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Fuckin' great tribute to Jimmy, Brian. I know there's a bit of blood on that keyboard for both of you. We're the not-so-young generation, and we've got something to say...

Lost in all of this, of course, is the fact that Walsh's work at City Pages just wasn't very good. Given a long leash to develop whatever beat or blog he wanted, the guy decided to focus on what was happening in his own head, and the occasional working class bar. If he were somebody - a writer who had reported and accomplished something in the past - that would have been acceptable. But to have this kind of writing from a basically washed-up music critic just didn't cut it.

Contrast him with G.R. Anderson, Perry, or Robson. Each of those guys actually bothers to go out and do some reporting on a regular basis, bring something to readers that they can't already get. I suppose Walsh will argue - with his well-known ego - that his personal musings are in that category. But we all know they're not.

Hell, the guy couldn't even manage to keep up that Walsh Files blog that was supposed to be a new playlist (twenty new songs?) every week. How hard could that be ... for a former music critic? Meanwhile, Robson has developed a huge following for blogging about the Timberwolves - a much harder task, believe me - and doing some occasional original reporting.

Lambert and others can get all sentimental about Walsh, but the fact is that - in terms of quality writing and journalism - he was at the very bottom of CP's stable of writers and editors. There's no argument there. I hate to see anyone get fired, but I can't say that I'm surprised that Jim Walsh was shown the door. Passionate or not, his journalism just plain stunk.

The Retirees

By Jim Walsh

Seven days before Christmas, a large group of St. Paul Pioneer Press employees and ex-employees gathered at O'Gara's bar in St. Paul to bid farewell to the latest downsizing casualties of Minnesota's oldest newspaper (for which this writer worked from 1993-2003).

In the ironically named "Titanic room" of the pub, former staffers such as Patrick Reusse, Aron Kahn, Chuck Laszweski, and Larry Millett mingled over a modest buffet with current staffers such as Matt Peiken, the former arts writer who in 2004 was reassigned to the suburban beat after he wrote a story about alternative media that tangentially criticized the Pioneer Press (the story was killed); Rick Linsk, the buy-outgoing investigative reporter who, along with Laszweski, was suspended for three days in 2004 for attending a Bruce Springsteen-headlined "Vote For Change" benefit concert; and Emily Gurnon, the Minnesota Newspaper Guild representative who helped organize the party.

Journalists are a notoriously proud and bitchy bunch, trained, ideally, as they are to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," and to be skeptical of power, including their own employers and bosses. But with the newspaper death-knell ringing louder than ever throughout the industry, there was a palpable urgency - and resignation - to this evening's proceedings.

The optimists talked about how there will always be a need for storytellers and good writing, no matter what the format or who/what owns/runs it. The pessimists talked about newspaper management's desperation to woo younger readers with intelligence-insulting writing, blurbs, and big graphics, and corporate ownership that values byline counts over originality, creativity, and flesh-and-blood connection with readers.

The rubbing elbows of it all, in other words, was an honest-to-God example of the human element - which, post-Enron, is the sort of grasp for grassroots credibility that corporations of all stripes are suddenly trying to replicate and fabricate (see: "Our Katie Couric" "My Star Tribune"; "My Starbucks"). And currently lost in the discussion about the corporate takeover of newspapers is how the process is slowly severing the intimate connection between readers and writers. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Annie in Andover doesn't give a shit about who owns her paper; she cares about reading about what's happening to her neighbors, including people who write for her newspaper.

In that sense, perhaps the most symbolic scene at O'Gara's on December 18 was that of a bald, middle-aged man sitting quietly at a table for most of the night. This was the Pioneer Press's behind-the-scenes office hero-curmudgeon Rick Notch, whose monotone voice had been at the other end of the newsroom's phone for over 20 years. His was the first voice heard by readers in search of editors, reporters, columnists, and photographers, and its expulsion with the latest round of buy-outs added up, for many, to the heart - or voice, as it were - being cut out of the paper.

