Media Monitor

As a top newspaper editors group drops “paper” from its name, staffers at the Star Tribune have launched a site to “Save the Strib” and a watchdog group highlights cases where conservative media guests “scapegoat” Minnesota’s secretary of state for a partnership with ACORN in a previous job.

The Star Tribune is ranked second in TIME’s top-10 list of papers likely to go under or go digital, while former Twin Cities reporter David Carr offers his ideas on what can save the news industry. This and more inside.

Blogger budget cuts are hitting Secrets of the City, the Pioneer Press makes RealClearPolitics “newspapers in trouble” list, and the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman hits the road. This and more, inside.

Amid budget woes that have pinched City Pages’ online budgets, area blogs are test-driving new ideas — from a new foodie site by a laid-off City Pages restaurant critic to a tech-blogger’s pay-per-post microfinancing plan to “Content Partnerships” at City Pages’ 2008 local blog of the year.

In its humble return, this edition of the intermittent Media Monitor catalogues: Ed Kohler’s latest analysis of City Pages (charged with rampant photo-swiping), a look at how a local Black History Month supermarket promotion has gone national, an acknowledgment of the power of “Brautweets,” and more.

How bad have the Star Tribune’s woes gotten? If a tweet by David de Young is any indicator, bad enough that they won’t honor commitments to contributors. The founder of the music site “How Was the Show?,” de Young writes that the newspaper sent him a copy of its “Commencement of Chapter 11″ bankruptcy papers, [...]

An assortment of media tidbits: The Duluth News Tribune slims down, Katherine Kersten is praised as an “investigative journalist,” and an accidentally apropos Star Tribune front page on Black Friday.

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine carried a quizzical interview by Deborah Solomon with President George W. Bush’s former senior adviser, Karl Rove. Across 21 questions, Rove and Solomon covered a lot of political and even emotional territory, with an often-combative Rove laying claim to having had his feelings hurt by Solomon on an earlier occasion.
The highlight, though, [...]

Shakopee reporter Ruth Anne Maddox (pictured) was murdered this week, and her paper is flooded with stories and notes by her readers and co-workers. The Mankato Free Press shuts down its online forum as a casualty of Election ‘08. And Media Matters takes issue with a local writer’s New York Times account of the Franken/Coleman recount.

“The recount has not even started in Minnesota and somehow Al Franken has already shaved nearly 500 votes off the incumbent lead.” So said Sean Hannity on Fox’s Hannity & Holmes yesterday, in a segment featuring Gov. Tim Pawlenty. While Pawlenty pointed out concerns about “statistical irregularities” in the changing vote tally in the race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman, he repeatedly said there’s no evidence of wrongdoing. Still, Hannity continued questioning that: “Is the fix in? … Do you suspect cheating is going on?”

What Hannity — and to a lesser degree, Pawlenty — fail to acknowledge is the history of vote tallies changing pre-certification. And both pass on the lie that Minneapolis’ election director found, as Hannity erroneously puts it, “32 absentee ballots hiding in the trunk of her car — all of them conveniently going to Al Franken.”