Good Friday noon Fellow Seekers,
Only three stories start on the Strib front page today.
All three (a Duluth jury’s verdict against a Brainerd woman for for sharing music on the internet; the Henn. Co. District Court ruling that Sen. Larry Craig doesn’t get to take back his guilty plea; and more MnDOT funding woes) are legitimate page one contenders to the eye of an old ink-stained wretch, but said wretch notes that all are local stories. It’s a theme.
Not that long ago, the typical page one story count was about six. That gave you room for some mix of serious and light, local, national and foreign. And there was still room for a couple or three promos across the top of the page for stories in the feature, sports and business sections.
I should note that today’s front page (and all the other pages of the paper) is a significantly smaller than it used to be (same for most papers). This saves a lot of money, but isn’t helping with the paper’s higher calling of making democracy and a free society work better by contributing to an informed citizenry.
The three stories today (a total of nine paragraphs before the jump lines) actually only take up about a quarter of the cover (I’m eyeballing, not measuring and I’m including two inconsequential pictures that go with the stories.)
The biggest thing on the cover is a posed picture of three members of the Minnesota Wild being introduced at the arena on the occasion of the home opener. Your humble and obedient ink-stained wretch is actually a sports fan, but one who still believes that those occasions when a sports item dominates the front page should be reserved for things like the home team clinching the pennant. (The Wild did win the home opener, 1-0, over Chicago, but it didn’t clinch a playoff berth.) Even at my sports fanniest, I never minded reading the sports news on the sports pages. But I’m an old fart, but I don’t see the problem. Sports fans can find the sports section.
The various blurbs around the cover combined (depending on how you count them, there are 12) soak up space about equal to the three news stories combined. The Strib’s current taboo on serious national or international news is even reflected here. None of the 12 blurbs mentions a serious non-local story unless you count “Famous fashion designer faces multiple sex charges.” The designer is named Anand Jon. Your h&o i-s wretch isn’t willing to count this as a serious national or international news story.
There’s also a Medtronic advertisement stripped across the bottom of the Strib front-page. Advertising on page one was forbidden until very recently. People like me are supposed to be upset about this, as with the smaller page size. But I’m more sad than angry. If running an ad on the front-page would finance the improvement of what’s in the news columns, I’d be for it.
If you are wondering what other stories might have been available for Page One, here is the front page story list of today’s New York Times. The only item on both lists is the Craig story. Presumably the Strib would not have offered it on the cover if the exact same story had occurred, but in a Detroit bathroom. The logic of this eludes me.
The Star Tribune’s current ownership and management have decided that the way to save the franchise is to go hyper-local. I don’t think it’s gonna work. Many of the Strib’s best and most loyal customers (bless them) want their paper to provide a smart, expansive overview of the most important local, national and world news. They’re driving too many of those folks away and I don’t see the evidence that they can replace with a large group of new readers who want to read hyper-local. Maybe I’m wrong.
I’ll end with my only personal anecdote about Par Ridder, the recently departed publisher of both Twin Cities metro dailies. And I won’t even mention the tawdry tale of why he is not currently working in the newspaper business.
In 2005, the last big Star Tribune redesign was implemented. Its most substantive feature was the addition of a twice-a-week world news section, which was a daring statement that countered the trend among similar papers, including the St. Paul Pioneer Press, to hyperlocalize. I was assigned to write a piece about the state of the industry on the day before the redesign was unveiled. I called Ridder, then the publisher of the PiPress and already the Twin Cities personification of hyperlocalization (which is how I justify including this anecdote in this piece).
I asked him to comment on what he thought of the Strib’s decision to start a world news page. He replied (I’m quoting from memory so I won’t use quote marks): Y’know one of my first jobs in the business was selling ads for the Washington Post. They had a world news section. One day one of my customers found that his ad appeared in the world section. He asked for his money back.
It’s stopped raining now. Get out and carpe diem.
I canceled my Strib subscription earlier this year. I already was receiving the Sun Current.
