Former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer. Photo: Paul Schmelzer, Minnesota Independent

Updated: Shortly after the Star Tribune reported that the faith-based Riverview Community Bank had been shut down by the state, we — like others — noticed that the paper’s online report deleted a reference to Mary Kiffmeyer, the sometimes controversial former Secretary of State and current state representative who has close ties to the bank. And, according to Lexis-Nexis, the Pioneer Press’ online story was also modified since publication Friday to remove mention of the Big Lake Republican. Why?

Strib business reporter Chris Serres says it’s a “relevant question” that has a “mundane answer.”

“We had very tight space in Saturday’s paper and had to cut information on the story that ran online, so I cut out Kiffmeyer,” he told the Minnesota Independent, adding that it was his choice, rather than an editor’s, what got cut. “The online version was updated to match the latest print version of the story.”

But the deleted line appears to have saved only 18 words (here’s a pasted-in version of the piece at a Google Group; the story doesn’t appear in Lexis-Nexis), and the first version of the story, which ran at 419 words, is actually much shorter than the 554-word piece that’s available at StarTribune.com.

To that, Serres said he wanted to focus more on the “God stuff,” instead of Kiffmeyer’s ties to the bank, which he feels fewer people know about. A Federal Reserve Bank agreement, signed by Kiffmeyer on Oct. 9, lists her as president and director of American Eagle Financial Corporation, which owns and controls Riverview Community Bank.

“I thought that stuff was more interesting than Mary Kiffmeyer,” he said.  Then, noting the dozen or so complaints he got, he added, “given the number of phone calls and emails, there’s a pretty good argument it could’ve been in the story. Relevance is often in the eyes of the beholder.”

However, as I prepared this post, I noticed that the Pioneer Press has also removed mention of Kiffmeyer from its story. According to Lexis-Nexis, this innocuous-seeming line was removed from the online story: “Mary Kiffmeyer, former Minnesota secretary of state, was on the bank’s board of directors, according to the Minnesota Bankers Association’s bank directory.” (In one instance, the line does appear in an AP-syndicated version of the story.)

PiPress reporter Nicole Garrison-Sprenger has not yet responded to my email and voicemail queries on the topic. I did call Serres of the Star Tribune back to ask if Kiffmeyer or her representative called him to request modifications to the story.

“No. Absolutely not,” he told me. “I never got a call from anyone at the bank, a board member, anyone, period.”

But he seemed less certain when I again asked him if he — not an editor — removed the mention of Kiffmeyer.  He twice replied, “I think I took it out.” Finally, he replied, “I had to cut stuff out of the story to make it fit. Yeah, it was my call.”

Update: Garrison-Sprenger emails that the Pioneer Press currently has two versions of the story online. The first one, which didn’t include Kiffmeyer’s name, was published before she’d looked into the bank’s ownership and board members; the newer one, which ran in the print edition, includes mention of Kiffmeyer.

Defunct paper sued:

Hoppin replaces Stassen-Berger: With Pioneer Press political reporter Rachel Stassen-Berger heading over to the Star Tribune, the St. Paul paper announces that her replacement will be reporter Jason Hoppin. A good move, but as editor Thom Fladung noted in his memo, Hoppin’s old beat — covering Minnesota’s capitol city – won’t be refilled.

Bridge shuttered: The Bridge, a community newspaper covering Mississippi River neighborhoods in the core of Minneapolis, stopped publishing its print edition a month ago, and now its website — rebranded as Bridgeland News — seems to be following suit. In a July 13 editors note, Dan Nordley wrote that, despite getting 1,000 email subscribers, the publication fell short in its fundraising efforts to switch to online-only newsgathering. The site — last updated on Aug. 6 — will get occasional new content, but, he writes, “the site will be like the Stone Arch Bridge—more of a nostalgic place than a structure that’s still used for commercial traffic.”

Health care debate goes online: Local social media types, fed up with mayhem wrought at public forums on health care by anti-Obama activists, are hoping for a calmer discussion of the issues online. Blogger and online media consultant Paul Saarinen has started a video conversation on “What bothers you about the health care debate?” Video commenters so far include Mediation blogger Taylor Carik and Matt Thompson, online journalist and former deputy web editor at the Star Tribune. All are welcome to participate.

Hubbard sues Ramsey County: In June, Hubbard Broadcasting — owner of KSTP, KAAL and others — filed a data practices request to see all uncounted ballots in the protracted Norm Coleman/Al Franken Senate contest. Now, after Coleman conceded defeat and with Al Franken serving his fifth week as Minnesota’s second senator, the company has filed suit against Ramsey County to get their hands on unopened absentee ballots. This week they did the same in St. Louis County.

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?”

Photo: Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

The rapid devolution of print journalism is regularly lamented for all the right reasons – among them the losses of investigative voices, institutional memories and checks on the powerful. A less-noted side effect is cities’ loss of revenue from recycling newsprint.

