Media Monitor: May 24

Impaler’s film debut: Minnesota’s most-infamous gubernatorial candidate — the one with the cape, not the feather boa — is the subject of a documentary film making its U.S. premiere at Minneapolis’ Oak Street Cinema on May 30. “Impaler,” by Texas filmmaker W. Tray White, chronicles Jonathon Sharkey‘s 2006 run for governor as the Vampires Witches and Pagans Party candidate. Make that a “Satanic Sanguinary Vampyre and Hecate Witch.” Sharkey’s political platform runs the gamut from pulling troops out of Iraq and legalizing gay marriage to punishing “terrorists” (those who engage in anything from drunken driving to murder) with impalement.  Filmmaker White and Sharkey, who is running for U.S. president in 2008, will take part in a Q&A after the Oak Street screening. Watch the trailer.

Remote Reporting on Paulose: After its Washington, D.C., bureau went dark on Tuesday, the Star Tribune has had to scramble to come up with innovative ways to cover news there. One method reporter Eric Black is trying is … C-SPAN. The Minneapolis-based journalist wrote today’s cover story after watching the live video feed of Monica Goodling’s testimony about Minnesota’s interim U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose.  The story ran with no Washington dateline, and photographs were credited to Getty Images.

“It’s obviously a problem that a paper like ours has no boots on the ground in Washington,” Black told Minnesota Monitor. He and editor Dave Peters came up with the idea “on the fly” as a way to cover the Minnesota angle on the firings of U.S. attorneys for political reasons. “It is possible to overstate how bad it is” to cover news this way, Black added, saying many papers likely covered the story from in front of TVs or computer monitors. (Emily Gurnon’s Pioneer Press story on Goodling’s testimony also ran without a Washington dateline.) While he’d rather have a D.C.-based reporter covering such stories, Black said there’s one advantage: watching C-SPAN, you’re guaranteed an unobstructed view of the action — something a journalist on site can’t be guaranteed.

Clift and Paul win News Challenge grants: Two Minnesotans are winners of the Knight News Challenge,  an initiative to “transform community news” through the innovative use of digital technology in local settings. Steven Clift of the online community e-democracy.org won $15,000 to develop the blog “The Ideas Factory,” which will “generate and share big ideas from the world of citizen engagement.” Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, won a $250,000 grant to create “a news simulation environment which lets citizens play through a complex, evolving news story through interaction with the newsmakers.” Congratulations!

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