Unlike your average legal filing, the complaint Dean Singleton’s Media News Group has dropped on Par Ridder and Avista Capital Partners is a damned good read. Maybe that’s because Singleton has hired a former Star Tribune reporter, Dan Oberdorfer, to bring the case against the new owners and operators of his old paper.
The complaint is full of semi-farcical imagery and loaded phraseology, entirely appropriate for telling a story as tawdry and squalid as this, but also remarkable considering the family pedigrees of the people involved. The picture of Ridder “scheming” (a word actually used in the filing), is so tacky and disreputable, not to mention clumsy, that you half expect to read something about a frowsy blonde and a Vegas hotel key.
A couple personal favorites: I like the part where the PiPress demands Ridder return an external hard drive containing vital, proprietary information. Ridder claims he can’t find it so … he sends over … a NEW EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE. As though Ridder later had a moment where he slaps his head and says, “Oh, you wanted what was ON the external hard drive! Well, why didn’t you say so?”
Also good is the part where Ridder agrees not to take any PiPress executives with him, but then claims to have thought that that only applied to the precise day he left … not two whole business days later for chrissakes.
Or wait. One more: Par downloads SIXTEEN spreadsheets and … allegedly … claims he did so only to show his new Strib staff how he
likes his financial info formatted. Riiiiight.
It goes on and on … and on. In fact it goes on so long and in such reputation-slurring detail it takes your breath away. I mean, corporate titans and the pampered sons of corporate titans are not supposed to behave this way in plain view of the masses. Maybe a thunderous hail of legalese between executive suites, with bland official-speak for public consumption, but nothing like Dean Singleton, back in the PiPress newsroom (again) Thursday — (lot of miles on the corporate jet, Dean-o) — saying, “In Par’s world he could get away with anything he wanted to because Daddy always took care of that. Well, it’s too late for that now.”
As for the real, competitive value of whatever information Ridder may have brought with him, a former PiPress salesperson argues that it actually does add up to something. Some of us have glibly dismissed the idea that PiPress ad contracts could possibly contain anything a sharp Star Tribune account executive couldn’t easily surmise. But no.
The former PiPresser paints a picture of at least a year of ruthless rate-cutting by the Strib for big contract advertisers, like Denny Hecker, for example. In cases like that, the Strib would love to know exactly what the PiPress has countered-offered, and for how long. And it’s not just big advertisers. The Strib would obviously also like to know the details of accounts with small, localized advertisers in all those PiPress regional editions.
A couple hecklers have mocked my instantly-obsolete Grand Unifying Conspiracy Theory, (see previous post), which I put up maybe 30 minutes before Singleton sued Ridder. This was the theory where Ridder going to the Strib was in preparation for Singleton moving in in a couple years as the logical buyer after Avista has harvested its profits and wants an orderly out of a dead-end business like newspapers.
So OK, on the face of it that theory doesn’t look, uh, “operative”, what with Singleton calling Ridder a spoiled Daddy’s boy.
But … continue to pay attention to Grand Unifying Conspiracy Theory II. The part about Daddy Ridder and other cash-rich Ridders, with their Minnesota connections, possibly already holding an interest in Avista. Under this alternative theory, part of Singleton’s unusually personal indignation might come from realizing the Ridders have tried to play him for a chump.
In another facet of the story, Jack Sullivan, the PiPress newsroom’s union chairman, says Singleton assured the staff yesterday that the cost of this suit — with clocks already running at two firms — will not be assessed against the PiPress. (I’d like that in writing, if I could.)
Sullivan also says he sent PiPress publisher Fred Mott a letter this past Tuesday — before the suit was announced — requesting that Mott share with the union proof that Ridder and Avista have destroyed any and all information related to salaries and other employment data of PiPress newsroom personnel.
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