Last year Minneapolis recycled fewer than 10,000 tons of newsprint for the first time since at least 1993, according to the city’s Solid Waste and Recycling department, with residential newsprint pickup accounting for only 5 percent of the total recycling collected by the city. Compare that to 15,000 tons of newsprint recycled in 1998, more than 9 percent of all materials that year.

Everything about newspapers is getting smaller, according to department head Susan Young. “Newspapers are using thinner paper,” Young says. “The pages are not as tall or as wide, and ads [particularly inserts] are way down.”

Minneapolis earns top dollar for its recycling because residents sort by type of material — newsprint, glass, aluminum and so on — whereas many communities, including St. Paul, collect mixed recycling, which is worth less.

In Minnesota, 40 percent of municipal solid waste is recycled, according to Recycle More Minnesota, for an annual payout (as of 2006, including sales of waste to energy facilities) of $10 million.

In 2007, Young’s department added $1.9 million to city coffers by collecting and marketing sorted recyclables. This year, she says she’ll be lucky to clear half that amount, projecting a net income of $800,000–900,000: “My worst year in a while.”

That’s due in large part to declining markets for most materials. But because newsprint and aluminum consistently account for the largest shares of what Minneapolis has to market, she also lays the precipitous decline at newspapers’ doorstep.

Part of the problem: People take papers delivered at home to read on the way to work or on the job, where they aren’t as likely to be recycled — or at least not on the city’s residential collection routes.

Still, Minneapolis is better off than cities that don’t sort and are “hemorrhaging money,” as Young puts it. In Blaine, for example, residents now pay a fee of $11 per month to have recycling picked up.

A representative at Veolia Environmental Services, the private company that picks up recycling in Blaine and eight other local cities, said a single stream of mixed recyclables makes it hard to measure trends in quantities of newsprint. The impact on St. Paul is likewise unclear, where a spokesperson said the recycling point person left the city’s employ late last year.

Both Blaine and St. Paul have their recycling taken to Eureka Recycling for sorting. (Repeated calls to Eureka for this story weren’t returned.)

The impact on cities in which citizens sort their recyclables is likely greater than elsewhere, since they have a more lucrative product to sell. Young proudly asserts that the newsprint Minneapolis collects, however skimpy by comparison to past years, is still a higher-value item than other cities’ “newspaper drenched in beer.”

(Speaking of beer, beverages that come in glass are fueling a rise in tonnage for that material in Minneapolis: from 4 million tons in 2003 to almost 6 million tons last year. And that’s mostly drinks, Young reckons: “You don’t buy pickles [or other foods] in glass anymore.”)

Young will ask the three local recyclers — Allied Recycling, Waste Management and Eureka — to bid for the city’s recycling business when the current contract with Allied runs out next year. She expects the drop in newsprint to make a dent in the size of the offers she receives, but there’s not much she can do about it.

“All I can do is take what people give me,” Young says.

But recycling markets are cyclical like any others, and Young expects even newsprint to stabilize. “People want their local news. Even I, who am supposed to be really tech-savvy, … like to be able to settle in with the newspaper.”

Young has a Friday-through-Sunday subscription to the Star Tribune and expects many Minneapolis residents will keep receiving — and recycling — at least weekend newspapers.

If the bankrupt Strib eventually goes bust? Readers will take the St. Paul Pioneer Press, she says, plus there are the community newspapers.

One community newspaper, The Bridge, won’t be weighing down recycling bins on the east and southeastern sides of Minneapolis. The Bridge just published its last printed edition (it’s now online-only).

That was news to her.

In an interview with the Colorado Statesman, Singleton discussed changes to the Media News paper there, the Denver Post, but repeatedly noted that changes in Denver reflect those coming throughout his 54-paper empire.

One change: “You’re going to see less and less newsroom-generated copy online and more and more copy generated specifically for online. And we’re doing this company-wide. It’s not just Denver,” he said. “We’re going to move away from giving away our news content online for free — give a small amount of it away, and then air that out with reader-generated copy, with user-generated copy, with listings and other things online. We’re planning to make our online offerings much different than our print offerings.”

“We will be moving away from giving away most of our content online,” he continued, adding that such changes will be rolled out in the second half of this year:

I think the free sites we have will help us drive them to some of the pay sites.

There are two different kinds of pay sites. Obviously, the facsimile edition of the core newspaper — we sell all those now — I think The Post has 25,000 daily subscribers that pay and get the facsimile newspaper and the ads, but they get it online and they pay … I think we charge $30 a year for it, which is cheaper than the paper, and it’s cheaper for us to deliver. And that’s a growing number. We’re selling more and more of those at The Post.

Our biggest seller of online editions is St. Paul, Minnesota.

But while he specifically calls out the PiPress, he also sounds an ominous tone for paper’s like St. Paul’s, which competes with the larger Star Tribune.

“Second newspapers in competitive markets, they’re going away. There isn’t enough revenue to support them.”

