(Wikipedia)

Twineball’s media moment? Brent Schacherer of the Litchfield Independent Review reports that home-decor diva Martha Stewart is interested in Minnesota’s legendary twine ball. Billed as the world’s largest ball of twine, Darwin’s 17,400-pounder — spun over 39 years, beginning in 1950, by the indefatigable Francis Johson — has sparked interest among Stewart’s producers, who have set up a Wednesday morning call with Roger Werner, curator of the Darwin Twine Ball Museum. No word yet on when or if the ball will be featured on Stewart’s show.

Power Line pilfers: You can’t find Tom Tomorrow’s comic strip at City Pages anymore, but local rightwing blog Power Line is picking up the slack — apparently without permission, credit or remuneration for the artist, according to a tweet by Tomorrow.

Untangling obfuscation: Graphic designers are telling Republicans to tell the truth when presenting infographics related to healthcare reform. A healthcare flowchart created by John Boehner’s office has been met with a graphic retort — in more ways than one. California designer Robert Palmer has created his own chart of healthcare, packaged on Flickr with an open letter to Boehner. In part, he tells Boehner, “By releasing your chart, instead of meaningfully educating the public, you willfully obfuscated an already complicated proposal. There is no simple proposal to solve this problem. You instead chose to shout ’12! 16! 37! 9! 24!’ while we were trying to count something.” The title of his letter and chart: “Do not fuck with graphic designers.” (Via Infosthetics.)

On local online news videos: Taylor Carik, formerly of KARE-11′s Metromix and founder of the blog Mediation, digs into an analysis of video use by online news outfits by University of Minnesota student Vadim Lavrusik. He praises Lavrusik’s college thesis as a starting point, but suggests a deeper look at, among other topics, accepted standards for online video. He writes: “Taken side-by-side, Minnesota’s mainstream media video usage is comparable. KSTP is on-par with MPR. Great. But taken against general video developments online, the group is easily two years behind an acceptable standard of online video usage.”

Grilled cheese sandwiches, a Cheetoh, toast, tree bark, ice, a Danish, pancakes, fish sticks, an ultrasound: These are just a few of the countless places the image of Jesus has been spotted. And according to this video found at Gawker, local news stations around the country have used their precious broadcast time to report on every single one of them. Here’s 6:23 worth of such “Savior Sightings.” Don’t miss one of our own at 42 seconds in: KARE 11′s Julie Nelson introducing a cat bearing the likeness of Christ in its fur.

A forum held by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) in Minneapolis this week centered on the relationship between law enforcement and the media at the Republican National Convention (RNC) and indicated the extent to which journalism is evolving.

The event was organized in response to the predicament that numerous journos found themselves in while they covered the convention: By the Minnesota Independent’s count, nearly 50 journalists were arrested or detained by police at the RNC, including MnIndy’s Paul Demko, while more than 800 people were taken into custody.

St. Paul city officials announced last week that the city wouldn’t prosecute journalists facing “unlawful assembly” charges, but many still want to know why they ended up in plastic handcuffs in the first place, or what they could’ve done to prevent it. A couple reviews of RNC security efforts are being done in Minneapolis and St. Paul, but city officials say that police performance isn’t the focus.

The Uptake has video of the discussion here.

Not a witch hunt

Al Tompkins, a media expert who arrived from the Florida-based Poynter Institute, which trains journalists, moderated the talk, saying it would be a productive dialogue between representatives of the media and law enforcement and not a witch hunt. Still, emotions ran high. On hand to answer questions from Tompkins and attendees were St. Paul Deputy Mayor Ann Mulholland, KARE-11 photojournalist Jonathan Malat, St. Paul Assistant Police Chief Matt Bostrom and Pioneer Press reporter Mara Gottfried.

It started with a recap of the RNC’s events, featuring protest footage from Malat. Later, Malat made the point that he was herded onto the Marion Street bridge while trying to obey police officers’ dispersal order on the last night of the protests.

Assistant Police Chief Bostrom said protesters and journos had plenty of time to leave the scene. “If someone disobeys a lawful order, they shall be arrested,” he said, adding that it’s up to the individual officer’s discretion. He conceded that there may have been a gap in their planning because he and other law enforcement agencies didn’t anticipate the sheer number of people claiming to be media. In his 20-plus years of police work, he says he’s never encountered so many journalists involved in an hourslong criminal activity, as he put it. “What do you want us to do?” he asked the crowd.

