The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

 

Note to "media types:" Your power by using sexual innuedno to get the "prized audience" isn't working so well...anymore!

I have been spending a lot of time lately doing research on what people read and why. There are a few important areas that seem to bug the future of this country and the ones who will ultimately be the ones to make or break the disastrous state of our economy.

First of all, kids, for the most part, are honest about everything. They are informed, sometimes too much, and can smell a phony from miles away.

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

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

photo by Raffy Abasolo
(Cover photo by Brian Hayes) 

A few weeks ago the new owners of the Star Tribune threatened to send the jobs of thirty-two of their advertising production employees to India, unless the employees agreed to find “expense reductions” of half a million dollars—or about $15,600 per employee. This business came hot on the heels of the Strib’s announcement that Pioneer Press publisher Par Ridder would be moving across the river.

**Note: See the July 20th NYTimes Magazine cover excerpt from Carr's forthcoming book, The Night of the Gun. Carr discusses the book August 14th at Magers and Quinn Booksellers and August 18th at Common Good Books.**

If you’re a shareholder, the money is still pretty good, but in almost every other way this is a rough time for the middlebrow, mainstream media. Judging by all the hand-wringing, navel-gazing, and gloomy, self-flagellating punditry you’d think the mainstream news media--the “MSM,” as bloggers love to peck—are at the fiery brink as a consequence of their fading influence and terminal irrelevance. Average daily newspapers in particular. There is no shortage of MSM news professionals somberly spreading their own ashes.

Over several nights about a year ago, a small miracle of human interaction took place on KSTP late-night radio. Host Tommy Mischke was embarking on a self-styled pitch for the Spectacle Shop, one of his show’s handful of loyal sponsors, when a call came over the transom. It had been a slow night and Mischke, who regularly acts on whims and lives for surprises, interrupted the ad mid-sentence to pick up the line.

The last time anybody heard from Eric Utne, it was the year 2000 and he had just walked away from the magazine he’d founded and run for almost fifteen years. The Utne Reader was faltering. It had published a “Y2K Citizen’s Action Guide,” which predicted a radical reorganization of society that never happened. Circulation and ad revenue were down, so down, in fact, that it looked as if Minneapolis’s most prestigious national publication might fold.