The Minneapolis Tribune Is a Stone Wall DRAG

Vizenor said it: “You know what it would be take to make me stay?  It would take any one of Them walking back here, patting me on the back, and saying ‘Vizenor, we think you’re doing a great job.’ Or even, ‘Viz, we know you’re trying.’  You know we don’t stay here for the money.  Jesus, we’re such suckers for crumb of commendation.” He left.

The cause of most of our immediate woes was The System.  The System, They said was going through organized Channels of Communication and medium was the memo.  First we were all ordered to write weekly memos, outlining our newsgathering plans for the week.  Any time unaccounted for was promptly filled by some officious assistant city editor with schlock work.  Then we were ordered to write memos every day, outlining our newsgathering plans for the day.  Any time left unaccounted for was promptly filled with schlock work.  Finally, They started writing Us memos, filling our time with schlock work.

We suddenly had a plethora of assistant city editors who were supposed to keep the System running smoothly.  They spend all Their time writing memos to each other and failing to communicate.  If one ACE assigned a reporter, another would talk to him when he came in, and a third would edit his copy and each of them would be sore because the reporter hadn’t done what he wanted.  They never wanted the same thing.

If a story survived the plethora of assistant city editors, it would then be forwarded to the news desk duchy, where it would be pronounced unfit for publication, returned to the city desk barony for more work, passed through the Sunday desk fiefdom for alteration, and finally cut to mincemeat at the copy desk.  The story seldom came out bearing much relation to the reality the reporter had witnessed on the street.

During one abysmal spell we had an assistant city editor who told reporters what the lead (first and most important paragraph) of their stories would be, word for word, before they went out to cover them.

Any reporters miraculously left with enough time to come up with a story idea on his own initiative had to write a memo and then sit and wait for an affirmative response.  Somewhere in the labyrinthine entrails of The System is a bottomless abyss into which dozens, hundreds, of good story ideas have disappeared to be heard of nevermore.  It is a veritable memo graveyard, and the ghosts of its unborn stories haunt the city room.

But behind the infamous System seemed to be a rather coherent philosophy of management.

“They’re trying to make us into deckhands,” raged Shellum, a man with a splendid temper.  “They think they can turn this paper into a factory and make us all like little interchangeable cogs: one falls out and you just plug in another and it won’t interrupt the goddamn System.  It’s cheaper for them to hire cogs then good journalists.  They hire the dummies who’ll do what they’re told, when they’re told and how they’re told and never worry about whether they’re letting the people know what the hell is happening around here.  Hire dummies and save dollars, that’s Their motto.”

Fuller said, “They want a crew of Bower’s Boys (Bower Hawthorne, editor of the Tribune, is one of Them).  Their dream is to have a series of form stories with blanks that can be filled out by morons to furnish the entire content of the paper.”

But the major problem with Them, I found, is that They are not villains.  Or even fools.  They are not trying to sap the initiative and creativity of the Tribune's staff.  They’re just doing it.  In fact, the most annoying thing about Them is that They keep agreeing with us.

The Wagon regulars finally took to meeting on Sunday mornings in an effort to get away from bitching and come up with some constructive suggestions about how to improve the situation.  We felt, naively it would seen in retrospect, that there was a failure of communication.  Our idea was that if They only really knew how grim things were, They would fix it.

The upshot, after some backing and filling, was a meeting on January 10 of John Cowles Jr., Bower Hawthorne and most of the city staff.  They said all the right things.  Cowles, whom most of us had never seen before, turned out to be bright, genial, and even fairly witty.  Hawthorne rumbled about his vision of a newspaper that would do investigative and analytical pieces as well as the “meat and potatoes news.”  Dave Kuhn, another valuable staffer who’s leaving, gave Hawthorne the stonewall answer to that dream, which every Trib staffer runs into every day.  “You haven’t got the horses,” he said.  And They won’t spend the money to get the horses.  If They wanted Bob Lundegaard to cover the courts, follow the routine, get the daily news, then Lundegaard will never have time to do the Big Stories.  What is justice in this state like?  Where are the inequities?  What will it take to speed up the process of justice?  Are they conflicts of interest on the bench?

If They want Fin Lewis to cover city hall and go to the city council meetings and council committee meetings and park board meetings and every doodlebug meeting in city government, then Lewis will never have time to do the think pieces.  Lewis, who majored in government at Harvard, is fascinated by the American political process.  He likes to watch it work, see who influences it and how much.

“I’m beginning to think of the Trib as a big mouth,” Lewis said recently.  “Every morning when I come to work its open and hungry and roaring at me.  So I feed it—four, five routine stories a day.  And when I go home at night, its belly is full, and it’s quiet.  But the next morning, there it is again, roaring at me.”

And so it goes for every reporter who dreams of doing the Big Story, the important one, the one that really going to let the people know what’s happening in this city and this society.  It takes time and money and freedom and a lot of space in the paper to get those stories.  The Trib doesn’t permit its reporter time, money, freedom, or space, and so we continue to crank out schlock.

The horror stories are endless—every reporter has dozens.  The sins of The Minneapolis Tribune are sins of omission rather then commission.  What the Trib does, it does not-badly and occasionally it even rises to glory.  But what the Trib doesn’t do, what it fails to do, what it should do—that haunts us.

First, there is the editing.  Readers of the Minneapolis Tribune, do you notice a certain lack of sparkle in your morning paper?  Do you find it less than absorbing?  Do you, in fact, feel that it is boring?  It is boring.  It is not boring because its writers are a clot of humorless clods who can’t rise above the level of prose found on the back of bottles of castor oil.  It is boring, dear reader, because the ever-vigilant pencils of editors are busily at work protecting you from anything that smacks of subjectivity.  Subjectivity is the opposite of objectivity as defined by Spiro Agnew.  And subjectivity, as further defined by editors of the Tribune, includes all efforts at lightness, wit, satire, and fun.  It includes all efforts to portray human emotion, human drama, and human vulgarity.  I think it includes the quality of being human.

Their idea of objectivity most certainly excludes nuance and subtly.

“Facts without their nuance,” Norman Mailer told Judge Julius Hoffman, “mean nothing, sir.”

Tribune editors, like Judge Hoffman, prefer the facts and let the meaning go hang.  An example: one of our many departed police reporters once got a story so exclusive that even Paul Helm didn’t know about it.  It concerned a tape recording of the police calls made three years ago during the riots (known to Tribune readers as “disturbances”) on Plymouth Avenue.  The issues was whether a police officer, Kenneth Vooge, now an inspector, had been to chickenhearted to move in and stop the riot or whether he had been ordered not to go in by other officials.  The officer’s reputation had suffered because of the truth of the matter had never came out.