The Rake Magazine

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.

It is spring in DC. Time for politicians and reporters to gather and reassure us and each that they are kindred souls playing the same game for the same team. For the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner the kids at JibJab debuted their latest video. Check it out here.

I have a lot of guilty pleasures, probably more than innocent ones, but among the guiltiest is redandnater.com a local broadcast message board. It is a place where usually anonymous broadcast professionals, very disgruntled ex-broadcast professionals and some appalling idiots re-staff, re-program TV and radio stations and spare nothing in insulting the talent of well, uh, on-air talent and the twits who hired them.

According to redandnater's deep thinkers Joe Soucheray is mailing it in, Tom Barnard is a washed up hack/genius, John Hines, (based on his first day), is never going to cut it on talk radio, every sales manager on every local station is a putz and a bastard, so is every program director, (except KSTP's former PD, Joe O'Brien, who is regularly proposed as the salvation for every programming screw-up the town has ever endured). It is also a place where "fecterated" (?) is an all-purpose slur.

If you know anything at all about the characters getting torched on redandnater you are also convinced that radio and TV are doomed in the Twin Cities market ... if even half of the board's contributors are actually employed in the business ... because they appear to be utterly clueless about what to do to invigorate either medium other than re-creating personalities and formats that were hot in the '80s.

Anyway ... like every other unmoderated board, redandnater has been plagued by the usual wretched few who aren't content just to sound profoundly stupid, but have to add a dollop of racism or porn-hound sexism for worse measure. So a few days ago, Eric Redlinger, the board's co-creator/primary supervisor announced that he'd post the IP addresses of the worst offenders if they didn't knock it off, pronto.

Outed for racist stupidity!? On the internet!? It's the fall of friggin' Rome!

Actually it's more like one average guy's stand for a little goddam civility. Maybe you can't make people b e smart, but you sure can shame them out of transmitting their closeted phobias.

"I posted one, today," Redlinger told me when we chatted this afternoon.

He says the board gets about 167 hits a day on 21 different topics. (Sample: "Tom Barnard's Act Has Grown Old" -- 46 posts.) And that in terms of cash flow, "We make very little, if none at all."

For a day job Redlinger runs a production house, RedCommunications.tv. But he did a term at KFAN until getting canned five years ago, pretty much simultaneous with starting up redandnater. (The "nater" half takes the very low profile. In fact, "he may or may not exist", Redlinger seems to like to say.) Last year Clear Channel regional capo, Mick Anselmo, memorably ordered his staff to lay off redandnater, at least on company time. (Anselmo's sales honchos, a few select program directors and Clear Channel in general take a constant, merciless beating).

Redlinger's personal guesstimate breakdown of knowledgeable broadcast professionals to blithering idiots is, "About 20/80, with the idiots leading the charge." He believes his I'll-post-your-IP threat has at least temporarily flushed out the most racist, sexist blitherers.

"That crowd wants nothing to do with having their identity
revealed in any way. I don't like to do it. When we said we'd post everything and not censor anything, and we meant it. But when it gets as ugly and hurtful as some of that stuff was, it drives off the people you created the thing for, the people who want to exchange information or just gossip."

Regular commenter, "Jimmy", is doing the heavy lifting today on the global warming topic so miserably bowdlerized by spin-crazed righties. (My dismissive, elitist position remains: "Let the fools rant on in their private echo chamber. They add nothing to the base of knowledge."

Earlier though, "Jimmy", asked only half-facetiously what I was ever doing watching Channel 5's late news in the first place? (For the record, an Eyewitness News teaser in the middle of "Lost", promising a Hubbard Broadcasting news organization's "report" on global climate change, was just too damned irresistible.)

But the topic of the relevance and value of local TV popped up again a day or two later over lunch with another former media columnist. We gather occasionally to condemn all the various bastards, (more every hour, it turns out), and bore waiters with our deep thoughts on the low-brow mayhem we see at every point of the compass. That, and we get to play amateur restaurant reviewers, although my colleague rates as something close to a true gourmet. (Capsule review of the M&S Grill's calamari -- quite good. But the dipping sauce still doesn't compare with Big Bowl's. The Reuben though, was juicy and flavorful. ... Now you know why I don't write about food.)

Anyway, amid exchanges of the usual gossip and slander we touched on the likely fate of the 10 pm local news, a "product" neither of us consumes much anymore, mainly because of the absurd concessions broadcasters have made to commercial considerations. It isn't just the monotony of breathless crime reporting and relentless self-promotion -- although that'd be enough to drive any sane person back to print. But in age of so many alternative news sources it is more and more the ridiculous short-hand formulaic 22-minute newscasts apply to almost every type of story, the almost complete lack of analysis given government reporting -- beyond which party's ox is getting gored -- and the sheer, numbing corniness of the whole content template.

I mean, don't you ever watch the local news, here in the Twin Cities or anywhere, and get the eery feeling that you're locked in 1970s worm hole? A time trap where 30 years haven't changed the lighting, make-up, story selection, presentation or ambient chatter?

With all the ink and tears being spilled over the gutting of newspapers by their investors, it seems worth taking a look into the near term future of local TV news, particularly at this moment when gizmos like Apple TV have arrived to marry all the news sources on the internet to your television set. (OK, for the moment Apple TV will only play video first downloaded to your computer. But we can agree that is a very short-term limitation.)

"Hyper-localization" is this month's buzzword among news managers, and TV news, with its satellite trucks able to pump out pictures of yellow-tape wrapped crime scenes faster and better than anyone else probably seem to have a solid lock on the "local news" franchise. But really, folks, tell me there isn't an audience out there in a city as hip as ours for a lower-tech version oriented to more relevant topics than gang-bang murders and house fires, staffed by smart-asses willing to ask impertinent questions of public officials and flesh a truly relevant story out beyond 45 seconds?

The actual point of departure for this conversation was the internet video work already being done by first-tier newspaper reporters like the New York Times' David Carr, David Pogue, etc. and the Washington Post's Dana Milbank. Based strictly on telegenicity none of those gentlemen would get passed the first purge of photo resumes. But in the evolved world of 2007 video-news, (as opposed to the 1970 standard revered by network consultants), they are all natural "performers", with, obviously, the huge advantage of being able to constantly assert and establish credibility by having three to five minutes to tell an actual story as opposed to silly, ghoulish, dumb-downed headlines.

Point being, the Star Tribune should have gotten hip to this evolution at least five years ago. If new owners Avista want a list of a dozen Star Tribune staffers who would make decent TV reporters they can e-mail me here at The Rake.

Also, for years PBS has danced around a full-scale union with NPR. Now THAT would make astonishing good sense at a point in our history where hoary commercial considerations have led otherwise serious news managers to conclude that the only way to survive is by aping and out bullshitting the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Nancy Grace.

With so much of the so-called mainstream electronic news media engaged in a bizarre process of self-marginalization, it comes as no great surprise -- but genuine delight - that The Onion has decided to get into the 24-hour "fake news" business. Describing itself as, "faster, harder, scarier and all-knowing", ("Scarier" than what? Fox News? Impossible!)

Actually, the news service declares itself a rival to CNN and MSNBC. "Those are parody shows," Onion prez, Sean Mills, told Variety. "This is serious news."

Given the rather startling number of cronies of mine -- go ahead, consider the source -- who have thrown up their hands at the timidity and target-demo driven silliness of the 10 pm local news and made a habit of "The Daily Show" instead, The Onion News Network, (ONN), available now at Theonion.com, commences business with a nice built-in audience.