Star Tribune keeps exposé offline

The Star Tribune may be financially bankrupt but it’s not out of ideas for how to make the news pay. The front page of Sunday’s print edition trumpeted a “Star Tribune Exclusive — only in your Sunday paper.” Indeed, to read the investigative piece about the chaos left by a construction financier’s bankruptcy, you had to buy the physical newspaper.

The Strib’s Web site had nothing about the story until midday Monday, when a video and slide show appeared. UPDATE: The full story has been posted. But the article remains inaccessible on the Internet, even for a price. And that’s a considerable comfort for the men behind the bad business that the article exposes.  

The Star Tribune kept its story — about an unregulated lender to a dozen half-finished projects across the exurban landscape — offline in order to bolster solid Sunday sales, according to MinnPost’s David Brauer. But if the move made the paper’s display-ad sales staff happy, it surely made Robert Machacek ecstatic.

Machacek is the chief villain in the piece, an ex-con who led Lakeland Contruction Finance LLC on a hell-bent, post-bubble, no-money-down rush to build up the metro’s hinterlands. Reporter Chris Serres went to some lengths (and exotic-sounding locales) to track Machacek down, even leaving notes “at a house listed under his name on Safari Heights Trail in Eagan.” Machacek comes off as a bad guy, but only if you see the article.

The online video and slideshow — effective if a bit odd as a package without Serres’ sizable reporting — don’t name names at Lakeland Construction Finance. Machacek doesn’t appear at all and investor Ted Waitt is pictured with only his name as a caption, leaving the Strib considerable online readership clueless. By withholding the story from the Web the Strib gave Machacek (and others behind the mess) a huge reprieve from Internet infamy.