The problems start with the byline. The article was apparently written by Mark Blaudschun, of the heretofore unknown “Boston Glove.” Then there’s Join in the Dance, who finished in the middle of the pack, thus apparently shortening his name to “Join the Dance.”

Both simple, easily explainable mistakes. But then things really run off the rails.

The chief story line of the day, of course, was the 50-1 upset sprung by Mine That Bird, and the rags-to-riches tale of jockey Calvin Borel. “It was his second Derby victory in three years,” the Pi Press story notes, “having guided Secret Sense into the winner’s circle in 2007.”

Secret Sense, eh? I must have been in a mint-julep-induced coma during that year’s race. Or perhaps the beast being referenced here is Street Sense?

So what the hell happened to pre-race favorite Friesan Fire, trained by the iconoclastic Larry Jones? The Louisiana Derby winner was never a factor, finishing 18th. Which apparently was a sufficiently disgraceful performance that he shall henceforth be known as “Friensen Fire.”

Friensen Fire’s collapse wasn’t a complete surprise, though (according to the Pioneer Press story), because “he had never run more than 1-1/2 miles.” Of course none of the entrants in the 19-horse field had ever run more than 1-1/2 miles. In fact, I’m not sure where you would find a race longer than 1-1/2 miles to enter if (for some reason) you wished to do so. Presumably the story was attempting to point out that questions persisted about Friesan Fire (or Friensen Fire, or Frilly Fat Ferret, or Fancy Ray McCloney, or whatever the hell you want to call the beast) because he’d never run a race longer than 1-1/16 miles.

In other news: I hear Barbaro is now the favorite for the Preakness.

This time the two sides are swapping positions about whether Minnesotans or non-Minnesotans should decide the race.

When Majority Leader Harry Reid was making plausible noises about the Senate seating Franken, Coleman’s camp declared that the decision should be left to the state’s voters.

Now that even Coleman’s own lead lawyer is publicly predicting he’ll lose the election contest trial, the former senator’s side is signaling it’ll seek a different result in federal court.

That leaves Franken’s forces to demand now that the decision stay within the borders of the Gopher State.

The Strib’s Web site had nothing about the story until midday Monday, when a video and slide show appeared. UPDATE: The full story has been posted. But the article remains inaccessible on the Internet, even for a price. And that’s a considerable comfort for the men behind the bad business that the article exposes.  

The Star Tribune kept its story — about an unregulated lender to a dozen half-finished projects across the exurban landscape — offline in order to bolster solid Sunday sales, according to MinnPost’s David Brauer. But if the move made the paper’s display-ad sales staff happy, it surely made Robert Machacek ecstatic.

Machacek is the chief villain in the piece, an ex-con who led Lakeland Contruction Finance LLC on a hell-bent, post-bubble, no-money-down rush to build up the metro’s hinterlands. Reporter Chris Serres went to some lengths (and exotic-sounding locales) to track Machacek down, even leaving notes “at a house listed under his name on Safari Heights Trail in Eagan.” Machacek comes off as a bad guy, but only if you see the article.

The online video and slideshow — effective if a bit odd as a package without Serres’ sizable reporting — don’t name names at Lakeland Construction Finance. Machacek doesn’t appear at all and investor Ted Waitt is pictured with only his name as a caption, leaving the Strib considerable online readership clueless. By withholding the story from the Web the Strib gave Machacek (and others behind the mess) a huge reprieve from Internet infamy.

In today’s Pioneer Press, Ruben Rosario has a terrific column cutting through all the nauseous grandstanding. The metro columnist brings up the rather unlikely parallel of Stanley Dean Baker, a.k.a. “Fingers,” a convicted murderer and alleged cannibal who served out his post-incarceration life in Minnesota without bothering a soul. Rosario also gives a pass to the police unions for beating on the Olson pinata, but performs a nifty double-leg rhetorical takedown on the state’s top elected official. Read the whole thing, but here are a few choice grafs related to T-Paw:

There are an estimated 1,591 convicted offenders from other states — from burglars to convicted killers — currently allowed to live here.

We’ve exported 2,518 of our own across the nation. We’re talking everything here from property burglars to murderers. Where are those other letters of protest?

Gov. Tim Pawlenty knows the score about this long-standing interstate agreement. But lightweight politicians don’t let the facts get in the way of scoring easy, knee-jerk political points.

Basically, the Governator from the Golden State told Pawlenty, ‘Sorry, but hasta la vista, baby.’ Olson was released Tuesday and will return to Minnesota under parole to live with her husband and three children.

Rosario has been hitting on all cylinders lately. His weekend column about Annie Yonly — a Liberian immigrant who’s lived in Minnesota for more than two decades, but now faces possible deportation — was devastating.

You know the St Paul Pioneer Press is…one of the second largest papers in the state, last week [they] said we’re never going to figure this out, just run it again.

Perhaps the Duluth News-Tribune is in a dead tie with the PiPress for second-largest status? Or does Norm know something we don’t about the future over at the Star Tribune?

Here’s the PiPress’ Feb. 21 op-ed Coleman’s referring to.