Among the 14 Pioneer Press employees who took the latest buy-out and departed last Friday was Matt Peiken. Perhaps not a household name like Joe Soucheray or Bob Sansevere, Peiken, 44, is the sort of character who shouldn't be completely out of step with modern newspapers, but is.
I first met him in 2000, not long after he joined the PiPress. Back when papers like the one in St. Paul had full-time employees to cover things like classical music and books and TV, Peiken was installed as a kind of general assignment "arts writer," something that today is an unheard of luxury. Not being particularly alert, I couldn't figure out what he was covering from week to week, only that he had a hell of a lot of opinions on how things ought to be going down in the PiPress and the A&E/features department.
Like most staffs we had weekly meetings to get things on the schedule and supposedly dissect each other's work. That last part always went over like a cast iron balloon. For myself and a few others who liked the idea of getting in, scheduling the next "feature" (translation: 18" preview), grabbing our mail, and getting back to work, we were regularly thwarted by Peiken, who, as I said, had an astonishing lot to say about everything ... TV, pop music, comedy, theater, bio-science, Boolean valued function, bo-tox, you name it. Most of it was kind of amusing and not entirely irrelevant. But there were times I wanted to strangle the bastard.
What was unequivocal was that Peiken cared. He was sincerely passionate about doing stories that were different and would draw an audience. Like so many others now migrating out of newspaper work, Peiken had a subversive streak that he employed to put a novel spin on the rote and ordinary stories he was assigned and to keep himself fresh.
I called him last Friday as he was packing up. How, I wondered, did he judge his creative satisfaction over his last years at the Pioneer Press as that paper, following the lead of so many others, elevated predictability to a high virtue?
"I tried to make it work," he said. "I really did. And really that's all [taking the buy-out] is about. I was close to taking it the last time [Thanksgiving '06]. But this time my gut was screaming for me to take it. So I did. Because, the way I see it, it really is all about me asking how much faith I have in myself?"
In 2005 Peiken was transfered out of the arts writer job into something called an "urban reporter," which in fairness, was somebody's idea of letting Peiken's innate idiosyncrasy stir up stories from wherever he found them in the city. That lasted a little over a year, at which point he was sent over to the editorial pages, which had been decimated to the point where today it is literally a one person staff, veteran Jim Ragsdale.
"That business with the editorial board was really just through the election cycle," Peiken explains.
With the campaigns over, the airlock began to slide shut. Peiken was assigned to the suburbs, specifically 12 cities in northern Ramsey county. No matter how much smoke publishers and editors pump, the reality of suburban coverage is that A) Papers don't have the staff to cover the suburbs adequately; B) As they pretend to cover 12 cities with one or two reporters they are pulling resources away and neglecting topics of interest to almost everyone; and C) Since they're faking "coverage" with skeleton staffs they will most often settle for rote and predictable coverage of school boards, cops, and developers. Very few suburban reporters get either time and/or encouragement to take time mining and writing stories outside the formula.
There are exceptions of course. But the exceptions will almost always prove the rule.
"I want to be clear. I am not angry, and I'm not a victim," says Peiken. "In fact, when they told me I was going to the suburbs I told them they had the wrong guy. Obviously I could cover it. But the stories I like to do take more time than a couple days. But they said, 'We need bodies out there.' So I went."
Unlike some suburban reporters Peiken says he actually drove around his area looking for something other than just cops and schools material. (Despite the urgency of their focus on the suburbs neither the Star Tribune nor the Pioneer Press has anything resembling a bureau in any suburb. Suburban reporters mostly cover their beat by phone from their desks downtown.)
[[CORRECTION: This just in from Star Tribune designer Chandra Akkari: The Star Tribune does operate a bureau for its South section in Burnsville, near the Heart of the City development. An editor, three reporters, and one photographer work out of this bureau four days per week, and the office has been in use since November of 2006. Star Tribune South is available Wednesdays inside the Star Tribune in suburbs south of the Minnesota River. The section was started in October 2003. There are also two other suburban weekly sections, North and West, though there are no bureaus at this time for those staffers. The combined circulation of the suburban weeklies is about 120,000.]]
It didn't work out so well for Peiken. As a guy who, in addition to editing a website for performance poetry has performed in the Fringe Festival, in a show based on a smarmy self-help guru character he wrote a book around, Peiken got jazzed by the talk ("talk," mind you) of on-line newspapering with all the video bells and whistles. Driving around led him to whip together a couple videos he dubbed "Suburban Satanic," clearly off-beat takes on life in 'burbia.
He says he played them for his superiors at the PiPress. And ... "They never went anywhere."
Since Peiken doesn't strike me as a guy who works blue I'm wondering how bad they could have been that the PiPress wouldn't ... at least ... say, "Not bad. But what if we do this." I mean, don't you say something to encourage the rare guy who goes and cooks up something entirely on his own time and dime?
Instead, it was the all too-familiar sound of nothingness. No feedback. Nothing. Or in the unspoken ... "Cops, schools, developers."
"That was a sign to me that I had to move on."
