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?”

Norm Coleman insisted Thursday that he and his wife, Laurie, have done nothing wrong.

The former U.S. senator was talking about a Texas lawsuit’s claim that a campaign donor funneled the Colemans $75,000 disguised as a business transaction. Also, a Coleman spokesman insisted that after three and a half months the campaign is still assembling a request for federal approval to spend campaign cash on fighting the allegations.

“There have never been any allegations that either my wife or I have done anything wrong,” Coleman told MinnPost correspondent Cynthia Dizikes Thursday as he left a meeting at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “There are allegations between businessmen about a business dispute. But there has never been a single allegation that me or my wife have done anything wrong, and we haven’t.”

That doesn’t mean they’re not spending money to prove their innocence. Both Colemans and both owners of businesses named in the allegations have hired top-shelf attorneys. One of the lawyers is Joe Friedberg, who represented Coleman in his election contest trial and is also representing Coleman donor Nasser Kazeminy, a defendant in the Texas suit.

It’s the first time in months that Coleman has himself publicly addressed the money-funneling allegations.

Meanwhile, a Coleman staffer insisted for the second time in two weeks that the former senator is still seeking federal approval to pay for legal expenses arising from the Texas lawsuit (and a related suit in Delaware) out of campaign coffers.

“We’re in the process of working with the FEC on that matter,” Tom Erickson told The Hill’s Briefing Room blog. It’s the same thing he told MinnPost March 19.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) provides advisory opinions on questions of federal election law within 60 days to candidates who request them. Often the commission can rule sooner, if the requestor asks for an expedited response, Commissioner Cynthia Bauerly told MnIndy.

That was the case with Franken’s request for an opinion as to whether he and a party organization could establish new funds to pay for the election-contest phase of the dispute.

Coleman’s campaign announced on Dec. 17 it would seek such permission, but the Minnesota Independent’s monitoring of the FEC’s Web site since then has revealed no Coleman requests. An FEC spokesperson has told MnIndy that the agency doesn’t comment on advisory opinion requests until they are officially received.

The FEC has also not made any public response to a complaint filed later in December by the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, which asked the commission to rule on what the Alliance called Coleman’s violation of federal election law. The alliance last year asked for investigations into the money-funneling claims by the Senate ethics committee and the FBI.

News last December that the FBI has launched a probe preceded Coleman’s announcement about the FEC request by a few days.

This week, the alliance’s executive director, Denise Cardinal, told MnIndy that she had received a flurry of calls from reporters in Washington, D.C., about the complaint, but she has no news from the FEC.

Interest in the Texas lawsuit, which was filed last October, was revived last week on news of sworn testimony by a second former executive from Deep Marine Techology Inc. B.J. Thomas claimed Kazeminy had demanded in 2007 that the company make a series of $25,000 payments to Hays Companies, a St. Paul insurance firm where Laurie Coleman works. Kazeminy, the executives claim, gave the order in the context of a comment that “United States senators don’t make shit.”

In his brief interview with MinnPost today, Coleman said “I can’t say anything”  about the FBI probe. ”We want this matter to be fully reviewed and fully investigated because nothing happened, and we are looking forward to that taking place.” It’s the same thing he said Nov. 12 in response to the Alliance’s call for investigation — with one difference. This time he didn’t accuse “my political opponents” of being behind the charges.

In a separate federal investigation, the U.S. Secret Service is looking into a leak of donor data, including credit card numbers, from Coleman’s campaign Web site. Coleman’s campaign said they welcome that probe as well.

Heres’ the CNN video (for transcript, click here).

(h/t MinnPost)

“I remember during the Depression — the Great Depression …”

Last fall in the run-up to the anniversary of Black Tuesday — and as our own clouds of economic doom seemed to be gathering — the Minnesota Independent carried a series of posts called “When Depressions Were Great” that took a look at what local newspapers were reporting before the crash of 1929. Iric Nathanson takes a similar but more detailed look back at a day during the depths of the Great Depression at MinnPost today — March 4, 1933, when banks in Minnesota took a state-ordered holiday to avert a run on their deposits.

Photo: Jill Brady (via The Vigil)

FBI whistleblower-turned-activist Coleen Rowley is on a roll. She ripped into the City of St. Paul’s report on Republican National Convention law enforcement in a commentary that appeared Friday at MinnPost and today at The Huffington Post. Tomorrow, as court hearings start in the cases of the RNC8 protesters, Rowley and individuals from Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) and other groups will file formal complaints against the city, state and Ramsey County over police tactics. And Rowley’s inquiries into what she suspects was overbroad surveillance during the RNC are starting to bear fruit — or at least what she calls a first “non-responsive” response from Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher’s office.