After drinks and a round of subdued Irish-wake-feel chit-chat, Kahn, longtime news/arts writer Rob Hubbard, a few other vets, and a trio of tough-looking twentysomething journalists took to the front of the bar to perform a skit. It was the sort of workplace version of comedy that relied heavily on bad inside jokes and an inbred gallows humor that, in this case, stemmed from too many days and nights working in a business that puts body counts and obits next to World War III-font headlines about weather conditions that can be sussed out by simply looking out the window, and stories that amount to Fluffy The Cat Had Fluffy Kittens and Shop ‘Til You Drop.

The theme of the skit was "The Rapture," centering on the 21 Pioneer Press employees who took buy-outs at the end of the year, the largest such deal in the paper's history. That, coupled with the company's lay-offs of several part-time or "non-essential" newsroom staffers two weeks prior, has left the news gathering operation working with what could generously be described as a skeleton crew, were it not for the fact that skeletons have more meat on their bones, and that skeletons are not typically haunted by their friends' ghosts who have families to feed and careers to rejigger.

Hubbard, sporting a Rip Van Winkle beard and dressed in blue wizard robes and hat, stood on a chair with a scepter and proclaimed, "What's in The Media News? I'll tell you what's in The Media News! Story about a buncha people who took a year's pay and six months health care and no longer have to pay their union dues. That's what's in The Media News."

The narrator, longtime state capitol reporter Rachel Stassen-Berger, who was perhaps inspired by memories of former columnists-turned-casualties Laura Billings and Rick Shefchik (who, like the paper's star columnist Joe Soucheray, were out of sight but not out of mind this night), picked it up from there: "One by one, it began to happen. Veteran, beloved employees went into editor Thom [Fladung]'s office as working journalists and emerged as raptured spirits. They carried with them their Rapture packages of wages and benefits.

"Five centuries of writing, taking pictures, editing, and complaining walked out the door. Counting the interns, the median age was now 14. Parts of the room looked like a sale at an office furniture store. The Raptured were gone. The newsroom now belonged to those who were… Left Behind. The young people didn't get raptured up, because there were enough senior workers who accepted rapture packages. Tonight, for the last time, the veterans bid their newspaper home an emotional farewell."

Kahn: "This is the best staff I've ever worked with. Although we did have a good crew when that boat went down in 1912. Can't remember the name of it. Guess my memory is going…"

Enter Jim Ragsdale, the paper's veteran capitol reporter and editorial page writer, clad in an old-timey newsboy hat and a vintage newspaper bag slung over his shoulder, holding photocopies of the front page from the April 16, 1912 edition of the St. Paul paper:

"Extra! Extra! Aron Kahn covers sinking of Titanic! Twelve hundred lives lost! Local man tells Kahn, quote, `Other than that, it was a fun trip!'"

Nervous titters. Forced howls. Then, dead quiet, as each of the cast members stepped forward to speak the name of their fallen colleagues, read like a lost-at-sea list. The somber mood didn't last, of course, for the gathered souls are tough nuts who have seen and reported on people who've got it much worse and were, on some level, itching to get back to doing the work they love. Levity quickly replaced sentimentality, and the Not Ready For Down Time Players concluded with a swaying, locked-arms version of "We'll Have A Blue Newsroom Without You," sung to the tune of "Blue Christmas":

We'll have a blue newsroom without you

It'll be so blue thinking about you

You'll be doin' all right

We'll take up the fight

But we'll have a blue

Blue blue blue newsroom

BREAK

In 2005, America's Most Literate Cities ranked Minneapolis number two and St. Paul number ten in its annual 69-city survey of people who read books, magazines, and newspapers. This area, then, has historically been a hotbed of readers, cultivated in part by local newspapers and local writers who have worked to capture the flavor of the state.

But if the January 2 edition of the Pioneer Press's People section is any indication, the pendulum away from local coverage has swung: 14 of the 15 bylines in the section belonged to wire writers in Washington, New York, and points far beyond the streets of the Twin Cities or farms of outstate Minnesota, affixed to bland-ass stories designed to appeal to Anybody in Anywheresville.

Alas. Other than the usual "commitment to local news" lip service, there shall be no outcry from the top about the homogenization of their product, because it's difficult to imagine an editor or publisher in today's feeding frenzy unconcerned with filling space with cheap wire copy and found graphics. Future ramifications be damned; the proof is already in the pudding: corporate ownership + focus on the bottom line = lost jobs, less locally-generated stories and local writers, duller newspapers (print or online), cancelled subscriptions, and readers getting their backyard fence fix elsewhere.

