Mandatory News Blogging — and the Strib’s ‘Drunk Uncle’

Time for Blogging: As the Star Tribune’s Big Question undergoes a change — with Eric Black gone, D.J. Tice resurfaced with an alert on the blog’s uncertain future and a site “Administrator” offers a belated post on that funny senator, Amy Klobuchar — Romenesko reports that blogging has become mandatory at TIME magazine. In a memo to staff, managing editor Rick Stengel wrote: “Let me make this explicit: evaluations of every Time writer, correspondent, and reporter will be based on the quality and quantity of the contributions each of you makes to both the magazine and to TIME.com. TIME.com is a daily responsibility; Time magazine is a weekly responsibility. TIME is made up of both.”

Holla about Vita.mn: Minnesota Daily’s Holla Backlash, a must for any news aggregator, weighs in on the Vita.mn “Sex al Fresco” debacle (in which regular Strib readers were offended by Alexis McKinnis’ cover story on outdoor sex). Commenting on efforts by Strib editor Nancy Barnes and reader’s representative Kate Parry to dress down — and distance the paper from — its tabloid cousin, Holla writes: “It’s like Vita.mn is that drunk uncle at family reunions who embarrasses the family with politically incorrect jokes and has the tendency to slap the behinds of women. He married into the family, we swear! We don’t share DNA! He wasn’t even invited this year, he just showed up!”

But as one Minnesota Monitor reader emailed, there’s a disconnect between Parry’s recent column — in which she pointed out that McKinnis isn’t a journalist, that she’s a free-lancer, and that you “have to read some mighty fine print in Vita.mn to connect the venerable Star Tribune and this upstart publication” — and the paper’s “Alexis on the Sexes” billboard campaign (seen, among other places, in Dinkytown and the Wedge). “Didn’t Kate Parry explicitly called her a ‘freelancer’ in her recent column?” asks Thomas Elko. “How many freelancers get organized marketing campaigns around them?”

What’s stranger? That KDWB radio morning host Dave Ryan bought game show host Bob Barker’s microphone for $19,000 at an eBay auction benefiting animal rights, or that the avid collector once owned a toe tag affixed to the dead Lee Harvey Oswald?