On The Patriot’s ratings slump: The new Arbitron ratings for local radio are out, and The Rake’s Brian Lambert notes that “deep wing nut radio, WWTC AM 1280, aka, ‘Patriot’ lost about half its adult audience from last year,” going from a 1.1 percent share to a 0.6 percent share. Conservative blogger Nihilist in Golf Pants comes up with a top-11 list of possible reasons why listenership in the 25 to 54 age group tanked. Among them: “White males just not as angry as they used to be” and “Adults 25-54 becoming less fascinated by technical difficulties.”

More testimony from Ridder hearing: Editor & Publisher offers more verbatim testimony from Star Tribune publisher Par Ridder’s hearing in June over noncompete agreements. In this excerpt, Avista Capital Partners’ founding partner OhSang Kwan says Ridder asked him on March 2, 2007, if he should shred the noncompete document he had with his old employer, the Pioneer Press. “Obviously I can’t tell you to shred the documents and I’m telling you you can’t shred them,” he recalled saying. Ridder had asked his secretary to destroy the documents, but later retrieved them before she could. Kwan also admits that “it was probably a mistake” for Ridder to take data, which included the identities of the paper’s customers, from Pioneer Press computers.

Who Owns What v.2:The Columbia Journalism Review’s “Who Owns What” website has long been an invaluable tool for keeping tabs on media ownership, like, for instance, which local radio stations are owned by Disney (KQRS and six others) and which by Clear Channel (Cities 97, KFAN and five others). But in times when Google is acquiring companies faster than you can say Rupert Murdoch — including FeedBurner, Doubleclick, YouTube and Blogger in recent years — perhaps version 2.0 of the list is in order. Voila!

Got a tip for Media Monitor? E-mail us your media news.