The Future Online — and in Jail

Your loss, our gain: With so many writers leaving the Star Tribune, recent buyouts at the Pioneer Press and some of City Pages’ best writers without jobs, online news could end up reaping the benefit. Minnesota Public Radio’s coverage of the Strib buyouts revealed that former Star Tribune publisher Joel Kramer is considering launching an online daily news site sometime this year. But he’s not alone in wanting to snatch up bought-out writing talent. With a site redesign in the works, MNSpeak publisher Matt Bartel has been emailing advertisers telling them the site will begin hiring writers to do local columns.

“It’s possible we may be picking up a few people from the last round of Star Tribune buyouts,” he wrote one advertiser. Reached by email, he said he hasn’t talked with any Strib writers yet, but confirmed the plan for columnists.

His dad, Tom Bartel of The Rake, has already given a food and dining column to former Strib writer and director of Twin Cities Media Alliance Jeremy Iggers. Iggers says he and Anne Bauer will be blogging for a new food and dining website The Rake is launching.

The news game: The winners of a $250,000 Knight News Challenge grant are fleshing out their plans to use it to make a digital news simulator. Nora Paul, director of the Institute of New Media Studies, and Kathleen Hansen, director of the Minnesota Journalism Center, will use the cash to create a game called “Playing the News,” which will help community members use news resources in actual contexts.

Paul says the game will help users understand the complexities of news gathering, “using real issues as they arise, the words and actions of real stakeholders, the actual reports and documents generated by policy experts, the news stories created by journalists and other sorts of information.”

Dateline: Jail. Former Minneapolis City Council member Dean Zimmerman has a blog — written from a federal prison cell in Colorado, where he’s serving a 2.5-year sentence on bribery charges.

From Duluth to The OC: Marti Buscaglia, five-year publisher of the Duluth News Tribune and a former Pioneer Press executive, has been named publisher of the Orange County Register in Santa Ana, Calif. The Orange County native said she leaves “with a heavy heart,” but the move to a larger paper — 1,400 employees with a daily circulation of 300,000 compared to the 65,000 issues the Duluth paper puts out on Sunday — must be appealing. And then there’s the weather.

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