I pick it up every now and then and I am shocked at how unreadable it is. Sid Hartman and Katherine Kersten are journalisticly (is that a word?) unforgivable (if Sid wrote about politics, he’d be the most infamous columnist in the country; Novak times a hundred), national news is non existent, SCOTUS coverage is non existent, international news is non existent…it goes on and on and on. I’m especially upset about the ads on A1. That just should not happen. Actually, what pisses me off more than anything else is that the weather terrorist Paul Douglass gets more ink per week than science news, court coverage, book reviews, and so on and so forth. Doesn’t the man get enough media time on CCO? Weather should take up no more than an inch/day (or 1 minute in a 1/2 hour news cast).
The Strib can’t compete with the Sun papers because they will never be able to get as locally targeted. The metro is too big for its #1 paper to go ultra local. There should be some regional pride in the paper; it’s our way of looking out, not in. It’s really heading towards becoming a source of shame. Welcome to cosmopolitan Minneapolis, let’s talk about the Byerly’s closing on 98th in Bloomington.
Even the Sports section is getting to be close to worthless. Sid…well, the less said about him the better, and Souhan may be a worse writer than Kersten. His cliches are intolerable and his propensity to fill every paragraph with some sort of pop cultural reference/joke is maddening beyond all belief. Baseball box scores have been scaled down, game summaries have been scaled down; I’m not sure where they’re going with Wolves coverage after they let their best sports writer go…it goes on and on with the Sports section.
I still subscribe, but question how much longer I will. I’m probably the Strib’s core customer, fifty something, still enjoys the ritual or reading real newspaper. So why is the Strib doing its absolute best to drive me away?
I think a local emphasis is fine, but we core customers still want national news. It’s ok that it comes from a wire service or the NY Times - but we still want it. Even if you think a local emphasis is important, you have to question the Strib’s implementation. There are many days when the “Region” section is only 6 pages long, with one page of weather, 2 of obituaries and another page of advertising. That leaves about 2 pages of actual local news, most of it suprficial and barely scratching the surface. (The old Skyway News, now the Downtown Journal, once a fish wrapping throw-away, now does journalism better than the Strib by a wide margin).
The Strib is attempting to attract readers who will never come at the expense of the readers who have been its base. The newspaper business (at least the paper part) is obviously in decline and may not exist for too much longer. Instead of catering to the base and strengthening it, the Strib has abandaoned the base and that will just accelerate its decline.
The day will soon come when I’ll sit at the kitchen table with a laptop instead of the morning paper. I will miss the funnies.
When they call us to suggest expanding our subscription beyond the current Sundays only (for the coupons), I say “I can’t stand that much aggravation, even if its FREE!”
But no-one seems to have an inkling that one cannot offend half of one’s potential readership with biased reporting nearly all the time (current ink-stained wretch when he was there being the notable exception) and expect those people to pay money to read one’s “stories”. Story selection, headlines, angle of approach, sources contacted, and what is not said all tell me this paper has nothing a seeker of truth is likely to be looking for.
In short, if I want the NEWS (the facts, ma’am, just the facts…the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth) the Strib is the LAST place I will go. If I want propaganda (I can’t imagine why), the Strib is my source.
Down the tube? More than likely. Will they “get it” before it’s too late? We’ll have to wait and see.
I’m a newspaper junkie from way back. I used to deliver three different daily papers as a newsie in Pittsburgh and read each one of them. In college I roomed with a Medill School of Journalism student in the sixties. (We used to refer to it as the Meddler School of Journalism.) Bill Sluis introduced me to the phrase ink-stained wretch.
The homer nature of the Strib toward the U of M has been very interesting to observe. No doubt the no sharp elbows policy will make things even worse. The Strib did some pretty good investigative journalism during the Najarian years. Since then they seem to have backed off for fear of criticism that they were hurting the U. The PiPress on the other hand has done some great work on sports scandals at the U. You’d think that with his great knowledge of sports at the U, Mr. Hartman would have been the one to break the story… The PiPress people still seem to be willing to get in the face of the U and write more controversial articles, recent e.g., the science classrom fiasco and the U of M med school dean’s unsavory association with Pepsi-Cola.
Lately there seems to be a red telephone between the Strib’s editorial offices and Morrill Hall. I pointed out to the reader’s rep a very curious phrase that appeared on the editorial page and also in a university propaganda document. This observation was pretty much blown off as coincidental. I don’t think so.
