Editor & Publisher’s  2009 “10 That Do It Right” list includes the Strib for its ambitious “Ballot Challenge” project, which yielded a handful of posts right here at MnIndy. The paper made available online all 6,600 contested ballots in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount, including ballots by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Nickel Bag and “Amy Whinehouse.”

Here’s what E&P had to say:

Star Tribune, Minneapolis
Crowd-sourcing is a digital journalism skill that still eludes most newspapers. But the Star Tribune pulled off something even more ambitious with its “Ballot Challenge” project, centered on the recount of the Minnesota U.S. Senate vote between Republican Norm Coleman and the eventual winner, Democrat Al Franken. Call it crowd-deputizing.

At StarTribune.com, users could inspect all 6,600 ballots disputed by one side or the other. One immediate effect was to highlight the many illegally frivolous challenges — embarrassing the campaigns into dropping thousands of disputes.

Digital Community Manager Leah Betancourt notes that this wisdom of the online masses, aided by a panel of experts recruited by the paper, led users to come almost eerily close to the margin of victory given Franken by the state Canvassing Board. Strib readers figured a 78-vote lead. The board awarded a 49-vote lead.

Via Romenesko.

Minnesota’s Jewish paper goes biweekly: After nearly a century in business, Minneapolis-based weekly the American Jewish World is switching to a biweekly production schedule. Founded in 1912 as the Jewish Weekly to “tell  the Jewish story and to be a catalyst for Jewish unity and cultural vitality” (it got its current name in 1915), the paper has been hard hit, like many community papers, by the recession. Anticipating a long-term downturn in advertising, publisher and editor Mordecai Specktor — only the fifth person to hold that position in the paper’s history — writes that the new schedule begins May 1. “The plan is to publish on a biweekly basis and deliver a more substantial newspaper to our loyal subscribers,” he told me in an email. He says he’d like to improve the paper’s website, but first he’s getting ready to announce publication of the annual AJW Community Guide, a directory of Jewish business and services, which will be published on the site and, in November, in print.  (A bit of trivia: Someone well-versed in the struggle to make media sustainable is involved with the publication: MinnPost founder Joel Kramer is Specktor’s partner and a board member on the paper’s parent organization, Minnesota Jewish Media, LLC.)

N.D. journalist sentenced in Iran: Journalist Roxana Saberi, a North Dakota native, was sentenced to eight years in prison for espionage by Iranian authorities. The 31-year-old, who was born to an Iranian father and Japanese mother in Fargo, has lived in Iran for six years, where she’s done reporting for National Public Radio and the BBC, among other outlets. Saberi’s father says that Roxana testified that her “earlier confessions were not true and she told me she had been tricked into believing that she would be released if she cooperated.” With pressure from the Obama administration, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has urged the top prosecutor in Tehran to review the case.

Happy B-day, TCDP: The Twin Cities Daily Planet is turning three and celebrating at a community happy hour, May 1 at Bedlam Theatre.

But other voices are either countering or concurring with his stance. Mpls.St.Paul magazine’s Adam Platt writes, “This gang that is running the state is simply contemptuous of government, period. Their modus operandi is to starve government of all but its core function of public safety, on the premise that the public sector uses its taxing power irresponsibly, largely to redistribute income from those who work to those who don’t.” A Pioneer Press editorial, on the other hand, states, “[W]e do not accept the idea that Pawlenty and the no-new-taxes Republicans are to blame. The governor never denied that more transportation spending is needed. He favored borrowing over new taxes.”

On Fox News conservative William Kristol seemed to blame no one by characterizing the collapse — as James “Sometimes Things Fall Down” Lileks did — as just a fluke: “I don’t think this symbolizes any great failure of our infrastructure. Once every 25 years some bridge falls down unexpectedly due to engineering problems, and it is unfortunate, obviously, but the idea that the whole country is crumbling is not, I think, credible.”

You can guess who the Rev. Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps blames.

Bridge down, traffic up: As the Twin Cities dailies report record web traffic in the days following the collapse, national media, too, is announcing a surge in site traffic. MSNBC says it had one of its highest traffic days on Thursday, logging 82 million page views and 11 million video downloads. And in case you forgot how focused the media was on the Twin Cities, here are the covers of the top 50 American papers on August 2.

Media Monitor continues…Former editor injured: According to Editor & Publisher, the former managing editor of the Faribault, Minn., Daily News was injured in the 35W collapse and is in critical condition. Minnetonka resident Garrett Ebling, 32, broke his leg and bones in his face and suffers from internal injuries.

Understatement: The headline of an AP story that ran in the Albuquerque Tribune: “Minneapolis bridge collapse bad timing for victims.”

Berg booted at KSTP: “Fresh from critical acclaim for its around-the-clock coverage of the I-35W bridge disaster, KSTP-TV fired news director Chris Berg today,” just as The Rake’s Brian Lambert predicted.

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