Less Strib To Loathe
By Mitch Berg
The possibly-bankrupt Strib is pondering cuts.
In addition to staff, though, says the MNPost’s David Brauer, this time they’re cutting actual Strib:
The Strib’s Sunday feature section, Source, will die sometime this summer. The Home & Garden section will no longer be stand-alone — it becomes the Wednesday Source section. And — in a move pregnant with meaning for 2005-redesign-haters — the Source name is being dumped for the old moniker, Variety.
All told, the paper will lose seven full pages of stories each week. That’s a solid ad-free page of copy a day, though the loss may be concentrated on Wednesday and to a lesser degree, on Sunday. The stakes are especially high for the latter edition; it’s by far the week’s biggest moneymaker, but it’s been shrinking steadily and circulation is down 7 percent in the past year.So why is Graydon Royce happy? The Strib’s longtime theater critic is also co-chair of the newsroom’s union, so he’s not one given to ebullience about management decisions. The l-word I expected to hear from his lips was “loathe,” not “like.”
But Royce says there are several positive aspects to the proposal. Sunday Source is a vestige of the redesign’s Signature section, which showcased long-form weekend pieces but quickly flopped. It survived as Sunday Source — which basically wrapped classifieds and ad circulars. “It was a small section, advertisers were frustrated and readers couldn’t find it,” Royce notes.
It was especially hard to find when you haven’t subscribed for years – but we digress.
Cuts the Strib should make – now there’s a topic…
May 7th, 2008 at 8:20 am
Ahhh, I recall that on Bush’s second inauguration, the Mpls paper did a front page, above the fold story/maps. Showing the confederate states from 1861, and the Bush voting states of 2004. Get it? If you voted for Bush in 2004, then you are a racist who supports slavery, in the eyes of the Mpls paper. (no word on North Dakota and Utah reasons for voting Republican).
Good riddence, Star-Tribune. Go away please. I’ll read my little mini-print St Paul paper (except the wire service A section).
May 7th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Should be small enough by this fall to drown in a bathtub.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Funny thing is, I stumbled across a couple of free issues this spring. Haven’t read this paper in 4 years and was surprised. If you ignore the editorial page, the columnists (except for KK and Lileks), maybe most of the national wire service stories, the paper was surprisingly good.
Decent comics (I think they even carry that neoCon Mallard Fillmore), the home maintenance type things. sports, that sort. Maybe they should cut out the news sections and keep the rest.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Thanks, Chuck. Much appreciated. Incidentally, I was curious about the map you recollected, so I went back to our archives: either we sent that one down the Memory Hole, or your memory may be a bit off. No such map ran on any page in the paper – not on the front page, not inside. Not on the day of the inauguration, or the day after, or the day after that. I checked the 2004 election week papers, and again: no such map anywhere in the coverage.
Perhaps you were thinking of the Pioneer Press? 😉
PS – Mallard Fillmore isn’t the only neoconcomic; there’s another, whose name I can’t recall at the moment – it replaced Doonesbury, which is on hiatus.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Chuck, good point. I’ve actually found myself getting less offended by the Strib, and commenting more often on actual fair, balanced coverage of some issues, of late.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
The Strib dropped Mallard Fillmore about a month ago. I’m surprised Lileks’ didn’t know about that with his insider status and mad archive searching skillz. 🙂
And f/t/r Mallard’s booting is fine with this neopaleocryptolibertaricon. It wasn’t funny and was usually 2 weeks behind the news cycle.
May 7th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Ohhh, if I mixed up the two papers from inguruation day, Jan 2004, is my face red and I owe the Star-Tribune an apology. I recall walking by the vending machines that morning, bending over to read the headlines and seeing that. I assumed it was the Mpls paper, but perhaps my memory is bad.
Full story…I go to the Carlson school at the UofM, and last winter they used to have a stack of free Mpls papers each day. I’d grab one to read on the light rail back home (yes, a right winger who likes mass transit). I actually enjoyed it. As far as the news, the local stories were good. The other sections were really good. I stopped reading that paper in the fall of 2004 because of the editorial page…..this I know is the Star-Tribune because I called in to complain….the last one I bought was the day they ran the cartoon attacking Vietnam vets (because of the Swift boat vets I suppose). Turns out I was missing something.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Should be small enough by this fall to drown in a bathtub.
Should be small minded enough by this fall to drown in a bathtub.
There, fixed it for you.
Actually, I tend to agree with Mitch that it’s been getting a bit better about insulting about 40% of the potential audience (anyone in the metro area who ISN’T a die-hard DFL member). When we first moved back to MN I actually resubscribed in a fit of nostalgia since I remembered to read with the Strib decades ago, but I didn’t make it even to the end of the 3 month trial period. How bad was that? I came from Vermont, a state arguably even further to the fringe than the metro area, and even there the paper didn’t feel it necessary to insult the smallish community of independent and conservative minded folks continuously.
Not that getting better is enough for me to contemplate resubscribing anytime soon. I read Lileks and that’s about it. Sorry, even Kirsten doesn’t get my attention. For local news, the PP covers the east metro better, and for national, business, and tech news the Internet rules. And Craigslist blows away any local paper as far as classifieds go.