Cleaning Up the Act

I feel like the guy sweeping up after the elephants. Only I’m also the elephant.

My lovely bride and I are enjoying a little beach time with family in sweltering, blustery Florida this week: Captiva Island — where, before you start building, a quarter acre of limestone gravel with no view of either the Gulf or Pine Island Sound — and even less breeze — will set you back $1.3 million.

Anyway, in my Sunday evening post about reporter Matt Peiken leaving the Pioneer Press I both dropped it and stepped in it.

CORRECTIONS!! As Peiken himself hurriedly corrected, the name of his proposed video project on northern tier suburbs was Suburban Safari. “SAFARI,” not “Satanic” — which is what my aging ears, calloused from a minimum of 40 Who concerts, thought they heard him say, and what my hand wrote down as my brain thought, “Peiken, you audacious, in-your-face [bleeper]!”

Anyway, “satanic” was some inner voice speaking … to me, not Peiken, who obviously has a much better sense of what the PiPress’s internal market will bear than I do, or ever did.

So, my apologies to Mr. Peiken. (Although, now that he’s out of the grey, mainstream world of daily newspapers, he ought to consider, “Suburban Satanic” for a new video project. I mean, tell me there isn’t an audience for something like that?)

Next up … the Star Tribune’s Burnsville bureau. I said neither the Strib nor the PiPress had any brick and mortar bureaus in any suburb. Wrong. The Strib has one in Burnsville.

This, of course, has me wondering how many staffers are aware of this, since I must have grazed past the topic a dozen times in recent months in conversations with Strib reporters, as the Bloomington-Bloomington-Bloomington hysteria ratcheted up, and never did anyone say, “Well, we do have that one in Burnsville.”

Oh, well. Wrong is wrong. So my apologies to visionary Strib management for actually putting staff WHERE THE BEAT IS, so they can interact regularly … FACE-TO-FACE … with local shopkeepers, business people, school officials, etc. Now, when they and the PiPress also set up shop in say, Eden Prairie, Maple Grove, Blaine, Forest Lake, Stillwater, and Cottage Grove, deploying a full complement of writers and photographers to each, as the Strib has done in Burnsville (since last winter), I’ll be inclined to take both papers’ much hyped “commitment” to the suburban audience far more seriously.

Finally, former PiPress colleague Dave Hanners takes me to task for suggesting that creativity is waning at the paper.

Dave is probably right that as the staff and the operating budget diminish, those left have to be more and more creative just to deliver the basic goods of a daily newspaper. But I don’t know that the equivalent of a duct tape and bailing wire job on a sputtering engine is the same thing as creating a news product for the fully-converged 21st century.

Frankly, on the level of group psychology, I’m often struck by what borders on every denial when it comes to those surviving these now regular purges. In my experience, with each budget slashing and forced exodus of staff, managers … insist … upon the hoary old “leaner and meaner” attitude from their underlings — an attitude that not only ignores the losses but emphasizes the belief that the paper is going to be “even better” — in other words, an implausible half-time pep talk to a team trailing by four touchdowns.

I always thought that sort of thing was a tough sell to a group of trained, professional skeptics. But it is something that mid-level managers are under strict orders to sell.

Dave accuses me of “demeaning” those who remain at the PiPress by suggesting that creativity is waning. I suppose I could argue that I’m not demeaning those people. But it is more accurate to say I’m not intending to demean them. That said, I stand by my view that there is simply no way that either newspaper can be as creative — in terms of seeking out, testing, and offering new types of stories with new technologies — as they were able to be when they had 30%-40% more staff and newsroom budget.

It’s the difference between realpolitik and wishfully whistling past the graveyard.