The Rake Magazine

With only five days to go before the McClatchy newspaper corporation flips the keys to its' once flagship property, the Star Tribune, to the Avista immediate-return-on-investment corporation, a terrible virus has infected the newspaper's connections to the internet. Something wormed into the Strib system Wednesday cutting off access to the net, and by Thursday it still hadn't been completely knocked back. "Its still running really slow, kind of like being connected to AOL," said one Stribber.

The thought of some nasty cyber toxin prowling the tubes of the Stribs' internets goosed the already high levels of profane gallows humor affecting the building. (The imagery of The Strib infected with an STD, as a result of a quick, tawdry union of McClatchy and Avista was amusing.) As noted here several times earlier, since no one has a clue what Avista is really all about, every professional skeptic in the place presumes the worst. And with good reason. There simply is no available precedent that encourages high hopes in the current situation. Private equity companies typically want to mine their downward-trending old media companies for profits, usually by rigorous cost-cutting ... I mean, "localizing".

Comments over the weekend by new top editor, Nancy Barnes, essentially confirming the prevailing view that Avista is a strip-and-flip squad intent on getting acceptable profits out of the Star Tribune in "three to six years", wasn't anyone's idea of a comforting bedside manner.

Point being that next week will be a big one in the lives of dozens of Strib employees, who have seven days, until March 12, to decide to take the contractual voluntary buy-out, or hang on and hope they aren't reassigned to covering feral cats in Woodbury stories. (A rumor working the Strib today was that Avista was planning to summarily whack all merit pay, sending veteran employees back to union scale salaries they haven't seen in decades. By the end of the day consensus was that there was language in the current contract prohibiting such an action, or at least most of it.)

One other move of interest, the Star Tribune's D.C.-based reporters, Rob Hotakainen and Kevin Diaz, were formally reassigned away from the Star Tribune, Hotakainen to the Kansas City Star and Diaz to McClatchy papers serving Alaska and Idaho. Both will remain in D.C. Among a host of mysteries is whether Avista plans to build its' own D.C. bureau. The presumption is they won't.

My apologies for the paucity of posts. I've been out of town since Saturday. But I've returned with a head full of savagely deep thoughts. Until one bites me there is this ...

I am not pretending that many will notice or care, but my alma mater, KTLK, (noted in previous posts for its' gruesome ratings performance to date), has terminated morning host, Andrew Colton, as of this morning, Feb. 28. No further details at this time other than a comment from a KTLK insider describing, "a dramatic scaleback of news operations". Odd,I wasn't aware there was a news operation at KTLK. Don't you need reporters for that? Maybe the source means KTLK missed a payment for access to all those Fox News rip 'n reads.

To the surprise of no one who can read a ratings book, my former employers at KTLK have at long last spared Twin Cities radio listeners a third hour of Sean Hannity. The downside of course is that that same audience will get a third hour of Jason Lewis. ... Oh, come on. That's a joke.

As has been reported previously, based on the most recent Arbitron ratings, Clear Channel's expensive, heavily promoted experiment with FM talk in the Twin Cities has not been going well. Explanations for the station's brutal under-performance all fall under the heading of, "Your guess is as good as mine."

The Top Three: (1). On Day One the idiots put Lambert on the air. (2). The underlying psychology of right-wing talk is heavily dependent on associations with a "winning team". Team Conservative has badly screwed the pooch over the past six years, and as a consequence fewer and fewer listeners are eager for its' company. (3). The KTLK line-up was monotonous. The same talking points at the same pitch hour after hour.

The "Hannity factor" plays big in that last one. No one cares if I call Hannity a dim bulb. But, to put it kindly, the guy brings nothing new to the table. Ever. Worse, he really is a performer who appears to have no concern at all for the accuracy of his "information". Nevertheless, Clear Channel and KTLK were stuck with him via his syndication deal. (They made Hannity and Hannity's people big promises to run him both live and at full length when they yanked him away from KSTP-AM.)

Like most businesses radio runs on leverage, so the assumption is that Hannity's godawful performance meant leverage slipped from him to KTLK's management, and in turn they felt brave enough to screw him.

