Our Powers Are Greater Than We Knew

A “veteran” of the Minneapolis Star Tribune poured his heart out to a local alternative weekly called The Rake:

As one Strib veteran tells the Mole, “The right-wing blog voices that were bashing the paper a couple of years ago, Hugh Hewitt and the rest, have gotten pretty much everything they wanted. The GOP wanted the Minnesota Poll gone, and now it’s gone. They wanted to get rid of people like [editorial board members] Jim Boyd and Susan Albright and their editorial policy, and they’ve succeeded at that. Now there won’t be editorials about the war and global warming; they’ll write about local issues like zoning conflicts in Coon Rapids instead. They wanted the paper to hire a conservative columnist, and they got that. From here on out, it looks like the Strib becomes the conservative, suburbs-oriented paper, and the Pioneer Press will become the paper of the city underdogs and the blue voters.

The “right-wing blog voices” would be us, of course, and some of our friends, and it’s equally easy to guess the identity of the Strib “veteran,” whose account is paranoid to the point of dissociation from reality, just like his columns. It would be nice if the Strib became a conservative paper, but hiring a single conservative columnist will hardly get them there. And monopoly newspapers are never conservative, they are always liberal.
The Strib “veteran’s” bitterness, toward us and the world in general, is striking. However much we may like to claim the credit, the shake-up at the Strib has nothing to do with us, and everything to do with the economics of the industry. The fact is that hiring kids to toss newspapers onto front steps is an archaic method of delivering information, and competitors like Ebay and Craig’s List have taken away most of the newspaper’s traditional cash cow, classified advertising. But Ebay and Craig’s List don’t make a very satisfactory enemies list, so it’s more rewarding to blame changes at the newspaper on “right-wing bloggers.”
Via Hugh Hewitt and Ed Morrissey, who fingers the same columnist that we do.
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