Par the Purloiner

Look, this has to stop. There are bigger issues out there. This US Attorneys things is starting to feel like the Oak Island Mystery, where every time you break through one layer of cover you dig a bit further and hit another. Now there’s this squirrely GSA business. (Thematic linkage: Throat-slitting partisan careerists politicizing every branch of government.)

But here in Minnesota we’ve got Par Ridder and the Star Tribune giving and giving and giving. Or maybe, “taking”, in this most recent case.

So Ridder, who preached all that spirit-raising teamwork and loyalty stuff at the Pioneer Press before getting a better offer from the evil enemy, (the Star Tribune), and jumping ship without so much as a teary cookies-and-cake farewell, seems to have walked off with a computer full of Pioneer Press secrets*. (*What secrets? Like how to cover high school football in Wisconsin?) The PiPress got the hardware back, but claims to be concerned about hush-hush stuff Ridder could have downloaded.

Obviously all that is goofy enough. Standard procedure in these matters would seem to be that you divest yourself of any and all proprietary information along with the executive men’s room key. But maybe Ridder just forgot. If he did, you’d think he’d simply say so — or tell his own newsroom before it got printed in the mousey rival paper and slapped on Romenesko, (all while most of Ridder’s peers/newspaper bigwigs are gathered together in D.C. for the American Society of Newspaper Editors … you gotta imagine the jokes going around that place).

I don’t know which part of the story I like best. The part where one of the guys the PiPress assigns to retrieve the computer ends up taking a job from Ridder — kind of like those Cuban baseball players who defect once they get two feet out of Castro’s waters — or the part where Ridder, a crack newsman don’t you know, didn’t bother to give his own reporters a heads-up that they were going to get scooped on what people in the newspaper business call an obvious “talker”.

I mean, this is so inept someone ought to check and see if Alberto Gonzalez is running the Strib.

As of 3 pm Friday the Strib still hadn’t put anything on the story up on its site. Nothing. Not even a half-credible glop of official-speak. Not even something on the order of, “Computer? What computer? I’ll ask my driver if he’s seen a computer.”

Word was that reporter Matt McKinney had been handed the assignment.