Minnesota Lawyer Blog

You may have heard that Minnesota Lawyer is celebrating the Big 10... In fact, we're including a retrospective anniversary section with next Monday's paper.

We really hope you enjoy this special publication, because if Microsoft's CEO is right, the next 10 years will kill the printed page.

In an interview published today in the Washington Post, Steve Ballmer says the next decade will turn the world of media and communications upside down. He further delivers this prediction:

"There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form."

I have a feeling that paper will linger a bit longer. But even if Ballmer is correct, your beloved Minnesota Lawyer won't simply disappear. When our 20th anniversary rolls around, we'll just beam our special coverage directly into that chip embedded in your cerebral cortex.

That is, assuming anyone bothers to exist in meatspace at all.

Every now and then an editor gets to have real fun with a headline. For your amusement I have an example of such a headline for you. It was brought to my attention by Chuck Williams, editor of the American Bar Association's Supreme Court Preview. In this case, the source bears mentioning not only because I like to give credit where credit is due, but also because it is the only legal connection to a posting I am putting up strictly for your enjoyment.

The headline comes from an Associated Press article spotted in the Washington Post. The story is about individuals who cross a Korean river on a wire as they use a pole to keep their balance. The precarious practice is called skywalking; the people doing it cross alone without any assistance; and the name of the river is the Han.

Now you be the editor. What headline would you assign to that story?

To see what headline was actually published, click here.

If there can be said to be an upside to the devastation that has hit some of the local print media, it has been the tremendous spurt of online innovation that has resulted.

All sorts of fascinating electronic journalism ventures have cropped up. One of those is shuttering today -- The Daily Mole. Steve Perry, the site's founder, is joining the Minnesota Monitor, another online journalism venture.

The Daily Mole was full of interesting little tidbits about all sorts of topics. It also had the occasional serious piece, although nobody was going to confuse it with MinnPost. (Not a lot on the Daily Mole about wind turbines, for example.) I liked the site because it was a fun, quick read.

I look forward to seeing Steve's stuff at the Minnesota Monitor site. I also wonder whether the Star Tribune will move into The Daily Mole's offices now that the Strib's real estate is back on the market. It's tough to be a brick-and-mortar operation without the -- you know -- brick and mortar

Minnesota's seldom-tested shield law has taken a couple of interesting shots in recent weeks.

Earlier this month it was revealed that KMSP reporter Tom Lyden had two months of cell phone records seized by St. Paul police as part of an ongoing investigation into whether a Ramsey County sheriff's deputy leaked private data to Lyden. The data was later determined to be public, and the investigation was dropped after protests from First Amendment advocates.

Then, on Tuesday, the Minnesota Court of Appeals struck down a ruling ordering a reporter to give prosecutors unpublished notes from an interview with a man who shot two police officers before killing himself.

Every first-semester journalism school student is taught the importance of shield laws, but few reporters are ever called on to invoke the law in response to a request that they reveal their sources. Media members in Minnesota are fortunate to be covered by the Minnesota Free Flow of Information Act, which provides a greater level of protection for reporters by requiring that three strict standards are met before disclosure is compelled by the court. The fact that the two recent shield law squabbles went the way of media outlets should be a relief not only to journalists, but to everybody who values transparency and disclosure from government entities.

If you read Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman's column today, you might be under the misimpression that Court of Appeals Judge Christopher Dietzen is some sort of mafioso.

It's well known that Dietzen, who was recently appointed to the state Supreme Court, has conservative credentials and close ties to Gov. Tim Pawlenty, including serving as Pawlenty's legal counsel. In an apparent reference to this, Coleman refers to Dietzen as the governor's political consiglieri. Now that word can technically just mean a counsellor or advisor, but who doesn't think of "The Godfather" when they hear it? In fact, I found the following definition when I googled the word: "An adviser or counselor, especially to a capo or leader of an organized crime syndicate."

As far as I know at least, Dietzen has never delivered a horse's head to anyone's bedside or shot anybody at a toll booth. With decades of legal experience and three years on the Court of Appeals under his belt, Dietzen is well-qualified for the high court post. He is a political conservative (no surprise with a Republican governor doing the picking), but does not have a reputation as a radical as Coleman seems to imply.

The one point Coleman makes that I agree with is that judicial candidates in Minnesota should go through a mandatory merit-selection procedure rather than just be hand picked willy-nilly by the governor. While I believe that Dietzen is a worthy selection, the governor could have made any lawyer friend an appellate judge with the same ease that Caligula once made his favorite horse a Roman senator. Under our current system, the governor has absolute discretion in awarding appellate judgeships to lawyers. (Several governors in the past have chosen to use ad-hoc screening committees to vet appellate appointments, but this process has never been required.)

