My Favorite Cheap Thrill...

...is watching writers for boutique freebie-zines getting beaten senseless with clubs.

The above is intended as satire, just like this bit here.

But to be fair, I think Steve Perry might have figured out something that some of us have known about the City Pages for a long time.

Steve Perry got his shorts scorched, as he noted notged last Thursday:

Having read a lot of comments and emails in the last 12 hours from readers who've seen the lives of loved ones wrecked or ended by meth, I think the readers were ahead of us on this one. I still believe that there was a legitimate point to be made about the dangers of overhyping meth or any other drug of the hour, as I said yesterday. That was why I approved the item. But if you're going to make that point regarding meth, it deserves some careful qualification--clearly, meth is not just any drug in the way it takes hold of many users--and in retrospect, casting it as a gag item in the Best of the Twin Cities issue was not the way to make the point.

Sounds good.

Hey, comedy is ugly. And sometimes stupid. I'm as guilty as the next guy; I feel Perry's pain.

More interesting though; Perry feels someone else's pain...:

If you've read this paper to any extent at all, you know that there are plenty of people whose feet we relish putting to the fire. Drug casualties and their loved ones aren't among them. What makes me feel worse, frankly, is that we have always worked hard in our news and features section to avoid the class biases and blind spots that shape way too much of the news coverage available today.

The City Pages has always known its target audience; lilywhite, living in Downtown, Uptown or Dinkytown, left of center, college-educated; to reach that audience, their assembled a staff of...well, the same thing.

And that's made them a tad myopic, as Perry seems to note:

What I mean is that we try regularly to tell stories that cast a light on people most media don't bother with, since those people don't belong to the most desirable ad/demographic niches.

Unless, in this case, those "people the media don't bother with" are lower and lower-middle class people from unfashionable, rural, exurban and suburban America.

Am I reading too much into Perry's mea culpa? No - he puts it into almost as many words:

And we blew it on that score here, in my view. Would we have published a satiric item about meth if it were tearing through the city neighborhoods where we live in the way it's tearing through many small towns and suburbs? No, I can't imagine we would; I can't imagine it would even occur to us to do so. We're sorry for the blind spot we put on display, and for the pain it clearly caused for many readers.

I've joked for years about the classism and label-driven myopia of the City Pages' staff; for years, I joked that their annual "Best of the Twin Cities" edition might be more accurately named "Best of Uptown, Downtown and Dinkytown", since it seemed their staff rarely left those neighborhoods.

But who knows. Maybe the whole flap'll teach the CP's editorial crowd that there are actual real people, rather than convenient stereotypes, out there west of Wirth Parkway and south of 36th Street.

Maybe. I'll still take the "under" on that bet.

Posted by Mitch at May 1, 2006 05:53 AM | TrackBack