"I think about this all the time," says Don Boxmeyer, the Pioneer Press's longtime columnist, when asked if we'll ever see another Don Boxmeyer again. "I was at a book signing for a friend the other day, and I looked around the room and thought, `I've done columns on at least 12 of the people here.' Then I thought, `Who's going to write their stories when I'm gone?'"

An ashen-faced Boxmeyer was in the crowd at O'Gara's on December 18. Told of Box's journalism credo ("this job isn't that hard to do; you go out and talk to people and write down what they say"), Reusse nodded vigorously and characterized Boxmeyer as, "the most underrated reporter in this town."

Boxymeyer, 65, started with the St. Paul paper as a paper boy, became a reporter and a beloved columnist who specializes in the sort of homespun tales of local characters and events that have been the lifeblood of the Pioneer Press since its roots as the Minnesota Pioneer, which was founded in 1849, and the St. Paul Dispatch, which was founded in 1868.

(In 1927, Ridder Publications acquired both papers, and for years the town supported morning and evening papers, while the Minneapolis Star and Minneapolis Tribune thrived across the river at the same time. In 1985, the two St. Paul papers merged into one morning newspaper as the Pioneer Press, which was owned for decades by Knight-Ridder and is now owned by the Denver-based MediaNews Group, Inc.)

"I've felt a connection with the paper since I was seven years old," says Boxmeyer, sitting in a booth at the The Capital City Café on St. Paul's East Side with his colleague, books editor Mary Ann Grossmann. "I didn't start out as a reporter. I was going to be an engineer, like my dad. But in my junior year of high school, a teacher said, `Boxmeyer, given your present state of advancement, I suggest you try something you can handle.'

"I said, `What would that be?'

"He said, `Journalism! You don't have to know anything for that.' I took his advice, and it worked. I told my dad, and he said, `Reporters are all drunks and Democrats.' I broke his heart, but he got over it once he started seeing his name in the paper. We made peace after that."

BREAK

Like Boxmeyer, Grossman has ink in her blood. She started with the paper as a reporter in 1961, but when she retired from the paper in 2003, she returned the next week after then editor Walker Lundy passed her in the hallway and suggested she "write a column or something." Grossmann took no time off because, "You know, I had people I had to talk to."

She also knew that if she didn't oversee it, the paper's Sunday books section and coverage of books in general would suffer or, more than likely, go away altogether. "I don't know what their plans were for the book page, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have survived without Mary Anne," says Dana Davis, who has edited the book section with Grossmann since 1987. "Her connections to the Twin Cities literary community is incomparable. We're continually grateful that she's here. I don't know where we'd be without her."

Davis's comments could apply to all 21 of the recently raptured, not to mention more to come when the next Guild contract comes up for negotiation in June. Grossman is already girding for more of the same dumbing-down that has claimed the fine arts critic, the classical music critic, and, as she warns, coverage of theater, pop music, and movies - abley manned at the moment by writers Dominic Papatola, Ross Rahalia, and Chris Hewitt, respectively -- could be replaced by wire copy plucked by whoever's doing the plucking.

"Movies might last because this generation who runs the papers loves movies," says Grossmann. "I think Chris [Hewitt] does an amazing job, but the argument can be made: `Can you get it somewhere else?' And I'm only saying that if you're looking at the bottom line, which all bosses are doing. `What can you get somewhere else?'"

"We'll cover legislature from India," cracks Boxmeyer. "We'll outsource it."

Most importantly, Grossman and Boxmeyer are good case studies, for they possess what Grossmann calls "institutional memory" that is currently lacking in so many slashed-and-burned newsrooms across the country. The two are beholden to their readers, and feel a symbiotic stewardship between the communities they cover and the newspaper; as a result, both now work on a contract basis for the paper, drawing small freelance salaries but no benefits. And, surprisingly, neither one doomsay the future for what writers like them have to offer.

"There was a piece on the Poynter website about how everybody is going to have the New York Times as their front (web) page, so pretty soon local papers like us aren't going have to use the New York Times (wire service)," Grossmann observes. "And so what does that leave us with? It leaves us with local. I think we're going to come back to local reporting. For years, there wasn't an emphasis on it. You know, Don: We were gonna be `big time.'"