Both the Minnesota State Bar Association and the Quie Commission include in their proposals for revamping judicial elections in Minnesota a requirement that a merit-selection committee screen all candidates seeking appointments to the bench. Regardless of where we come out on judicial-election reform, I think that is one component of the proposals that ought to be adopted.

The much-touted (hyped?) MinnPost online news site debuted today at 11:00 a.m. The site is staffed by a number of veteran journalists -- many of whom are refugees of the newsroom "trimming" that has been occurring at the (once large) metro dailies.

So why are we mentioning the launch here on Minnesota Lawyer blog? Well, how could we not when the lead story of the just-launched new venture includes a photo of Minnesota State Bar Association President Brian Melendez (right). The story quotes Melendez wearing his other hat -- chair of the state's DFL.


The piece is entitled: "Right Now the D in DFL stands for debt." (Hmmm. Wonder what the "F" and "L" stand for then?) Former Star Tribune columnist Doug Grow wrote the story, which examines the financial situation of the DFL.

"How bad is it? Not nearly as bad as the rumor mill suggests," Melendez wrote in a memo quoted in Grow's story. "The Party's financial situation is cause for concern but not for alarm."

In the interest of balance, the article also says the GOP is struggling too. How about a follow-up story? I have a title to suggest: "Right Now the P in GOP stands for Pecuniary Problems." Oh wait, that wouldn't work. Never mind.

I saw Matt Lauer's exclusive interview last night with Idaho Senator Larry Craig on NBC. Well, I saw most of it, anyway. Unfortunately, it was on opposite the Red Sox's playoff game against the Indians, so I kept flicking back and forth. (The Sox lost, by the way. Uggh.)

Between channel hops, I was unable to come to a firm conclusion whether Craig did what he was charged with in a bathroom stall at the MSP airport bathroom (something of a "he said/ he said," I guess). But I must admit I found myself oddly amused by the name of the NBC show that directly followed the interview -- "The Biggest Loser."

Hmmmm. I will let you insert your own joke there.

I watched "60 Minutes" on CBS last night, which featured a variety of interesting stories, including an interview with the head of the Blackwater security company. (Why is it that the big controversies so often have "water" in them -- e.g. Watergate, Whitewater and now Blackwater?) If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd find some significance to this. But then again, I'd probably be all wet.

In any event, I did have one issue with last night's "60 Minutes" program. For the second week in a row, it was a special "extended 60 Minutes." How the heck can you extend "60 Minutes?" Doesn't it then become "75 Minutes" or whatever. But I had better stop now. I am starting to sound like that crotchety Andy Rooney.

Former Star Tribune media reporter Deborah Rybak -- whom we have blogged about here before -- has joined forces with Brian Lambert at the blog formerly known as Lambert to the Slaughter (see "Rybak to the Slaughter"). The header on the blog now reads: "Brian Lambert & Deborah Rybak To the Slaughter."

Rybak -- a well-respected veteran reporter -- will no doubt be an excellent addition to the blog, which is already a must read for those interested in the doings of the local media. However, I cannot help lamenting the havoc the name change wreaks on the whole "lamb to the slaughter" reference. It really gets my goat. I know. I know. That was really baaaaaaaad.

Woodbury attorney Bill Harper is about to get his 15 minutes of fame. Well, OK, it's actually more like an hour of TV network prime time devoted to a case which he is handling. Harper is representing the family of Teri Lee, who was murdered when her ex-boyfriend broke into her home and shot both her and her new boyfriend. The assailant was convicted on two counts of murder.

Lee's family is suing the company that installed the state-of-the-art security system on Lee's house. They allege she never had chance because the system was defective and provided no warning.

Minnesota Lawyer is running a story on the case in Monday's edition, but you may also want to catch Bill on TV. The show on which he will appear is NBC's Dateline, which airs locally Mondays on KARE-11 at 9:00 p.m.. The Minnesota case is currently scheduled to be shown this upcoming Monday.

We at Minnesota Lawyer try not to be prima donnas when we participate in panel discussions or other events in the legal community. However, that apparently cannot be said of every legal journalist.

Gale Beckerman over at the Columbia Journalism Review has an amusing piece today about New York Times Courts reporter Linda Greenhouse, whom Beckerman dubs the "queen bee of Supreme Court reporters." Greenhouse was to be one of several legal journalists on a panel discussing covering the high court. C-SPAN came to film the event, which was sponsored by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

But things got a little odd when Greenhouse arrived, according to Beckerman. When Greenhouse saw C-SPAN's lights and cameras, she reportedly "became infuriated."

