So far today, 96 126 160 Strib stories are listed on Google News’ “author” page with Favre’s byline. Stories about ACT scores, the tornado that touched down in south Minneapolis today and deadly bombings in Iraq, to name a few.  Is it a Google glitch, or a concerted plan by the Star Tribune to turn this media moment into traffic gold? (I contacted Terry Sauer, assistant managing editor for digital, but haven’t gotten a reply yet.)

A fair guess would be the latter. As MinnPost’s David Brauer reports, the Favre story propelled the paper’s site traffic to an all-time high: 5.42 million visits in a single day. Having each new story tagged with Favre’s Googlriffic name couldn’t hurt day-two stats, could it?

A look at Favre’s journalistic breadth:

Bridge-blast double-take: Sunday morning’s implosion of Minneapolis’ Lowry Avenue bridge was big news, garnering coverage on TV and YouTube and, of course, in the local dailies. Front covers of Monday’s editions of the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press gave readers an inkling of what a one-newspaper metro might mean: both papers used the identical three photos of the bridge demolition, attributed to Hennepin County Public Affairs via the AP. The dailies followed up this morning with, you got it, front-page placement for the New York Times’ excellent piece on the death of 26-year-old Iranian democracy protester Neda Agha-Soltan, which also appeared on the Times’ front page. (Via Newseum.org, images of PiPress and Strib covers.)

Saberi inks book deal: Fargo-based journalist Roxana Saberi, having just penned a piece on threats to free speech in Iran for the Chicago Tribune, just landed a book deal with HarperCollins to tell the story of her arrest and 100 days of imprisonment in Iran. Financial details of the agreement weren’t made public, but a publication date was: the as-yet-untitled memoir will come out in March 2010.

Worth examining: As David Weigel at our sister site, the Washington Independent, writes about the conservative bent of the Washington Examiner and its founder, MinnPost’s David Brauer tweets about a headline at an apparently unrelated Examiner: “Plucky Minn. House GOP minority picks leader.” Of the piece, which references the “small but potent Minnesota House Republican caucus,” Brauer asks, “Did AP write this headline or is the Examiner being a bit patronizing about the House GO(mini)P?”

CityPages.com image courtesy of Ed Kohler

City Pages, courtesy and copyright: After looking at how City Pages and its parent, Village Voice Media, apparently “game” social-bookmarking sites like Digg, The Deets’ Ed Kohler is again gunning for the Minneapolis altweekly – this time over the paper’s rather rampant disregard for image copyright.

“Photography kleptomaniacs,” including editor Kevin Hoffman, use images without permission, sometimes even slapping “Courtesy of” credits for publications, without ever linking to — or, one would guess, contacting — the source. (Several MnIndy photographs have ended up on City Pages site, including photos we purchased through WDCpix.com which, therefore, we wouldn’t be within our legal rights to “courteous”-ly offer up to anyone else. Another time my photograph, shot in former MnIndy editor Steve Perry’s house, ended up illustrating their story about how Perry left our fair site for MinnPost. When I asked Hoffman about lifting it, his response was to say he found it on Google Images and then to add a linkless credit. Curiously, that picture is no longer attached to the story, but it was — as recently as this Feb. 6 Google cache of the page [screengrab]. According to a Deets commenter, most of the images Kohler lists have also been removed from CityPages.com)

Brautweets get results: After David Brauer ribbed the Strib via Twitter about its long-neglected online newsroom directory, the page today is now not functioning. Hopefully, it’s evidence that it’s offline so Star Tribune staff can cull departed employees, rather than an indication they’re throwing in the towel on a treadmill-like job of erasing reporters and editors after a seemingly unending cycle of layoffs and buyouts. Or maybe it’s the new directory of the newsroom of the future?

Collardgate, ahem, blossoms: Brauer also reports that “Collardgate” — the story about Rainbow Foods’ move to promote collard greens during Black History Month — has gone national, with pickups by Gawker and (by way of WCCO’s Jason DeRusha), BrandFreak, BrandWeek’s blog.

Attention reporters, here’s how NOT to use Twitter.

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.”

“In Minnesota, we don’t have any evidence of wrongdoing, but these patterns that you just described causes us concerns,” said Pawlenty, but Hannity would have none of it.

“What about 32 absentee ballots all going to Franken — every one of them?!”

