Dave Wood

I’m sorry to report that the newspaper I once was proud to work for, now named the Minnesota Star Tribune, “The Heart and Voice of the North,” is making news that is heart-wrenching to read.

Last month both its owner and its new publisher announced it would no longer print the newspaper at its printing operation located in north Minneapolis, but would outsource the job to Des Moines, Iowa, hiring Gannett newspapers (its competitor!) to do the job, which will leave 125 Minneapolis printers out of work. Once printed the Star Tribune will be hauled by truck to Minneapolis for home delivery, which means deadlines must be set earlier and newsworthy items like sports scores and stock market reports will appear a day later than currently.

According to Steve Groves, the newspaper’s new publisher and mega millionaire Glen Taylor, its current owner, the move is necessary because it will save millions of dollars annually which ensures the Strib of surviving at all. (They’re quick to point out that other metro dailies are doing the same thing, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.)

The management’s recent announcement has caused quite a stir, including from former Strib reporter Doug Grow, who in a heart-breaking guest column remembered when he first delivered the old Tribune in faraway South Dakota where the Tribune was a Big Deal, delivered as far away as Colorado. Grow admitted that the times change but wondered what would happen to news coverage when the new deadlines went into effect.

A letter to the editor writer added his idea about the Star Tribune’s need for more cash, wondering if newspapers would eventually go the way of local Twin Cities bakeries, which are closing around town in droves. If the news was going to be “day-old” would newsboys begin to sell them discounted as “day-olds,” like glazed donuts?

I worked at the Tribune in the twilight of its Big Deal Years, when it was still a great newspaper with its own foreign correspondents, a well-staffed op-ed page, great cartoonists Dick Guindon and Steve Sack, a revolutionary food section (Remember Al Sicherman?) and a daring travel section led by adventurous Catherine Watson. But the cracks were beginning to show. First came the merger with the evening Star, prompting the resignation of editor Charles Bailey. But that was just the beginning. The 1930s and the introduction of a flurry of so-called “Guest Columnists,” introduced after owner Taylor forgot his promise to not tamper with the paper’s editorial policy, broke my tender heart.

So I resolved to cancel my subscription and send Groves and Taylor duplicate letters reminding them of an earlier Minnesota journalistic squabble in Red Wing years ago, when the pretty little town had three weekly newspapers, The Republican,  the Democratic Eagle and an off-beat Farmer Labor weekly, whose feisty editor one day editorialized that “If you removed the brain of the Republican editor, and the brain of the Eagle publisher and mashed what you found into a ball, inserted it into the bladder of a mosquito,  it would rattle around like a bean in a boxcar!”

But a wiser head prevailed, one which belonged to my beautiful wife, who counseled me to calm down, become slightly saner, and remember that it wasn’t the new bosses who caused all the trouble. They didn’t build that new printing plant and sell off the old Big Red press in the original Strib building, nor did they build the ugly corrugated metal warehouse to store newsprint whenever its price declined (it didn’t), ignoring predictions that subscribers and advertisers were likely to soon drop off. (They did.)  The previous owners did that.

She also wondered just where we’d get our news. Certainly not on TV or from smaller dailies, like the once-excellent Eau Claire Leader-Telegram, which are currently being cannibalized by new wannabe press moguls liker Stephen Adams who owns Eau Claire, Duluth, and Superior dailies and tons of others. (What would his father CEDRIC Adams think about that?)

“So buck up, my dear,” she advised, “and send in the annual check for $749 to the Strib, pass up the wisdom of all the new ‘guest columnists’ and bask in the remembrance of the Good Old Days when the Tribune’s motto was ‘Sunshine on Your Doorstep.’”

Okay, dear, I’ll do that, but don’t be disappointed if their next decision is to change that old motto to “Clouds and Thunderstorms on the Wet Curb and Gutter which Runs Past by Your Neighbor’s Front Yard,’’ (which is often the case with its current delivery system.)