According to Beckerman, Greenhouse told the organizer that she had come to speak to a “room of academics,” and “didn’t want to have to modulate [her] comments for a national audience." She then reportedly issued an ultimatum -- the cameras go or she does. (Greenhouse denies this, saying that she would have continued even if the camera crew had not left.)

In any event, since Greenhouse was a marquee participant in the panel, the organizer chose to placate her, and the poor C-SPAN camera crew was sent packing -- probably to cover some legislative subcommittee meeting somewhere.

I would encourage you to read Beckerman's full post. (See "The Greenhouse Effect.") It's an entertaining piece poking fun at the ego of a legal journalist. My personal assistant and I had a good laugh about it before I sent her off to fetch me another chilled bottle of Perrier.

We do not talk about our parent company much -- since, frankly, it would be a little self-serving to do so -- but Dolan Media, the Minneapolis-based company that owns locally Minnesota Lawyer, the St. Paul Legal Ledger and Finance and Commerce, is about to go public. Dolan Media was started right here in Minnesota in 1992 by Jim Dolan. Finance and Commerce was, in fact, Dolan Media's very first acquisition. The company now owns business and legal publications in a number of markets throughout the country.

The Star Tribune's Neal St. Anthony has a column on the Dolan Media IPO worth checking out, "Dolan Media IPO shaping up to be a doozy."

Don't expect to read much more on the IPO here, since I generally disfavor newspapers covering themselves (unless they are fighting a non-compete battle with each other, that is). Not to mention those pesky SEC regulations that limit what we can say. However, I did feel like we had to say something since you will undoubtedly be seeing a lot more about the Dolan Media IPO in the general media.

The Strib's Kate Parry has an interesting column this week: "Is anyone going into journalism anymore?" It's an upbeat piece about how the influx of a group of summer interns has brought revitalizing energy into the (so recently decimated) Strib newsroom.

It is difficult to give cheery advice to folks thinking about journalism as a career these days. The general circulation dailies continue to trim back staff faster than a shaggy dog sheds its hair. I was put into a tough spot not too long ago when one of my nieces told me she was interested as journalism as a potential career field. Do I tell her to go for it, or caution her to be wary? I settled for something in between. It's like a lot of things -- those who really love it and really want to do it shouldn't (and probably wouldn't) be dissuaded. Fortunately, my niece also loves the theater, so at least she has a solid fall back if that journalism idea doesn't pan out ....

Meanwhile, Brian Lambert over at the Rake has a recent column tracing all the benefits that Pioneer Press staffers are losing under the new regime ("Singleton to Pioneer Press: Bend Over.")

I have been following with some bemusement the court battle between the state's two largest dailies. Par Ridder's testimony can be summed up as follows: "Yes, I took confidential information from the Pioneer Press and spread it around the corporate offices of the Star Tribune. Oops! But, gosh, I really didn't mean to harm anybody."

Hmm. I would think it must be embarrassing for Par, 38, to have to pull out the babe-in-the-woods defense, you know, being publisher of the state's largest newspaper and all. But what do I know?

In any event, Brian Lambert on his blog at the Rake has been following the case very closely, and posted quite a bit of Par's testimony (See e.g. Par in Court: This is (Will Be) Expensive and Day 2: Par Takes the Stand.

Everyone in the local media knows that the place to go to get news on what's happening with at the Star Tribune is not the Strib's website, but on the Rake blog. Media watchdog Brian Lambert has been tenaciously covering the buyouts -- to the point where I'd be willing to bet that the Strib management wishes that he'd stop. In fact, the blog is turning out to be the one place Strib staffers can go to see if they still have a job.

I was getting my Rake fix yesterday, when I noticed something of interest to the legal community. Deborah Caulfield Rybak has decided to take a buyout and leave the Strib. As many in the legal community may recall, Rybak, among many other accomplishments, is one of the authors of "Smoked: The inside story of the Minnesota Tobacco Trial." She has also written for Minnesota Law and Politics, among other publications.

The Rake blog tells us that she was treated pretty abysmally in the process, which is detailed in "Rybak exits Star Tribune." The blog reports that right up until Friday's deadline for staffers to decide whether they would take the buyout, no one would tell Rybak what her status would be if she didn't. It's a pretty nasty piece of business and worth checking out. Ironically, Rybak provided a lot of the paper's coverage of the media. It may just be that Strib feels that with its scaling back of staff, along with that of its rival, the Pioneer Press, there will be nothing left of the local media worth covering. Unfortunately, that philosophy may be right.

