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

Dane Smith is back, and he's back with the panache that only serious money can sustain. Is this a good thing? As per Rupert Murdoch's Pravda West, you decide!

Here's the headline from yesterday's Strib: "Girl, 6, is grazed by bullet, leaving community hurt, too."

It's tempting just to let that stand as one more blob in the insipid lump of goo that is the Star Tribune. OK, I will, but with just one comment: Doesn't every bullet that hits a six-year-old hurt our community?

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.

I made a mistake the other day and accidentally tuned in to KTLK and whatever right-wing boob they have on during the late morning. With a little checking after I got back to the office, I found his name is Dan Conry, and he has, like so many of his ilk, the IQ and eloquence of a doorknob…or of Katherine Kersten, whichever is higher.

For he was haranguing about Kersten’s column of Monday, in which she asserted (surprise) that the government was out to take your kids and brainwash them.

(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.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth continues unabated at the Strib and other print publications these days. A report from ABC, the company that audits the circulation of the Strib and most other daily newspapers, just noted that most daily newspapers’ circulation was down again. The Strib was down over six percent.

RYBAK: Oh gosh, that Nancy Barnes. How does the girl do it? She's editor of the Star Tribune and still found time these past two weeks to write a Sunday column filling us in on all the neat goings-on at the paper, just like the old readers’ reps used to do.

Why, last week she introduced to some of the nice people still on her staff. Like Paul McEnroe, who has been there for almost 30 years.

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