Business

Conrad Sverkerson is a legendary figure at First Avenue. Conspicuous for his dreadlocks (although more recently sporting a Jewfro), the iconic rock club’s stage manager has spent more than two decades making sure shows go off without a hitch.
Now there’s a movement afoot (or at least one blog post) to land Sverkerson a job at [...]

A watchdog group, Stimulating Broadband, which keeps tabs on stimulus spending on broadband infrastructure, says Minnesota is the only state holding back details about funding priorities. Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s administration says it doesn’t have to disclose the information.

The University of Minnesota is the latest public body to make a mess with multiple beverage-marketing deals. The U of M has canceled a contract with Red Bull because the energy-drink company’s on-campus ads conflicted with the university’s separate, exclusive contract with Coke. Last year it was the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board that couldn’t [...]

To the victor go the spoils, the saying goes. And so on Tuesday Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak took delivery of 10 pounds of hamburger from Jim Schmitt, mayor of Green Bay, Wisc., in fulfillment of the friendly wager they made on the Vikings-Packers football game. But the Vikings’ win wasn’t the only news since the [...]

A statistic from Michele Bachmann made Glenn Beck go, “Whoa!” on his radio show this morning: The federal government owns or controls 30 percent of private wealth. Beck exclaimed that the stat was new to him and even to his aghast studio crew. Where’d she get that? Bachmann (again) cited as her source an unnamed Arizona State University professor. The Minnesota Independent found the prof and asked him where he got the number.

We crossed a line in the turf this month when the publicly owned place where the Minnesota Vikings (alone, now) play football was renamed “Mall of America Field at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.” Let the re-branding of one of Minnesota’s greatest statesmen begin. 

Updated: The University of Minnesota marching band forms the corporate logo of TCF Bank on the field at the university’s new TCF Bank Stadium in a promotional video released by the university today.

Six people blocking the entrance to the UnitedHealth Group offices in Minnetonka were arrested Monday morning, following a health care rally attended by 100 activists.

The New York Times riffs on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” today in the headline to Timothy Egan’s piece on how Western states have long embraced the concept of cooperatives — even health-care cooperatives. Egan didn’t mention that the radio host’s brother, Steven J. Keillor, wrote the book on rural co-ops in Minnesota, from the [...]

Coffee megacorp Starbucks is de-branding several shops, experimenting with a logo-less look that mimics the feel of independent coffeehouses. If the stealth Starbucks succeed and expand beyond Seattle, Minnesota might prove fertile ground for faux-indie conversions: It’s the only state where Starbucks coffeeshops are outnumbered by others.