It is known that Lewis has been campaigning for that third hour, the 4 to 5 p.m. slot -- a warm-up before prime-time drive-time. Now, beginning March 5, he has it.

Interesting piece today from former Rake writer Al Eisele on The Huffington Post.

He's entirely correct in citing another terrific piece of work by the upper echelon of mainstream journalism. But do keep on reading, as Eisele's readers rip HIM for giving the MSM a nano-second's break from the hellstorm over their far more egregious failures. Common theme: A cut-'em-a-new-a**hole story on something like the treatment of returning vets should NOT feel like an exception that proves the rule.

And do check out this link to a chat between PBS' "Frontline's": Lowell Bergman and Steve Talbott on issues related to their excellent, four-part ... MSM ... series, "News War". Part 3 premieres next Tuesday.

I don't currently subscribe to either XM or Sirius satellite radio. But there have been times I would have sold my mother to the Arabs, (to quote Woody Allen), for anything that offered relief from the unmitigated crap that qualifies as "local broadcasting" across huge swaths of the continental USA. I mean, westbound out of Minnesota you can get maybe as far as Pierre S.D. before the "charm" of the voices of colloquial America have you pounding your head on the steering wheel.

One big reason is that "local broadcasting" in the heavily-consolidated, Clear Channel-take all, post-TeleCom Act of 1996 age means there are very few actual locals on "local radio". Instead you get a hell of a lot of Rush Limbaugh, regional Rush Limbaugh-wannabes and syndicated Christian/bigot preachers inveighing against homosexuals and the U.N. All that and soulless, whitebread "radio-country" crap. (Would it kill these alleged country stations to play Hank Williams and Lucinda Williams? The Drive By Truckers? Come on!)

The long-predicted announcement that XM and Sirius are planning to merge gives Congress an opportunity to right a few of the big time wrongs that followed the TeleCom '96 Act. As Cong. Ed Markey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, told the Wall Street Journal yesterday, "In light of the dramatic consolidation of radio ownership in the U.S. terrestial radio marketplace in the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, I believe the merger of the only two satellite radio companies must be assessed with an eye toward ensuring that it does not have a similar deleterious effect on diversity on the dial and localism in radio coverage and reporting."

"Deleterious effect" Well, amen to that, Congressman. Markey is probably just blowing brave smoke, but he seems to understand the bland, monopolized and, I dare say, politicized mess that 11 years of unchecked consolidation has brought. More to the point, what with the new, Democratic-controlled Congress having oversight over approval of this proposed merger, it is possible to re-think 21st century radio.

The trick, it seems to me is creating a legal template that assures true(r) diversity -- not just different call letters for programming that all comes out of some New York or San Antonio studio. The best way, it seems to me is by finding a way to keep satellite subscriptions low-to-non-existent, and using that competition to force stagnated, ad-choked terrestial radio to clean up its act.

One proposal worth exploring seriously is a la carte programming. As in, let me pick 20 satellite channels for a buck, or 50 for $5, or something like that, instead of insisting on $13 for everything, and see what happens. Like many of you, I'm maxed out on monthly subscription fees. But ask yourself, wouldn't you pop for satellite radio if it only cost you the price of a couple espressos a month?

The other is squeezing local stations onto the one big satellite system. Don't get me started on the way Congress and the FCC never get tough with terrestial broadcasters -- WHO PAY NO MONEY, EVER, FOR THEIR LICENSES. I think it'd being amusing to watch {the parent companies) of big local stations, like, say, WCCO, KSTP or KFAN, bidding for a priority spot on a satellite, if each Top 50 metro area was only going to get one, or two. (Clear Channel of course owns a fat chunk of XM).

Since terrestial broadcasters haven't paid Dime One for the right to print money from the public airwaves, maybe they could pay cash straight to the government kitty for spots on a bird -- required of XM/Sirius as a condition of approval.

I haven't bought into satellite to this point because, A: I'm a cheap bastard. B: It hasn't been portable enough, yet. (but its getting there.) C: I've got hundreds of CDs that'll get me from here to there just fine, and without 30 minutes of commercials every hour, and finally, D: Some of the best hours of road-tripping I've ever enjoyed came with a serenade no more expensive than a sunroof open to the whistling wind.