I rag endlessly on the Minnesota Monitor.\u00a0 But I’ll say this: media correspondent Paul Schmelzer is very, very good at what he does.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Vastly better, as a media-beat reporter, than the “source” of this bit from Friday, Brian Lambert, one of the Twin Cities’ media scene’s great ongoing embarassments.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lambert, who’s been ekeing out a living of sorts at “Rake” or “Pulse” or “Spume” or “Froth” or “Cake” or some other boutique handout ‘zine, visibly slavers for any gig that’ll get him back in the journalistic middle class.\u00a0 And so it’s gotta hurt when his old rival from twenty years ago, James Lileks, came out of the turmoil at the Strib with the reins of “Buzz.com”, and a license to make it work (Lileks is an alum of the City Pages<\/em> from back in the eighties; Lambert wrote for late, unlamented rival Twin Cities Reader<\/em>).\u00a0<\/p>\n Schmelzer reports that Lambert is oh so onto something<\/a>, yesirreebob:<\/p>\n The Rake’s Brian Lambert says what’s been on the minds of many I’ve talked with recently: How come the Star Tribune community blog Buzz.mn has become the sole domain of James Lileks, who was hired to manage it?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Not sure if Lambert and “many” that Schmelzer has “talked with recently” have heard, but Lileks is a fairly prominent blogger.<\/p>\n Y’know.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I and others never had the impression it was supposed to be a one-person rumpus room, yet another variation on ‘The Bleating Quirk,'” Lambert writes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Brian Lambert, who\u00a0loses the title of “Twin Cities’ Media’s most egregious DFL flak” only because Lori Sturdevant\u00a0draws breath,\u00a0dinging Lileks, the center-right blogosphere’s least political prominent blogger,\u00a0for being a political\u00a0one-trick pony?<\/p>\n I’ll let that little dollop of cheap irony fester\u00a0right there for a moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Is there, as one dime-dropper told me, ‘a de facto boycott’ going on?<\/a> And how did Lileks end up with an editing job officially described as requiring, ‘the consummate team player’?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “How?”<\/p>\n “How” indeed!\u00a0<\/p>\n Because he was able to convince management that he’s, if not an “ultimate” team player, at least good enough to do the job (as, indeed, Brian Lambert has never been)?<\/p>\n Or is it that blasted right-wing conspiracy again?\u00a0 Because we all know how very very much influence<\/em>\u00a0 the vast right-wing conspiracy has at the Strib.<\/p>\n Lambert ponders whether “Nancy Barnes and Scott Gillespie, the Strib’s top editors, parked Lileks there just to goose up traffic with his ‘Bleat’ readers.” If so, are they — or potential contributors at the Strib — concerned that readers of this “community journalism website<\/a>” aren’t necessarily from the local community?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If so, they’d be blissfully\u00a0unaware that the web is<\/em>, in fact, international, and that when it comes to advertising, hits\u00a0is hits; one never looks a gift audience (especially one like Lileks’ which, unlike Lambert’s, is big) in the mouth.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0Or that many are arriving via Lileks’ personal conservative contacts? In today’s post on The Bleat, Lileks’ non-Strib blog, he praised\u00a0 Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds (dubbed “the godfather of conservative blogging<\/a>” by Right Wing News), “whose natural generousity has thrown boatloads of traffic to buzz.mn this week, bless his soul”<\/a> and mentioned a radio segment he did with Dean Barker, conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt’s co-blogger at Town Hall.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And so we get down to the next-to-center layer of the onion; to the likes of Lambert, the only “unbiased” media is the one where everyone explicitly shares the same <\/em>biases.<\/p>\n The center layer, of course, is that Lambert would seem to be a jealous little fellow who deeply covets Lileks’ success which, at every step in both of their careers, has constantly outpaced his own.\u00a0 Back in the eighties when they both wrote for boutique ‘zines, Lileks was the better and more successful writer.\u00a0 Lileks went to DC to write for Newhouse; Lambert went to Saint Paul to write an expendable media column (which was, eventually, expended).\u00a0 Lileks’ radio show was a success and remains a cult favorite; Not even Sarah Janecek could save Lambert’s latest foray into broadcast, while his earlier attempts were definitely cable-access-worthy.\u00a0 And today, Lileks is working the only part of the Strib franchise that’s growing; Lambert will be selling articles to the Skyway News <\/em>and the Highland Villager <\/em>before too long.<\/p>\n Yeah.\u00a0 It must be the politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I rag endlessly on the Minnesota Monitor.\u00a0 But I’ll say this: media correspondent Paul Schmelzer is very, very good at what he does.\u00a0 Vastly better, as a media-beat reporter, than the “source” of this bit from Friday, Brian Lambert, one of the Twin Cities’ media scene’s great ongoing embarassments.\u00a0 Lambert, who’s been ekeing out a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[333],"class_list":["post-935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","tag-brian-lambert"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=935"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53018,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions\/53018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}