Then Pawlenty: “Finding 32 ballots in the trunk of the car and supposedly forgetting they’re there, that’s a problem.”

But as MinnPost’s David Brauer reported yesterday: the story of the 32 absentee ballots is flat wrong. He called up Minneapolis election director Cindy Reichert to get the facts. She (Pawlenty during two Fox appearances in as many days called her “he”) attests the car-ballot story is “just not true”: She never had the ballots in her car — nor were they in anyone’s car for several days — and they were kept in secure facilities between election day and vote counting. It was Coleman’s attorney, Fritz Knaak, who told reporters, “We were actually told ballots had been riding around in her car for several days, which raised all kinds of integrity questions.” From there, the Wall Street Journal picked up on it and reported it as fact; similar to Hannity’s on-screen graphic (shown above), the error appeared in a story headlined “Mischief in Minnesota?”

But according to Brauer, Hannity is wrong on another count: “every one of” those 32 ballots did not go to Franken. Franken won half, 18 16, seven were cast for Coleman, and the remainder went to other candidates.

Finally, during his Reality Check segment last night, WCCO’s Pat Kessler makes the point that wild swings in vote counts prior to Election Board certification “is what happens in Minnesota elections. We just don’t pay attention when the race isn’t close.” In the Senate race between Coleman and DFLer Walter Mondale, Coleman gained 54,429 votes and Mondale 63,192 votes between Election Day and the day the tally was certified. (For more historical perspective on gains for Franken, see Chris Steller’s recent piece on 1962’s Minnesota gubernatorial race.)

Tim Pawlenty on “Hannity & Colmes,” Fox, Nov. 12, 2008

Secret Service briefed MSM on RNC threats? MinnPost’s David Brauer points out shocking video of a WCCO cameraman freaking out on RNC protesters — captured on film by competitor KARE — while not realizing that the crowd was barring him because a man was having a seizure nearby. While many of us covering the RNC were on edge, Brauer shares a surprising reason that’s new to me: According to WCCO union steward Dave Chaney, the station was “getting emails from the Secret Service all day long that there were people in that crowd that were going to try to attack,” Chaney said. One threat involved a “gentleman who was supposed to be a black belt in karate who was going to try to assault one of us.” Funny: We in the independent media never got such Secret Service notifications.

Local heads top reporters’ org: St. Cloud Times reporter Dave Aeikens has takent the reins as president of the national Society for Professional Journalists. MN-SPJ has the video.

“Ameirca!” My favorite on-screen RNC typo.

On the objectivity paradigm: The Star Tribune’s Bill Ward asks Arianna Huffington if “solid, impartial coverage” is a “thing of the past.” Her reply: “I think impartial coverage is coverage that is accurate, fact-based and fair. It does not mean you give equal weight to both sides of each story or issues when one of the two sides is wrong: the idea that you talk about the war and have full coverage include Richard Perle or Bill Kristol or other people who basically lied to us to get us into this war and continue lying to us to keep us from getting out, and yet these are the people that the mainstream media are looking to.” [via]

The pervasive Obama-Muslim meme: It’s not exactly a news flash, but as Wired writes, hoax emails about Barack Obama being a clandestine Muslim “still fool dumb white guys, a point made by the New York Daily News. As Cursor notes, four major papers — The Washington Times, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Baltimore Sun — have recently mentioned the false Obama/Muslim link without correction.

On the lighter side: Mediation tracks down an early acting gig by Strib columnist James Lileks, who, in a 1987 KTCA documentary, geeks out on Mary Tyler Moore.

But the insularity of the media business also often creates journalist-as-local-celeb stories that are less actual news pieces than they are colleague knockdowns or knightings. No matter how you slice it (and as much as they hate to admit it), journos will always be way less important than the stories they cover. And that’s a good thing.

That caveat in mind, David Brauer’s MinnPost piece on Thursday, “What if City Pages Doesn’t Suck?” held a suspicious and simpleminded response from CP editor Kevin Hoffman that was so dubious it deserves a serious second look.

When asked about the continuing and ever-obvious gender disparities at CP, Hoffman responded that A-List editor Jessica Armbruster and copy editor Bridgette Reinsmoen are veteran female employees with responsibility. As a former CP staff writer, I had the pleasure of working with both Armbruster and Reinsmoen, and both are fantastic, especially Reinsmoen, who often put in more hours there than anyone else, poring over pages with a fine-toothed comb and a grimy, old style guide.

