Media Monitor: May 10

Strib Websearch to log off: As more than 200 employees plan a 4:30 p.m. Thursday demonstration outside the Star Tribune’s  offices to “protest the dismantling of a once-great newspaper,” news of another column’s demise is reported by a newsroom insider. Websearch, which appears daily beside James Lileks’ Quirk column, will disappear and its writer, Randy Salas, will be reassigned. The irony, of course: Websearch, which digs up curious finds on the Internet, was launched in October 2005 as a way to use the Internet to engage younger readers and women, key demographics cited in the Readership Institute’s “experience newspaper” studies that led to the Strib’s redesign. It also became one of the more popular Strib features picked up by other papers through McClatchy’s newswire.

More InsideHubbard’s House Halted: Hubbard Broadcasting mogul Rob Hubbard was again denied the OK to tear down a small cabin on his property abutting the St. Croix River to build a 16,000-square-foot home. The Department of Natural Resources had previously denied permission for Hubbard’s planned five-bedroom house and four-car garage because it would’ve violated a rule requiring a 40-foot setback for buildings near the federally protected river. In January, he threatened, “I’m not making any threats, but I’ve lived on the river my entire life. I intend to raise my family there. I don’t think the [DNR] should have the ability to tell me that I can’t rebuild a structure that is there.”

Former columnist on Lileks’ ‘bad standup’: While many in the conservative blogosphere have rushed to James Lileks’ defense over Strib plans to cut his daily Quirk pieces, columnist-turned-blogger Nancy Nall will have none of it. She’d heard that Lileks was paid $92,000 a year by the Strib, and for what? Columns on Pepto-Bismol and Kleenex she describes as having the “flop-sweaty smell of bad standup.” She writes: “I used to like his Newhouse column, until his hardening right-wing sensibilities ruined it for me. Close your eyes, and you’d swear his words were issuing from the mouth of a 33-year-old Grosse Pointe soccer mom in a blonde pageboy, about to climb into her Hummer H2 without guilt, thank you very much, because it makes her feel safe.”

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