Grossmann's most recent version of Boxmeyer's "who will do these stories when I'm gone?" experience was a story she wrote on the Guild Of Catholic Women in St. Paul. The organization was involved in every social service organization in St. Paul since 1906, and Grossmann, the paper's former women's page editor, drew on her knowledge and history to put together a package that no one else could.

"This is the thing that bothers me," she says. "It's not that nobody could write the story - we have wonderful young writers. It's whether anybody would have understood that this was beyond a foo-foo `women's ball' story. And since the buy-outs, what really scares me, is that there's 20 and 30 and 40-year-olds now, and then there's me. I'm 68. There's a whole gap there. You're missing that whole perspective of that decade, of the fiftysomethings."

Which, Titanic-ironically enough, is the main readership of newspapers: the generation who grew up reading them and who will die reading them. The people who read a newspaper not for the Pulitzer pimping or sensational "take-outs" or water-cooler "talkers" (i.e. the quickly digested charticles that go down and out like soup), but for the meaty 20-to-30 inch rants, raves, or revelations that leaves the reader knowing something about themselves and the place they live.

"When you write a story, and your name is on it, then readers know you as the person to go to for a certain kind of story. I've always thought of myself as sort of the Amway salesman of columnists, because I branch out," says Boxmeyer. "I tend to write pieces that don't hurt people, and they come away from it feeling generally fairly good about themselves. And so I become their reporter and then they tell someone else about me. That's been going on for so long, and now I can't stop it."

"We come from a generation where you stay," says Grossmann. "At any medium-sized paper, we'd have people who stayed for ten years. But if people keep leaving and moving on, then you have a constantly turning-over staff of people who are just beginning."

Which results in new and ever-changing bylines, and, in the end, a deep distrust of the paper from readers. To belabor a very basic tenet of writing and storytelling, be it fiction, journalism, memoirs, or blogs: When readers find a writer they like, they will pick up the paper for it, add it to their favorites, and they keep coming back to read what that writer has to say. But readers and writers alike stop coming back when they get jerked around too many times by the powers that be.

That is not Grossmann and Boxmeyer's problem, of course. Both are careful to rave about how the Pioneer Press is still coming out and how good work is still getting done. They reminisce about a meeting on the eighth floor at 345 Cedar in the late ‘80s when management brought in a huge hay rack filled with stacks of papers to illustrate the prevailing circulation boom. Boxmeyer, who in recent years has had open heart surgery, and kidney and liver replacements, worries about which local dignitary will be the first to die and who will not be written about in the hometown paper because nobody at the paper knows who they are.

Finally, he and Grossmann are coaxed into talking about the impact they've had on St. Paul, which this writer saw firsthand a few years ago in the St. Paul Winter Carnival parade, as Boxmeyer sat on the Pioneer Press float and was hailed from curbs that were lined with waving readers who recognized him as their storyteller.

"It has felt really good," he says. "You sometimes try to become detached from the impact you make, but when you stop and think about it, people come up to me all the time and it's scary how much they know about me and my family. Because over the years I've written about them, and people have found out, and my God, I think they even know where I live. I've never kept any of that private.

"Part of what is so satisfying is that people still welcome me into their homes. I'll do this until the day I die, because nobody ever says, `I don't want you to write about me.' I'm a social voyeur. I like to be in the background. But because my column is so visible, across different generations now, it sometimes makes it hard for me to go places and just observe."

Says Grossmann, "It's also gratifying to have someone come up and say, `Oh, you wrote a story about me and my mother 25 years ago, and this is what happened,' or `We've never forgotten it,' or whatever.'"

At that, the two old friends rise from the booth. They've got work to do, people to talk to, deadlines to meet. But first a photographer takes their picture by a Pioneer Press single-copy sales box, which stands on the corner like a Titanic heirloom-in-waiting, and begs the question: Will a Tom Horgen or Alexis McKinnis be around 30 or 40 years from now, talking about how it was back in the vita.mn heyday?

"I've never seen it before where people feel as though something of theirs is threatened," says Boxmeyer. "And they become closer to it. People in St. Paul consider it their paper: `Where's our paper going?' `What's happening to my paper?' I got that today. I get that everyday."