Deputy Mayor Mulholland defended the police response to the RNC protests. Mayor Chris Coleman “believes that police did what they needed to do in the name of public safety.” When asked if it was legitimate for journalists to be on the scene, she answered, “I think the mayor ultimately believes that it is appropriate for journalists to be wherever people are gathered lawfully.” (Her statement was left hanging until someone referenced it later, saying that in order to continue covering an illegal activity, they would likely need to get farther away from the action, or run the risk of getting in the way.)

Further, “I think we have determined a special role for media to assure that members of the media have access and the information they need to tell a story. Having watched hours of footage, I’d be hard-pressed to think we didn’t give great access,” she said. But does that mean bloggers and traditional journalists should be lumped together as equals? “I don’t know who the journalist is … I think our approach was probably to treat everyone the same.”

Lawful journalists?

But the Associated Press’ David Pyle testified that not everyone was treated the same, not even within his news crew. Four AP staffers were detained, including one photographer who was forced to the ground and “roughed up” before being let go and another who was held for 10 hours. Coincidentally, it was one of their AP photos that the police used to ask for the public’s help in identifying the alleged anarchist who broke the Macy’s window during a protest. Pyle said he was relieved that police didn’t credit the AP. “We don’t want to be identified as an investigatory arm [of the police].”

Twin Cities attorney Mark Anfinson, who specializes in First Amendment law, said that when given the order to disperse, journalists “very much like covering a war, proceed with some risk. Here the risk is being arrested… It’s hard to see where the police violated rights as opposed to acting without a lot of tact or wisdom,” he said. “A lot of these charges were of this species, about failure to obey a lawful order… What’s a lawful order?”

Dave Aeikens, the national president of SPJ and staff writer of the St. Cloud Times, said he hopes that journalists and law enforcement officials can come to an understanding so arrests can be avoided in the future. While he said that SPJ prefers not to define who is a journalist, WCCO’s Jason DeRusha commented that he thought the whole reason for coming together was to find out who gets to be in the “in crowd.” Contrary to that, he said, independent media advocates seem to be arguing that journalists shouldn’t be afforded any special protections.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which maintained a hotline for journalists during the RNC, said from her Virginia office that she was prepared for some of the things that went wrong. “Sometimes you have to get arrested,” she said, in order to keep doing your job. But in certain cases, such as the scenario with the AP staffers, “That is inexcusable.”

Photos by Kathy Easthagen

This can’t help the paper’s woes: The ad battle between Norm Coleman and Al Franken — Coleman took out an ad chiding Franken for not condemning MoveOn’s Petraeus ad; Franken replied, with a similarly designed ad showing Coleman arm-in-arm with Bush — took an ironic turn. Franken’s campaign had to pay more for an ad the same sized as Coleman’s. $12 grand more. So the paper is refunding the Franken campaign and eating the loss.

KARE nabs Emmy: Congrats to KARE-11′s Boyd Huppert and John Drilling who beat out competitors CBS Sunday Morning and ABC World News Tonight to win a national Emmy Award for their story on Kaziah Hancock, a Utah artist who paints portraits of soldiers killed in action.

Got a tip for Media Monitor? E-mail us your media news.

Goldberg’s infraction? Asking Paulose about, in his words, “the questions surrounding her appointment as U.S. attorney and her management style.”

Brian Lambert reports that Goldberg shot back at his KARE 11 blog, saying Paulose’s request was not a “ground rule [but] a joke”:

In our industry, ground rules are conditions agreed upon by both parties before an interview takes place. The Paulose press conference didn’t begin with an agreement. It began with a decree…

A public official, in a public building, at a public meeting, can not tell reporters they are not allowed to ask questions about unpopular topics. That would be like Tony Snow announcing President Bush won’t be taking any questions on Iraq. Come on.

Let’s remember the backdrop:

1. This was the very first press conference Paulose held after three of the top lawyers in her office resigned their management positions and called her management style into question.

2. This was the very first press conference Paulose held after the news broke that the name of her predecessor, Tom Heffelfinger, had surfaced on a Justice Department “hit list.

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