In her commentary, Rowley cites President Obama’s inauguration as an example of a National Special Security Event (like the RNC) that police pulled off “somehow, without tear gas, tasers or thousands of people dragged off in handcuffs.” St. Paul’s Heffelfinger-Luger report, Rowley points out, avoids the question of “whether such aggressive ‘police state’ action during the RNC was actually necessary.” She concludes:

Perhaps the worst mistake made in the RNC Commission Report is falling for the notion of trade-offs between security and liberty instead of seeing them as intertwined. President Obama phrased it well in his inaugural speech statement, when he said “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

After a “Mardi Gras-themed procession” at noon on Tuesday on the state Capitol lawn, Rowley and others plan to file ”Notices of Claim” (pdf) that will contain charges like this:

In the year-long investigation and planning that preceded the RNC and the police enforcement during the RNC, Sept 1-4, 2008, the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office, along with other state, local and federal law enforcement agencies and private corporations and associations of private companies, including the “Department of Homeland Security’s (now defunct) Highway Watch” and presumably the FBI’s “InfraGard” corporate partnerships did produce faulty and defamatory “intelligence” assertions that linked the organization WAMM that I am a member of to “terror networks”. Ramsey County opened an investigation approximately one year before the RNC that provided the basis of the false claims used to defame WAMM and to violate the privacy rights of WAMM members by then disseminating this information to private corporations, associations and other law enforcement agencies.

Rowley’s public-data requests to the FBI (her former employer) and Ramsey County have so far elicited only a brush-off response from Fletcher’s office (pdf).

Her draft response:

1) If I understand correctly, any data gathered on the other organizations and groups (besides the RNC Welcoming Committee) that I inquired about—to include that gained by viewing their websites–is not contained in separate files but in the same investigative file as the one that has led to prosecution of some of the “RNC Welcoming Committee”. Is that understanding correct?

2) If you are saying that the information your Department has collected on other groups and members of other groups, is all contained in one big file, there still would be no reason it cannot be segregated out for release, would there? Since there are no ongoing prosecutions related to these other groups and members of these other groups? For example: the “Women Against Military Madness (WAMM)”; “Troops Out Now”; the “Anti-War Committee”; “Protest RNC 2008” and other peace and social justice groups are charted out in a “Social Network Analysis” and “Power Centrality Ranking” that links them to the “RNC Welcoming Committee” in a Homeland Security-Highway Watch document that has recently come to light. It’s not clear whether this “intelligence” product was only produced as a result of “viewing their websites” but even if that’s so, wouldn’t there at least be notes and copies made from that law enforcement effort of analyzing the public websites?

3) I have a hard time believing that Ramsey County Sheriff Department informant(s) reported information only on the “RNC-8”. It is precisely the other individuals who are not being prosecuted and about whom information may be contained in the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office that is of interest for the research that Mr. Cox and I are conducting. Are informant report files maintained separately?

4) Again assuming I’m correct in believing that the Ramsey Sheriff Department’s information is contained in one big file that also involves the information collected on the “RNC Welcoming Committee,” what is the name of that file? How is it indexed for retrieval and further use? Was the file opened to contain all investigative data collected in the lead-up to the RNC or was it focused solely on the RNC Welcoming Committee? If the latter, why would the information on other groups and members of groups not connected to the prosecution of the “RNC Welcoming Committee” not be releasable at this time? Can you give me an idea of the size of the file and how many other individuals and groups (not being prosecuted) are documented or referenced in the file?

5) Why did you ask for a delay when first responding to my request back in December, telling me you expected my request to take a lot of time to gather up responsive materials?

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.

Piehowski has vowed to reject blogs who are too harsh and to lay down the law on irresponsible blogging:

Now, being a blogger with a worldwide audience also comes with a lot of responsibility. We’ve all heard at least one story about a blogger who has misled, misrepresented or flat-out lied on their blog.

Simply put, there’s a lot of garbage in the blogosphere and I won’t hesitate to call out a Minnesotan who blogs recklessly.

The people-powered media revolution is knocking at our door, friends. It’s time to peak between the curtains.

That, of course, led to harsh criticism from bloggers. A Blue Stem Prairie’s Ollie Ox:

MinnPost has hired a blog nanny to watch over those of us who presumed to set up blogs without asking permission. Yes, gentle readers, the Blog Cabin is here to award gold stars to those nice people who fit the rules of high-quality journalism and to take naughty posters out to the blog woodshed.

In the upcoming weeks we’ll find out which Minnesota bloggers make the cut and which ones will be shamed into blogger obscurity.