I used to like to read local papers all over the country. Nice to see how they handled local and national news. How much content was their own and how much wire-service. Who were the great local writers? It’s not much fun to do this anymore and this is true most places. Even the LA Times seems to have gotten local fever.
So keep up the good work. The way things are going I will have to drop my daily subscription to the Trib and add the NYT during the week. Both the NYT and Strib on Sunday. I can scan the Strib and the PiPress on the web, the Strib in about two minutes. But I do miss very much the old days at the Strib, when we had a local paper I could be proud of.
Keep up the good work, Mr. Truth-Seeking Ink-Stained Wretch.
It is a sad degradation of what once was a great newspaper. I delivered the Tribune as a kid and loved it for its national and international news coverage. My parents subscribed to the Star for its local and entertainment coverage. The combined paper wasn’t bad, but it has certainly slid in recent years. I still subscribe to the Strib and the PioPress. I like the PioPress’ coverage of local news in the east metro, but it would no longer need to be a daily to scratch that itch. And to see the Strib fall into that local-local-local emphasis is unfortunate. I now get my international news from the BBC website, but it’s still important to me to get ink on my fingers and hold paper in my hands. We may be the last generation to feel that need, though, and I worry about the future of journalism in America.
I feel the same way, Steve. I’ll probably continue to get the Strib and the PiPress even though both have measureably declined from their standards. I am worried too that this decline is part of the assault on our freedoms. Some people are better informed these days but that is not all people and we need all citizens to be better informed than they are today. The Internet for all its virtues has not yet delivered and I’m afraid it might never, especially with attempts by conglomerates like Verizon to abolish net neutrality.
And it gets worse. I read in this mornings Strib that, even though I live in downtown Minneapolis, I am relegated to the newspaper’s “Western Region.” According to Avista editor Barnes, since 2/3 of the Strib’s readers are from the burbs, the 1/3 of us that do live in the core cities are being allocated to suburban “regions” - so I will get feature stories covering Annandale and Cokato (I am not dissing those places - they probably don’t care to see feature stories about the core cities either). Would it have killed them to have a Minneapolis/St. Paul “region”?
The worst thing about the Barnes piece is the patronizing way she tries to roll this out as an “expansion” of coverage, when it has already been widely reported as a staff consolidating budget cut. It is also disappointing to see the cut of the Reader’s Representative position - although Kate Perry has always been more of management’s apologist than true reader representative, she was at least a placeholder.
I wonder what the answer is. I think that all the Strib has done is alienate the people who do like the paper–everyone I know has been cancelling their subscriptions in droves, from the ascension of Katherine Kersten, to the redesign, to the recent mass bloodletting. The last hold-outs I knew felt the editorial section was so good and was worth supporting. Now they have unsubscribed. They’ve gone about it all terribly, but I wonder how you do survive as a newspaper in this day and age. Is there any argument that instead of emphasizing graphics or brain-dead talking-point spewing conservative columnists or “going local” or getting rid of their best writers, they might, instead, emphasize…quality?
It is sad to see how greed and corporate stock prices have reduced what was a very good newspaper to fish wrap. I HATE the latest redesign. I subscribe to the paper because I want the kind of news I don’t get on TV. I want the longer stories, the back stories all the things you no longer get. You have to turn to blogs of questionable veracity or wire service blurbs to find out what’s happening nationally and internationally. Disgusting really. I will probably still subscribe because like the poster above, it is part of my daily routine, start the coffee, get the paper off the step and go to the bathroom. Perhaps the Strib could raise circulation if it came on a roll? That’s about all it’s good for.
Its not like the Star Tribune is the only newspaper that has had these kinds of issues. Newspaper circulation everywhere has declined, largely (I assume) due to the availability of information on the internet. Does anyone read the newspaper want ads anymore? All of that information is available online. I can read Eric Black for free now. Declining circulation and declining ad revenue means that you have to cut costs, and that is exactly what happened.
I think Kersten is still around because she’s a lightning rod - conservatives love her and liberals love to hate her. Do you think anyone else at the paper generates the number of letters she does?
Sid Hartman’s column isn’t really sports journalism, its comedy. The guy predicted that the Gopher football team would win the big ten title this year.