City Pages

The personal is apparently political for Minneapolis City Council president Barb Johnson. City Pages reports that the four-term council member, who is locked in a tough, four-way re-election fight, makes some rather dubious campaign expenditures.
Johnson charged her campaign $1,154 for hairdresser appointments and $986 for dry-cleaning during the current four-year election cycle. No other city [...]

Six months after City Pages and other Village Voice Media papers cut all comics, including his, liberal cartoonist Tom Tomorrow yesterday wrote that he felt like his career had been “kneecapped” and that he could’ve “spent the next six months moping and feeling sorry for myself.” Instead, he’s got good news to report, which he characterizes as “one of the great adventures of my professional life.”

More newspapers, online media outlets and political pundits are offering former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman free advice — mainly that he look in the mirror and see that he’s toast.

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.

When City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman told me recently that the paper’s Blotter blog saw traffic jump from 25,000 pageviews in October to 235,000 in December, he credited City Pages’ diverse content. But the spike struck technology blogger Ed Kohler as strange. In a new blog post today, he asks, “How does one manage to grow a blog’s traffic by 7X over two months?” The answer seems to be that City Pages and its fellow Village Voice Media papers seem to be gaming the popular social media site Digg. But it’s not just Digg: they’ve tried it with Stumbleupon, Reddit, Newsvine and others.

The too-familiar story of media cutbacks hits close to home for progressive readers this time. A month after laying off famed writer Nat Hentoff at its flagship paper, Village Voice Media, owner of a chain of altweeklies including City Pages, has suspended publication of all its syndicated cartoons. That means readers from Seattle to Ft. Lauderdale to the Twin Cities will have to go without Tom Tomorrow’s “This Modern World.”

Naturally, Shepard Fairey, who created the ubiquitous poster of Barack Obama that eventually made the cover of TIME (in revised form), was dubbed artist of the year by one writer at City Pages. But when Paul Schmelzer, Minnesota Independent editor, was asked to make his pick for the Minneapolis altweekly, he went for a less obvious choice: Trevor Paglen. An experimental geographer based at the University of California – Berkeley, Paglen has long tried to peer into the murk of the U.S. government’s “black” world, which makes up around $30 billion of the annual budget.

As Barack Obama picks up two key newspaper endorsements, news photographers debate if or how to run that embarrassing John McCain debate photo. And Nielsen’s top-30 news sites list shows City Pages’ owner as the only traffic dud for September — and an Alaska paper making a huge jump into the top sites list.

Smart Politics’ Eric Ostermeier discussed Minnesota Monitor’s content, audience and influence with news editor Steve Perry in a recent interview. However, one of Ostermeier’s questions prompted City Pages’ Jeff Shaw to weigh in with a post on “The Blotter” titled “Smart Politics asks a stupid question.”

The question in question:
Since political reporting comprises a large portion [...]