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

Noam Chomsky says a well-informed populace is a necessary ingredient to any democracy. In other words, we're boned.

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

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

Here is the first sentence of today's Star Tribune editorial on "Aiding Baby Boomers' Search for Meaning": "The nation's supernumerary baby-boomers have reached what's being gently called "the second half of life," but the big generation is still doing what it has done since its diaper days: It's demanding notice and altering the contours of every phase of life it touches."

Yuk.

In what can safely be called a HUGE blow to the Star Tribune's already shaken editorial staff, Dave Hage announced today that he is leaving the paper to join Sen. Amy Klobuchar's staff as communications director. Office scuttlebutt holds that newsroom editor D.J. Tice will be tapped to replace Hage. That makes sense: Doug Tice provided the conservative voice for the Pioneer Press editorial pages when he worked there, and has faced some criticism for allegedly bringing that bent into the Strib newsroom. Moving him back to the opinion pages would solve that

Lost in the loud wailing heard in our little journalistic glade over the clear-cutting of staff at the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press is any serious discussion about what’s being severed: Is it actually worth the efforts of the journalistic tree huggers? To some, the answer is a stentorian “No.”