The Minnesota Independent  is pining for the fjords:.

I am writing today to announce the closure of the Minnesota Independent. After five years of operation in Minnesota, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com.

I love that; the “American Independent News Network”, which runs the “Colorado Independent”, the “Iowa Independent”, the “Florida Independent” and the “Texas Independent”, and ran the “Minnesota Independent” (as well as the also-closed “New Mexico Independent” and “Michigan Messenger”), allows the various regional fiefdoms about as much “independence” as the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture. The “Independent” regional media is not only being shut down…

…it’s being centralized!:

This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms of journalism made available as technology has advanced, and an increasing emphasis on national coverage and issue-based coverage from our network. Over the coming months, AINN will announce a number of new journalism initiatives that will continue to advance our mission of producing impact journalism in the public interest.

So that’s that!

The Mindy, as some of us called it, wasn’t always a complete waste; Paul Schmelzer was a capable writer; Andy Birkey could be a decent reporter, back before his obsession with Bradlee Dean drove him off the rails.

But from the Mindy’s breezy, amateurish start (as the Minnesota Monitor, under then-editor Robin Marty), through its history, it went from groaningly disingenuous (Marty often, absurdly denied any connection to George Soros and “liberals with deep pockets” during her reign) to curiously overstaffed (the Mindy briefly employed some very high-caliber liberal reporters and “editors” – Steve Perry, Erik Black and others – until, it seemed, moments after the 2008 elections) and its descent into near-irrelevance over the past three years, it’s always been a hothouse flower – something that couldn’t exist without massive outside support.

And that’s gone.

Going forward, an archive of Minnesota Independent’s reporting will exist on AmericanIndependent.com.

Perhaps a more interesting archive of the Mindy and MinnMon’s history is found right here on this very blog.

So just for old time’s sake, let’s go through some of the Mindy’s greatest hits:

• Andy Birkey wonders when Bradlee Dean stopped taxing his wife…
• …and promotes a call from a loud-mouthed unknown into “a threat from a Tea Party leader!!!!!!!”
• Dan Haugen is shocked, shocked that Tennessee might allow legal carry-permittees to carry guns in bars, unlike urbane, cultured Minnesota (where that very thing’s been legal since 2003).  That’s what you get for using Steven Colbert as a “source”.
• Andy Birkey teases a Tom Emmer quote into compliance with his narrative.
• The Mindy staff are shocked, shocked that their owner, the “Center for Independent Media”, tubed so many of them after their usefulness expired the 2008 election.
• Watched Steve Perry – who had turned the City Pages into one of the better reporting shops in the Twin Cities in the nineties – spiral into being a high-veneer Mark Gisleson (he’s been rehabbing himself for the past few years at Politics in Minnesota – by all accounts I’ve heard, successfully).
• Liberal mope-with-portfolio (and old friend of this blog) Molly Priesmeyer snickers and chortles about the state of John McCain’s orthodontia – ignorant of the fact that his originals were smashed out of his face by his North Vietnamese captors.
• We caught a MinnMon reporter plagiarizing the Associated Press on at least three occasions, in a three-part series (First, Second, Third) that drew emphatic, not-very-editorial silence from their editor.

And on, and on, and on.

One of my more solidified principles is that I never, ever do the end-zone happy dance over people losing jobs.  I do indeed hope Andy Birkey (and whoever else may still have been left at the Mindy) come up with some kind of gainful employment (and I have a hunch the Sorosphere will look out for its own).

But I come to bury the Mindy, not to praise it.