The Star Tribune has another article about how it will be retooling its coverage to make it more local. For those not in the the know, those trying to save the general media on Wall Street (or at least those trying to squeeze larger margins out of it) have determined that the magic formula is something called "hyperlocalism" (although I have not heard the folks at the Strib actually use the dreaded "h" word yet).

Wikipedia defines it this way: The term "hyperlocal" is sometimes used to refer to news coverage of community-level events usually overlooked by mainstream media outlets. Of course, if more and more mainstream media outlets are now turning hyperlocal, the definition seems a little disingenuous and self-defeating -- but I will use it for want of a better one.

The hyperlocal trend/idea is why we keep hearing Strib management repeating -- as the editor reportedly did in a newsroom meeting yesterday -- that Bloomington, with about 84,000 residents, is one of the largest cities in the state -- yet there's no Bloomington reporter on staff.

I have seen mention in the Strib on several occasion now that there is no local daily Bloomington newspaper and that the Strib has no Bloomington bureau. Now I have nothing against Bloomington, but I sure am getting tired of hearing it used as an example. Why doesn't the Strib just open up a branch office near the Baby Gap in the Mall of America and be done with it?

A few weeks ago, I posited in a post ("A double standard?") whether their was any significance to the fact that the general media had intensely scrutinized issues involving Republican U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose's Office, but had virtually ignored issues at DFL Attorney General Lori Swanson's Office. I provocatively threw it out for comment whether their differing political affiliations may have played into the disparate media coverage. That post led to a lot of debate.

I was curious if things had changed at all after it was revealed on April 26 that there were indeed significant management issues at the AG's Office and that the employees there were battling to unionize. So I went through the Star Tribune's archives and pulled up all the articles or blog entries chronicling issues at the two offices from April 27 until today. Here is what I came up with:

Issues at AG’s Office
-- “DFL rift exposed in fight between AG’s Office, Union” (4/27)
-- “Swanson-AFSCME Dispute intensifies” (4/28)
-- “Hatch quits post in AG’s office” (5/2)
-- Nick Coleman: “Mad Mike made for one AG too many” (5/2)

Issues at U.S. Attorney’s Office
-- Nick Coleman: “We need to know the answers about Paulose’s assent” (4/27)
-- “Former U.S. attorney was on early fire list” (4/28)
--- Correction: Letter stating Paulose went to “tier four” law school incorrect; she went to Yale (5/4)
-- “Ellison seeks Justice Department documents on Heffelfinger, Paulose” (5/9)
-- The Big Question Blog: “Assistant U.S. attorneys to Paulose: Quit dissing us and clear our names” (5/9)
-- “Workers who left Paulose’s office protest remarks” (5/10)
-- Editorial: Minnesota still needs answers from Justice (5/11)
-- “Gonzales: Justice Department working with Paulose”* (5/11)
-- “Gonzales Addresses concerns about Paulose”* (5/11)

* Although these last two stories both appear on the Strib’s website, they appear to be different versions of the same story.

The thing that kind of struck me is not so much the difference in the number of mentions between Paulose and Swanson (although it is substantial), but the fact that the Strib coverage of the AG's Office goes completely blank after Hatch announced that he was quitting. I guess Strib readers are not really all that concerned where that leaves things or what is happening with the unionization attempt now that Hatch has left. And this is before the recently announced cuts in the size of their newsroom. What will coverage be like after? Sigh.

A fond farewell to the column of the Strib's James Lileks, who goes out in style today with a nice piece worth checking out: Daily Quirk: See you in the funny papers.

Ramsey County District Court Judge David Higgs disqualified Faegre & Benson from representing the Star Tribune it in its dispute with the St. Paul Pioneer Press over the departure of publisher Par Ridder.

Higgs based his order on the fact that Faegre's Denver office has represented the Denver Post, MediaNews Group Inc.'s flagship newspaper. MediaNew Group also controls the Pioneer Press, which the judge found created a conflict of interest. Higgs was unpersuaded by Faegre's argument that there was no conflict because the two lawyers who handled the work for the Denver Post were leaving the firm.

See "Judge: Law firm can't represent Star Tribune" for more coverage.

Ah yes, almost makes one feel sorry for the Faegre media law group. The newspaper battle of the century is shaping up, and they will have to read about in the press like the rest of us. While some might call this order a disqualification, I prefer to refer to it as an "involuntary buyout."