However, Reinsmoen and Armbruster hardly have the authority to say what feature stories the paper covers. That’s left up to the almost-all-male news staff, which, minus Paul Demko (who is now here at Minnesota Monitor) now consists of five males and one female. Up until a few months ago, with the hiring of staff writer Beth Walton, the paper’s news-feature writers consisted of six men and zero women. A male-only news regime was in place at CP for more than a year.

Continued: Click “Read more”While I am an admitted big fan of Brauer and his work, I was ruffled that he mostly glossed over Hoffman’s comment, a poor attempt at inoculating the gender-gap criticism, in favor of detailing CPs’ highest-traffic-producing blog posts. Outlined instead are slide shows and quick-hit “winners” about things like naked sushi and Ms. Pac Man in Hustler, dude-centric topics that have become a standard at City Pages under Village Voice Media’s thumb. Hits, it would seem, have outpaced quality as a defining measurement of success.

Compounding the palpable sexism in CP’s print pages, Hoffman is known to staffers as a “frat boy” around the office. While that’s an admittedly small-minded and overly simplistic stereotype, some former (and current) staffers describe Hoffman as a single-minded editor hungry for dude-centricity: There’s a not-so-subtle push to bring in city-gritty, dirty-underbelly, sexed-up stories that can be neatly packaged for web hits. (Web hits have become the fool’s gold of the Internet. The Maxim-ization of the media helped create the current Fark-ization of the media, which has served to turn stories into flimsy currency traded for page views. But that’s a whole other story that reveals another layer of dumbing down altogether. And while I’m at it: SEX. SEX. SEX!)

Former staffers I’ve talked to say there was an uncomfortable and juvenile, slap-on-the-back atmosphere created by the heavily male masthead. Hoffman allegedly told one staffer that, since the A-List (the paper’s picks for best events each week) was being edited by females, it was necessary to make sure it wasn’t too, you know, girly. Testosterone-driven stories are acceptable, apparently, but anything with too much estrogen doesn’t pass the CP sniff test.

City Pages isn’t the only Village Voice Media paper to have a mostly-male masthead. In fact, of the 16 VVM papers, there are only five female editors, although one of those is Patricia Calhoun, who co-founded Denver’s Westword paper before VVM snatched it up.

Even more egregious? Of the papers’ 33 managing, senior, associate editors and senior writers, only 9 are female. In other words, females make up only about 25 percent of all of VVM’s editorial-decision makers. And males consistently outnumber females in the newsroom at all but one (LA Weekly) of VVM’s 16 news newspapers. All hirings go through the corporate office in Phoenix.

To be sure, CP has done some intriguing stories in the last year, such as the one Brauer noted about the shrinking sex-crimes unit at the MPD. And those great stories don’t deserve to get lost among the big-muscled and even bigger-boobed cover packages. But excusing the current macho ideology of VVM based on a handful of well-reported pieces is like reasoning Bravo doesn’t suck because it also occasionally airs a provocative documentary in between endless hours of “The Real Housewives of Orange County.” 

So when we’re talking about whether a newspaper “sucks,” perhaps it’s best not to judge a paper’s weight in fool’s gold (web hits), but whether a weekly paper whose mission is to be a “bastion of progressive thought” (VVM’s words) actually achieves said mission, versus continuing to breed and feed chauvinism and prejudice through its hit-hungry story coverage and regressive hiring practices.

Related: Charming: City Pages music editor learned of impending dismissal on the street

Do you get a free City Pages t-shirt for that? The UpTake’s Chuck Olsen appeared on NPR’s Sunday Soapbox yesterday to discuss the citizen journalism organization’s plans for the Republican National Convention. Couldn’t help but notice one bit of product placement: in one shot, blogger Noah Kunin holds the copy of City Pages that features the best-of-the-Twin-Cities honor for top citizen-media outfit. Watch the video.

Quickly, now: Ed Kohler writes on weatherpreneur Paul Douglas’ soon-to-launch online digs, David Brauer chronicles the Strib’s circulation skid, and City Pages’ Jeff Shaw says goodbye to Paul Demko (who starts here today) by recalling his “legacy of great stories, and some really weird shit.”