As a Fargo artist renders one local symbol of press freedom in stencils — journalist Roxana Saberi, who was accused of spying and jailed in Iran — another pair of American reporters remain imprisoned in North Korea. But there’s a new development in their case.

Artist Matt Mastrud — aka Punchgut — turned his focus from rock bands to images of Fargo-born journalist Saberi in a pair of recent works, but he says he has little political intent behind them: He just likes Saberi’s smile. Saberi, accused of spying by Iranian officials, was freed after spending four months in a Tehran jail. Said Mastrud, “It was pretty much just a nod to a fellow northside Fargoan, you know?”

Saberi’s fellow reporters — Euna Lee and Laura Ling of Al Gore’s news project Current TV — haven’t been as lucky: In June, they were sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp for “hostilities against the Korean nation and illegal entry.”

But today there’s a new development: Former President Bill Clinton has made a surprise trip to Pyongyang to plead for their release.

“This is a very potentially rewarding trip. Not only is it likely to resolve the case of the two American journalists detained in North Korea for many months, but it could be a very significant opening and breaking this downward cycle of tension and recrimination between the U.S. and North Korea,” Mike Chinoy, author of “Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis,” told the AP.

This morning White House press secretary Robert Gibbs released a statement on the trip: “While this solely private mission to secure the release of two Americans is on the ground, we will have no comment. We do not want to jeopardize the success of former President Clinton’s mission.”

Mastrud’s art in on display at Fargo’s Upfront Gallery through August 15.

What’s in the Q?

Kupchella to tackle healthcare reform: Rick Kupchella has two new projects in the works after leaving KARE 11 two weeks ago. One’s a new-media project, but details haven’t been revealed yet. This is the other: the i.e. network, a PR effort targeting healthcare reform. According to the network’s site, they’re partnering with Target and “some of America’s most progressive corporate entities” to create The ALLIANCE for a Healthy Twin Cities to promote lower cost, higher quality healthcare through a focus on wellness. But it might not be as “progressive” as you’d think: partnering with Kupchella is Tom Mason, formerly chief of staff for Norm Coleman, senior communications adviser to Tim Pawlenty and communications director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Once dubbed a “rising star” of the GOP, he also published Twin Cities Business Monthly for five years.

Saberi’s plea: As Fargo-born journalist Roxana Saberi calls for the release of her former cellmate in Iran, Iranian aid worker Silva Harotonian, protesters for democracy in that country are reportedly dealing with the government’s news blackout by making an underground newspaper. Here’s the translation of one.

LATimes gives props to local Twitterer: The Los Angeles Times included a local — Secrets of the City’s Max Sparber — in its list of funny tweets in response to South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s news conference yesterday, in which he revealed he’d been unfaithful to his wife. “None of us are in a position to judge Sanford until we too have had sex with a woman in Argentina,” Sparber wrote. “Now who is up for a road trip?”

Hubbard honored: Hubbard Broadcasting, owner of KSTP radio and TV as well as other broadcast stations, is receiving the Historic Site in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists tomorrow. The family-owned company has been in business since 1942.

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?”

The pair was working on a piece about the trafficking of women for the online video news site and weren’t aware that they crossed the border into North Korea, they said. While American officials work “feverishly” (according to ABC News) in an effort to secure their release, Spencer Ackerman at the Washington Independent tracks down what a “labor camp” sentence means. From the State Department’s 2008 Human Rights Report:

Reeducation through labor, primarily through sentences at forced labor camps, was a common punishment and consisted of tasks such as logging, mining, or tending crops under harsh conditions. Reeducation involved memorizing speeches by Kim Jong-il…

If the pair are dubbed political prisoners, they may face harsher conditions, including “prolonged periods of exposure to the elements; humiliations such as public nakedness; confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods; being hung by the wrists; being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse.”

The same report underscores the importance of Lee’s and Ling’s work exposing trafficking of women across the border with China:

There were no known laws specifically addressing the problem of trafficking in persons, and trafficking of women and young girls into and within China continued to be widely reported. Some North Korean women and girls who voluntarily crossed into China were picked up by trafficking rings and sold as brides to Chinese nationals or placed in forced labor. In other cases, North Korean women and girls were lured out of North Korea by the promise of food, jobs, and freedom, only to be forced into prostitution, marriage, or exploitive labor arrangements. A network of smugglers facilitated this trafficking. Many victims of trafficking, unable to speak Chinese, were held as virtual prisoners, and some were forced to work as prostitutes. Traffickers sometimes abused or physically scarred the victims to prevent them from escaping. Officials facilitated trafficking by accepting bribes to allow individuals to cross the border into China.

The Obama administration would like to keep the journalists’ cause separate from bargaining over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, but many fear the country will use the case as leverage. Word is Obama is considering sending former Vice President Al Gore (founder of Current.com) or New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to Pyongyang to negotiate for the duo’s release.

“Investigations with her have taken place and she will be released in the next few days,” an unnamed person from the prosecutor’s office in Tehran is said to have told ISNA news agency. 

Jailed since January for espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison, Saberi was hospitalized last week after she began a hunger strike in April. 

UPDATE: ”The appeals court … has reduced her jail sentence from eight years to two years of suspended sentence,” Sky News quotes Saberi’s lawyer as saying. 

UPDATE II: U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar issued this statement: 

I am glad this injustice has been reversed and Roxana Saberi is now free to return home.  Her arrest and imprisonment provoked a worldwide response.  The government of Iran should never have used this young American journalist as a pawn in their international game.

As World Press Freedom Day passed Sunday, a hunger strike in solidarity with Saberi extended into its sixth day by Reporters without Borders activists in Paris, while hundreds of supporters and friends held a vigil for Saberi on the bridge linking Saberi’s hometown with the neighboring city of Moorhead, Minn. Saberi was scheduled to give the commencement speech at her alma mater, Moorhead’s Concordia College this weekend.

According to the World Association of Newspapers, 125 journalists were imprisoned last year, including 12 in the region where Saberi is now detained.

Members of Reporters without Borders are joining Saberi in a hunger strike in Paris today: they stopped eating at 11 a.m. Paris time. The organization says Iran ranks 166th out of 173 in press freedom. Currently Saberi is among seven journalists and two bloggers who are currently jailed in the country. She was sentenced after a closed, one-day trial.

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.