Avista’s Media Master Plan?

Revolving Door: As the Star Tribune loses CFO Mike Riggs to Des Moines’ Meredith Corp., owner of magazines like Better Homes & Gardens and Family Circle, a former Meredith staffer has been hired as a consultant for Avista Capital Partners. Last week, Robin Domeniconi, most recently president of Time Inc. Media Group, signed on with Avista, a company not known for its media holdings before purchasing the Strib. Avista CEO Thompson Dean explained the hire: “Avista is very interested in companies that have strong positions in niche sectors of the content-creation, content-packaging and content-distribution segments of the media industry — particularly those well-branded companies that are able to take advantage of additional and emerging distribution channels and/or improve the geographic reach of their content.”

[Update: Strib CFO Riggs is one of five execs named in the ongoing suit over Par Ridder's theft of data from the Pioneer Press.]

Avista’s Minnesota Conquest: Maybe Thompson Dean is referring to this kind of “distribution channel”: Avista just sealed a deal to purchase a controlling interest in Chanhassen-based IWCO Direct, the “largest co-mingler of standard mail in North America and [...] a leader in the execution of postal optimization strategies.” Time will tell if this means even more Strib promos in our mailboxes — or a flurry of more MARQ-like niche publications.

Strib’s Scooter Libby Strategy: The Rake’s Brian Lambert prognosticates on Avista’s strategy for the Par Ridder tussle: “I predict Harte and his band of Avista Capital Partners brothers will follow George W. Bush’s example in the Valerie Plame case. First, decline to make any comment while the legal process is on-going. Then, once flattened by legal judgment, declare that unlike everyone else you’re ‘moving on.’”

Media Monitor continues…Breaking News(room): Buyouts have been extended to all Guild-represented employees at the Pioneer Press, not just the original three departments indicated earlier in the week (newsroom, circulation, composing). But Editor Thom Fladung says the 30 targeted reductions might not be enough. If the paper gets all 15 newsroom cuts it wants, the staff roster will have gone from 202 before last year’s buyouts to 165 today.

About the quick timeline for this round of buyouts — roughly a week less in time for employees to make their decisions — Fladung, seeming to minimize the gravity of the situation, said, “Journalists should be able to react quickly. These are life-changing decisions, and I don’t mean to minimize it.”

MPR’s Eastward Expansion: American Public Media, parent company to Minnesota Public Radio, is hoping to get a Washington, D.C., foothold by purchasing the license of WGTS-FM, a station owned by Columbia Union College. The favored bidder, APM will pay in the “mid-$20 million range” for the station, according to the Washington Times, but president Bill Kling says national funders, not MPR members, will foot the bill should the sale be approved. The station, run by the Seventh Day Adventist-affiliated school, has played contemporary Christian music for the past decade and reaches 250,000 D.C.-area listeners.

Not jazzed: Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like throwing furniture at the television set every time those ubiquitous Slumberland commercials — the ones with the vagabond jazz musicians dorkily shimmying their way through an enthusiastic family’s living room — comes on? Just me?

Oh.

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