Nutty Polls and News Blues

More on Spring: A followup to the story about Duluth meteorologist Karl Spring calling Al Gore a “left wing nut”: Public radio’s KUWS has posted the audio from the October 12 conversation [mp3] on the show Final Edition. In it, Spring also calls the American vice presidency “a job no one wants to have,” says he’s unaware Gore won a Nobel prize, and claims Gore’s Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth” was politically motivated.

The Duluth News Tribune picks up on the flap, citing coverage by Minnesota Monitor and the blog Perfect Duluth Day (through an RSS accident, I lost track of where I found the piece and didn’t credit PDD: Apologies). The Tribune also runs a readers poll asking “who’s nuttier”: Al Gore is outpacing Karl Spring with nearly 60 percent of the votes.

MediaNews Blues: MediaNews Group, the Denver-based owner of the Pioneer Press, has come to an agreement with the St. Paul paper’s Newspaper Guild members. While the deal is better than “a poke in the eye with a sharp stick — barely” (as Lambert says), it could be worse. Guild members at the MediaNews-owned York Daily Record in Pennsylvania have been without a labor agreement for two years. Its members have created a YouTube video for their song “MediaNews Blues” to highlight this fact and to coincide with today’s first bargaining meeting since June. A snippet: “I’m feeling so low, now that I know, [the Record]‘s sending my money to Denver.”

City Pages bosses arrested! Sort of: Two executives at Village Voice Media, City Pages’ parent company, were arrested Thursday night in Phoenix for unlawful disclosure of grand jury information — that is, revealing in a story that the paper (and possibly its readers) had been subpoenaed by a special prosecutor. The prosecutor was investigating whether the paper violated any laws by publishing the home address of Sheriff Joe Arpaio on The New Times’ website three years ago. Michael Lacey, the executive editor, and Jim Larkin, chief executive, were in jail as of this morning.

Strib.com upswing? The Star Tribune’s online efforts won a mention on Editor & Publisher’s regular listing of the top 30 media websites. While the New York Times commands the most viewer time — 36 minutes on average — the Strib is among papers making “good showings,” with 27 minutes of user time.

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