar, from Google's wallet-lightening purchase of YouTube to the boom in expenditures for online employment ads, which now show online job listings outpacing those in print by a half billion dollars. Given the trend, who can blame dead-tree media for trying extraordinary tactics to make ends meet? Locally, that's meant plenty of media consolidation, cost-cutting measures, and new ventures. A less than comprehensive run-down of local media goings-on:

• This week's sudden news of a Star Tribune "fire sale" is surprising, not because, like the Pioneer Press, it's happening at all, but because the Minneapolis daily is being sold for a monstrous loss not to a well-known media company but to a private equity firm. The paper's own coverage blamed the internet for the unprecedented low valuation, and staffers are reportedly freaking out about the bombshell: " Everything we've heard from [Star Tribune owner] McClatchy recently is 'Hey, we're all in this together. We don't do layoffs.' Blah blah blah BS," columnist Doug Grow told the AP. (More to come on this.)

• Citing a drop in ad revenues (and the internet ad spectre), the St. Paul Pioneer Press announced it'd be offering buyouts to staffers this fall. By the time all was said and done, ten percent of newsroom employees were without jobs, representing a combined 502 years of experience, and another 37 part-timers were let go. The paper was acquired by McClatchy and eventually sold off to MediaNews Group; nationally MediaNews is slashing staff as well, most notably at papers in San Jose, Denver and Los Angeles.

• The Star Tribune's efforts in 2006 seemed a shotgun approach: last month it launched Vita.MN, a bars-and-bands event listing that covers that same turf as Free Time, a standalone free tabloid the paper tested out a few years back. It seems to be geared toward competing with City Pages and Pulse, but its less than dazzling content suggests it exists to drive traffic to its website. The paper's Buzz.MN seems derivative of the social networking site Gather.com, a Minnesota Public Radio joynt, and MNSpeak. (The dot-MN URL was a hot one this year, as someone figured out that Mongolia was selling domains with that locally flavored e-ppendage.)

• Speaking of which, MNSpeak got a financial boost this year when it was purchased from creator Rex Sorgatz (who has since moved to Seattle to work at Microsoft) by the "Bartel Cartel"--former CP publisher Tom Bartel and his wife Kris Henning, who founded The Rake. They installed their son Matt as editor of the site. (In other Rake news, the monthly cut loose editor Hans Eisenbeis this year, allegedly over conflicting opinions on the editorial direction of the magazine.) Grassroots online projects like the local issues forums at e-Democracy and Twin Cities Daily Planet appeared to continue with relative (grassroots-sized) gusto this year.

• Forum Communications, the Fargo, North Dakota–based media company, added to its empire this year, picking up key regional papers including the Grand Forks Herald, the Duluth News Tribune, The Daily Telegram in Superior, Wisconsin, and weekly newspapers in Cloquet and Two Harbors, Minnesota. As the elections came around, Forum came under scrutiny for its unusual policy—dictating which candidates a local paper was to endorse from Fargo, based on the preferences of unabashed Republican donor William Marcil, the chain’s owner.

[Cross-posted at Minnesota Monitor.]

Photo of the year?

Maybe not, but this shot of Charlie, the Italian greyhound, viewing a Minneapolis rollover (posted back in February) gets high marks for combining drama and cuteness, without the aid of Photoshop.

eBay: Castle for sale

Minneapolis' Van Dusen Mansion, a castle-like complex built in 1892 in an eccentric Richardsonian Romanesque-meets-French Renaissance architectural style, is being auctioned at eBay. With annual taxes of around $75k and a current bid of $3,550,100 (that's $100 more than the previous bidder), the 23,000 s.f. residence has no buy-it-now price.

Thomas Hirschhorn's unbuilt book

Two years ago, artist Thomas Hirschhorn visited Minneapolis with a plan: to create a 50-foot-tall effigy of Deleuze & Guattari's classic philosophical text A Thousand Plateaus on a corner of diverse, gritty Lake Street. He loves the "pointless disproportionality" of roadside attractions like the Jolly Green Giant Statue in Blue Earth, MN, and the Big Fish Supper Club in Bena, MN, and so he set out to create a "Road Side Giant" of his own--only this one would serve his passions: for two months this "obscene gift" to Minneapolis was to print a daily philosophy newspaper, present talks by international thinkers, and house both Hirschhorn's residency and a lending library of philosophy books. Alas, the project was never realized, its budget not as outsized as its vision. Read all about it at Off Center.