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.

Both the Republican Party of Minnesota and the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party held press conferences yesterday (see videos below) and steered supporters online to give money, sign petitions, and, in the DFL’s case, watch this video at its new GiveItUpNorm.com Web site:

The Crookston Daily Times joined the Star Tribune, the Grand Forks Herald and the Albert Lea Tribune by wading into the fray with an early end-of-trial editorial, titled “Coleman just wants to win, that’s all“:

Coleman is a politician, so his goal is to win. Politicians seek elected office, after all, so if you’re not elected, you’ve failed a basic requirement of the job. He didn’t want a bunch of votes counted, but now he does. Surprised? Lest we forget, Coleman used to be a Democrat, and then he switched parties. Hey, it happens.

So let Coleman appeal. Let the politician desperately trying to remain in office leave no stone unturned in his effort to win. For politicians, winning isn’t just everything, after all, it’s the only thing.

Pioneer Press reporter Rachel Stassen-Berger, last seen jawing with Coleman attorney Ben Ginsberg after a testy Tuesday courthouse press conference, has since backed up her rhetoric in an article today and a Political Animal blog post yesterday. She refutes Ginsberg’s (and Coleman’s) contention that the Republican would win if only more absentee ballots were opened from GOP-leaning precincts:

But, according to a Pioneer Press analysis of the absentee ballots that have been counted during the recount and the contest, the logic that there is Coleman gold in the ballots from GOP areas fails. Of the 1,284 absentee ballots that have been counted since Election Day, Coleman underperformed compared to the political tilt of the cities and counties from which the ballots came.

Media Matters’ call for the media to at long last call out Coleman as a sore loser (as they did much earlier with Al Gore in the shorter-lived 2000 presidential recount) doesn’t go far enough for Ernest Canning, an attorney writing with Brad Friedman at BradBlog. For Franken, they say, “It’s not a ‘lead’, it’s a ‘win,’” and reporters and commentators should stop saying Coleman is trailing in votes and start saying he lost:

But to go one further than (Media Matters’ Eric) Boehlert, we’d ask not why the media fail to describe Coleman as a “sore loser”, but rather, why it is that — particularly since Tuesday’s final count of any remaining, lawfully cast, previously uncounted absentee ballots — the media fail to describe Coleman as the loser at all, much less a sore one.

Here are videos of the DFL and Republican state party press conferences, from The UpTake:

Noah Kunin (Aaron Landry, Flickr)

When it comes to rejection and Norm Coleman’s campaign, Noah Kunin knows a thing or two. As senior political correspondent for The UpTake, he’s seen his questions ignored at official Coleman press conferences; his UpTake colleagues have been dubbed not “legitimate media” and refused access to campaign “media availabilities“; and GOP chair Ron Carey called The UpTake a “partisan, liberal blog” as a way of attacking Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who referenced The UpTake’s video feeds in an email.

But what Kunin wasn’t prepared for was the rejection of his absentee ballot. This afternoon, Kunin sent out a message on Twitter from the Senate contest trial that his name  appeared in a database of some 150 names of voters whose absentee ballots Team Coleman alleges were rejected. (His last name was misspelled “Kunim,” an error on the Coleman team’s part, he says; he checked with his Plymouth polling place, where it was correctly spelled.) He hasn’t yet responded to my query for comment, but the Pioneer Press’ Rachel Stassen-Berger, who has likely covered as many hours of the recount and contest as Kunin has, did. “That is righteously funny,” he said.

Update: Reached this afternoon, Kunin said he was unaware that his absentee ballot was rejected. “My brain is pretty blown right now.” He’s confused about why his ballot was rejected. He’s certain his ballot was witnessed correctly, sealed in the proper envelope and mailed properly. In fact, since he was close to the deadline, he over-stamped: “I remember distinctly putting extra stamps on it; I wanted to overpay just to make sure it got there.”

How has this news been received in the courtroom?

“The Coleman campaign has been cool to this revelation,” Kunin says. “We’ll see if I’m called to the stand or not.”

As for the earlier rejections of The UpTake from Coleman’s events, perhaps that problem will ease up a bit. This week, The UpTake was officially accepted into the capitol press corps [pdf].

Photo courtesy of Aaron Landry.

Paul McEnroe and Tony Kennedy said today they had sought an interview with Coleman for days and warned his campaign that without one they’d have to raise the issue at an Oct. 29 campaign event. And the record shows that by that time local reporters had been trying to get answers from Coleman for at least three weeks.

“They knew the cameras were there,” Coleman told WCCO-TV on Sunday. “They could have gone back and had a quiet conversation if that was the purpose. My point being they appeared in a Democratic Party ad four days before an election on something that never happened.”

The public showdown (video) wasn’t the reporters’ first try or their first choice, they said. “We made every attempt to have a ‘conversation,’ as the senator put it, but we were continually stonewalled by his staff in the days prior to our attempt to talk to him during his campaign stop in St. Cloud,” McEnroe and Kennedy told Braublog.

In fact, Coleman was already griping about reporters’ questions on the topic and stonewalling them three weeks before Kennedy and McEnroe made their stand in St. Cloud, as Steve Perry explained in a Minnesota Independent post last November:

On October 10, Norm Coleman volunteered on the record that “Over the last several days I have received a fresh batch of questions from reporters, fueled by blogs, about personal issues concerning… my wife.” … 

At an October 8 press conference (here’s a Publius post with transcript) that’s been widely viewed on YouTube — the one in which Coleman rep Cullen Sheehan repeated the same boilerplate response about whether Nasser Kazeminy bought suits for Norm Coleman — Rachel Stassen-Berger of the Pioneer Press asks Coleman about his wife’s job at Hays Companies.

And speaking (as Coleman did on Sunday) of ads that run “four days before an election on something that never happened,” it’s worth noting that the former senator no longer talks about the charges he leveled against Franken in his own last-minute campaign ad (hat tip to commenter lenzy1000 at The UpTake’s live chat):

Al Franken’s eleventh-hour attack, phony accusations filled with lies delivered anonymously to a Minnesota paper before being filed in a Texas court, the vicious personal attack on my wife. This time Al Franken’s crossed the line. My name’s on the ballot. I’m fair game for his smears. My wife and family are not. In Minnesota this is as dirty as it gets. I’m Norm Coleman. I approved this message because there’s got to be a better way.

Coleman saw fit to make that accusation against Franken at the eleventh hour before the election. But now, at the whatever-hour of the election contest, reporters have become his target.