Brian Lambert – the Major Renault of the Twin Cities media – yaps about the Stribs’ discovery of that thing that most terrifies people like…well, Brian Lambert; the free market.

But first, some things that oughtta scare all of us:

Former City Pages editor, Steve Perry, has been busy tunneling through some juicy news troves as he prepares to launch his much anticipated website, The Daily Mole, (Think: A young, hip, bra-less version of MinnPost.com).

Not sure that I want to see a bra-less Steve Perry.

But I digress. 

In the process, he came across an interesting piece of Star Tribune in-house stategery, (as W* would say) that we felt needed to emerge from behind the Mole’s beta fire-wall to be shared with all of you.

I quote:

“Ridder’s Star Tribune legacy: The newspaper of the very best zip codes.”

By Steve Perry
October 2, 2007

Let’s stop right there.

Brian Lambert and Steve Perry – no Frogtowners, no blue-collar working stiffs, nobody who would seem to have seen the wrong end of a time clock in his entire post-Dinkytown-fratboy lives, they – are yipping about a newspaper, a business, actually selling their product where the money is?

Perry:

Par Ridder may have fallen, but his vision of the Star Tribune’s future marches on. The map shown here (click on the image for a large view) is an internally distributed Strib planning document that identifies the “key zip codes” in the paper’s primary distribution area. Think of it as a visual rendering of the paper’s latest push to shore up its collapsing profits and reshape its news coverage in the most demographically attractive corners of the metro: the affluent, mostly conservative outer-ring suburbs. And if you live in Minneapolis or St. Paul (or any first-tier suburb save Edina), think of yourself as the hole in the donut.

The red sectors on the map also help to make sense of Avista point man Chris Harte’s push for a more conservative editorial page voice in recent months, a development that Brian Lambert and Deborah Rybak have been watching closely at their Rake-hosted media news blog. (Harte’s more notorious diktats have included forced revisions of editorials calling for DOT chief Carol Molnau’s head, and championing a proposed gas tax hike.)

Um, yeah.  The Strib has become a conservative tool.  Just ask…I dunno, a conservative.  Does Steve Perry know any?

I’ll go back to Perry’s bit while I herniate myself laughing:

As one Strib veteran tells the Mole, “The right-wing blog voices that were bashing the paper a couple of years ago, Hugh Hewitt and the rest, have gotten pretty much everything they wanted.

We got a paper that doesn’t say “be gentle” when the DFL says “bend over?”

(shrugs) 

 The GOP wanted the Minnesota Poll gone, and now it’s gone.

Really? 

They wanted to get rid of people like [editorial board members] Jim Boyd and Susan Albright and their editorial policy, and they’ve succeeded at that.

Well, to be fair to all of us conservatives, anyone that supported unbiased, fair journalism should have wanted both of them chased from 425 Portland by a torch-and-pitchfork-bearing mob.   

Now there won’t be editorials about the war and global warming; they’ll write about local issues like zoning conflicts in Coon Rapids instead.

Let’s leave the Strib’s congenital bias aside for a moment; even if they were going to remain a pure DFL flak organ, the fact remains that “local sells”.   

 They wanted the paper to hire a conservative columnist, and they got that.

Over how many dead bodies? 

From here on out, it looks like the Strib becomes the conservative, suburbs-oriented paper, and the Pioneer Press will become the paper of the city underdogs and the blue voters. They may wind up getting pushed more to the left.”

Let’s leave politics aside for a moment, again; the Pioneer Press might just have to to exactly that, since they blew the chance to try to capture the moderate-right-leaning audience that both papers have piddled on for all of recent memory.  If the Strib (and it’s a HUGE if) is actually moving to the middle, the PiPress may have lost its best chance to survive.  Period.

The irony is that the Parmeister worked his magic in St. Paul before turning his talents on Minneapolis. East of the river he frankly declared his intention to turn the Pioneer Press Op-Ed section into “the conservative alternative to the Star Tribune”, all while and blanding-down “news coverage” to those same mythically potent outer suburbs.

The “mythically potent” ‘burbs where most of Minnesota’s growth, and red-ifying, are happening, in other words.

In other words, though shamed by his own malfeasance, Ridder has wrought red across the Twin Cities metro.

Well, maybe he’s not so dumb after all.

(Via Ed and Tracy)