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.

MnIndy file photo

This is some extremely shoddy journalism from Mickey Kaus. The Slate blogger asks if “ACORN chicanery” elected Sen. Al Franken, who won a razor-thin 2008 race for the U.S. Senate after eight months of legal challenges. Kaus links a “tactfully phrased Minneapolis Star Tribune story” to argue that fraudulent votes might have stolen the election for Franken.

ACORN claimed to have registered 48,000 new Minnesota voters. If just 1% were ineligible but cast ballots, or had ballots cast for them illegally, and survived the recount process … that’s 480 votes, almost certainly overwhelmingly cast for Franken.

Let’s look at this.

First, the story Kaus links to is actually a column by the conservative Katherine Kersten, whom the paper refers to as “a Twin Cities writer and speaker,” and who limns the column with attacks on the “liberal agenda.” Kersten has no proof that any illegitimate votes were cast, only that “Minnesota’s laws on proof of voter eligibility are notoriously loose.”

Second, “surviving the recount process” in Minnesota was more difficult than it sounds now. Ballots were counted once and recounted twice, and challenged ballots were counted in a hearing that was streamed live. Republicans had a lot of time, and a lot of incentive, to make the cause that thousands of ballots were illegitimate. They made their case. They narrowly lost.

Franken doesn’t have to face voters again until 2014, so the attempt to smear him here is just a way of draining the ACORN story for all it’s worth and casting illegitimacy on the Democrats’ Senate majority. It’s one thing for, say, Newsmax to engage in this; I am mystified as to why Kaus would do it. From arguing that the 2000 election was stolen from Al Gore by blocked recounts to arguing that ACORN maybe, kinda-sorta, might have registered an illegal voter in Minnesota. Strange.

Todd Herman, who runs new media at the RNC, heartily endorses the ACORN-Franken conspiracy.

UPDATE: Media Matters reports that, in addition to Slate, The Fox Nation and Gateway Pundit have picked up Kersten’s opinion piece to “baselessly cast doubt on Franken’s campaign victory.”

David Weigel is a politics reporter for the Washington Independent.

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:

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.

Editor & Publisher’s  2009 “10 That Do It Right” list includes the Strib for its ambitious “Ballot Challenge” project, which yielded a handful of posts right here at MnIndy. The paper made available online all 6,600 contested ballots in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount, including ballots by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Nickel Bag and “Amy Whinehouse.”

Here’s what E&P had to say:

Star Tribune, Minneapolis
Crowd-sourcing is a digital journalism skill that still eludes most newspapers. But the Star Tribune pulled off something even more ambitious with its “Ballot Challenge” project, centered on the recount of the Minnesota U.S. Senate vote between Republican Norm Coleman and the eventual winner, Democrat Al Franken. Call it crowd-deputizing.

At StarTribune.com, users could inspect all 6,600 ballots disputed by one side or the other. One immediate effect was to highlight the many illegally frivolous challenges — embarrassing the campaigns into dropping thousands of disputes.

Digital Community Manager Leah Betancourt notes that this wisdom of the online masses, aided by a panel of experts recruited by the paper, led users to come almost eerily close to the margin of victory given Franken by the state Canvassing Board. Strib readers figured a 78-vote lead. The board awarded a 49-vote lead.

Via Romenesko.

Diaz wrote that Ellison faces a review by the Ethics Committee for his “decision to keep the trip’s costs under wraps — even though it was paid for by a local Islamic nonprofit and typically would be reported as a gift to a public official.”

Yesterday, the Minnesota GOP cited the paper’s report in a letter to the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, concluding:

Rep. Ellison’s actions and stonewalling are clearly wrong and he should apologize to the people of Minnesota. Taxpayer money intended for students must never be used for a politician’s personal travel. To avoid the appearance of inappropriate use of taxpayer funds, we also believe he should reimburse the state for any and all expenses incurred during this travel immediately.

In his letter to the editor Thursday, Ellison said the Strib story’s “opinions and spurious connections… do not stand up in light of the actual facts. The Star Tribune’s account must be corrected.” He says he submitted the invitation from the Muslim nonprofit to the House Ethics Committee, where it was approved.

“The Star Tribune knows that I followed the spirit and the letter of the House rules, as communicated to me by House ethics lawyers, at every step of the process,” he wrote, adding that the ethics review is a standard procedure in the House, sparked by the newspaper’s inquiry.

Ellison, Congress’ first Muslim member, said that despite his public stature he deserves a private life.

“Privacy is not undiscovered dishonesty,” he wrote. “Some things are private. For example, family and religion. My trip, which was not at taxpayer expense, and paid for by a nonprofit organization that does not lobby, was handled according to the House rules, which balance disclosure and privacy.”

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 drawn-out process has also seriously eroded Coleman’s approval ratings. Just 38 percent of those surveyed indicated that they view the Republican favorably, while 55 percent viewed him unfavorably. Franken’s standing with Minnesotans, however, isn’t much better. Nearly half (48 percent) view him unfavorably, while 43 percent look upon him favorably.

The telephone survey of 1,042 Minnesota residents consisted of 36 percent Democrats, 20 percent Republicans and 37 percent independents. It had a margin of error of four percentage points, plus or minus.

Another poll, commissioned by Alliance for a Better Minnesota, found similarly widespread dissatisfaction with Coleman’s continuing legal contest. Roughly 60 percent of respondents indicated that the former senator should concede, while just 34 percent of those polled also expressed approval for the way the statewide recount was conducted. Just over 60 percent believed that the process was “fair, impartial, accurate and carried out according to Minnesota law,” while just over a quarter of respondents disagreed with this statement.

Most Minnesotans also now believe that Franken was the victor in last year’s election, according to the ABM poll. The DFLer was deemed the winner by 54 percent of the respondents, while just over a quarter believe Coleman received more votes.

The ABM poll, conducted by Grove Insights, surveyed 600 registered voters between April 22 and 25. It has a margin of error of four percentage points, plus or minus.