Peiken says he has found the first flush of freedom, "Really exciting. I've got all these ideas of things I want to do, a couple non-fiction book proposals, other writing, that it just didn't make sense any more to stay with the paper. It's not like I'm wealthy, but for me writing for the paper was always about something more than the check. And for whatever the reasons, my personality didn't match up with where the paper is going."
Peiken reiterates that he doesn't feel like he was pushed out. Rather the institutional voice and perspective of the Pioneer Press was evolving further and further away from what kept him intellectually refreshed and eager to write.
In other words, "A bad fit," as every manager says who resents spending time getting square pegs to fit in round holes.
Peiken, who will also be attending poker-dealing school, believes this quarter's PiPress buy-outs will likely require the paper's management to raid more from what is left of the paper's features section, in further pursuit of suburban "coverage."
Maybe the most interesting thing Peiken said was an aside: "You know, never once in all the time I was there, not once, did my editor ever come up to me and ask, 'What do you think of this?' I think that's kind of odd, don't you?"
Yeah, I do. Maybe they didn't ask because the loquacious Peiken already told them. But I'm guessing it is something else. Something blander, duller and resigned. Curiosity -- or just simple cross-checking -- used to be a virtue in newspapers.
Heh: http://blogs.walkerart.org/visualarts/2007/10/04/home-brave/
LAMBERT: Peiken to the Slaughter.
Lacking a parakeet, I don't often pick up the PiPress, which, when I do, now reads like the two bits they get for it. Claiming there are still creative people up there on the shabby sixth floor is of little relevance to those of us who still read newspapers. Their creativity is not manifest in your pages. For that, I blame your fusty managers.
It seems the PiPress's apologists are making a herculean effort to avoid Lambert's obvious point that the manageral brain trust ya' got there regards creativity as a hassle, a hard-to-manage trait best stamped out, or, at a minimum, pointedly ignored. Although, having sat through Pieken's Fringe performance, which argues for making the Fringe a juried festival, I can't fault management for ignoring his "suburban safari" convergence idea.
I miss Jim Ragsdale's coruscating copy from the Capitol. He could make some of the dullest dimwits on god's green earth a delight to follow. I realize Jim now carry's on his shoulders your entire editorial page and I am grateful for his voice after the bean counters cleared the execrable stable you had in there before him.
I miss Aron Kahn's brilliant ledes and discerning coverage of the bidness of sports, where he often scooped his better-staffed competitor's across the river. I miss Laura Billings' snarky wit and her husband's unapologetic indignation. I miss Soucherey's column when it wasn't just his part-time job where he uses whatever dross he expediently skims from his spittle-flecked talk show. I miss Larry Millet's literate and scholarly writing about architecture and its history here in St. Paul. I don't miss Lambert, because he has this forum and is allowed to write about matters vastly more interesting and relevant than the latest reality show and the shut-ins who care about it.
Nobody blames the reporting staff.
Brian, I'd like to differ with the following item from your blog:
"(Despite the urgency of their focus on the suburbs neither the Star Tribune nor the Pioneer Press has anything resembling a bureau in any suburb. Suburban reporters mostly cover their beat by phone from their desks downtown.)"
Since last fall, Star Tribune South has been reported, written, photographed and edited out of a bureau at Nicollet Avenue and Burnsville Parkway in Burnsville (an editor, three reporters and a photographer). We're here four days a week to produce Star Tribune South (we all have to be in Minneapolis one day a week on section-production day).
Star Tribune South reaches all of Scott County, most of Dakota County and slices of both Rice and Le Sueur counties.
Dennis Buster
editor
Star Tribune South
101 W. Burnsville Pkwy.
Suite 220
Suburban Burnsville, Minn.
While I enjoyed the column -- and have great professional respect for Matt and the others who took the buyout -- I do have to raise an objection about the column's headline. There are still plenty of "creative" people at the Pioneer Press. In fact, as more and more of my colleagues walk out the door, we're having to find new ways to be creative in order to cover the news we have to cover. It is wrong to claim that the paper lacks creativity just because an editor didn't go for a reporter's idea. I have no personal or even second-hand knowledge about the video thing, so I don't know if Matt came up with the greatest idea since sliced bread or if he came up with a real stinker. But I DO know that there are still creative people left at the paper, and proclaiming that the Pioneer Press lacks creativity just because of this incident demeans the rest of us who still walk into 345 Cedar Street each day with the intent of putting out the best paper we know how to put out.
Brian, you are incorrect when you say: "Despite the urgency of their focus on the suburbs neither the Star Tribune nor the Pioneer Press has anything resembling a bureau in any suburb."
The Star Tribune South section has a bureau in Burnsville, in the Heart of the City development. The staff works out of the Burnsville office four days a week and has been stationed there since November 2006. One editor, three reporters and a photographer work out of that office, as well as occasional sales representatives.
Star Tribune South is one of the three suburban sections the Star Tribune has been publishing since fall 2003, which cover the suburbs to the north, west and south of Minneapolis.
"Suburban Safari" was the name of the video series I'd proposed to the Pioneer Press -- you can see two pilot episodes in the See/Hear section of my Web site (mattpeiken.com). If I were an editor of a mainstream daily, I, too, would question the judgment of publishing something titled "Suburban Satanic."