New Internet Venture

Hey guys.

What have you been up to? Not much has been going on over here. Same old, same old. Since I'm not publishing the Star Tribune or Pioneer Press anymore, I've been looking for things to do. I can only spend so much time helping my wife redecorate our house or work on my screenplay.

My buddy Kevin and I were talking over beers the other day and he said I needed to get back in the game. We were talking about my screenplay, The Deadline, and he said a screenplay was fine and everything, but I need to get back in the saddle and do what I love and that's business, mostly publishing. And I think Kev is right. Why not try to get back into publishing?

But you know what I've learned from this blog? Paper publishing is the past. The internet is the future. You can say whatever you want and it doesn't matter. You can even just take the articles that other people write, put them on your web blog and act like you're reporting, especially with politics. Kevin thinks I should start my own internet paper and do the publishing for that. Maybe I will, who knows. I just need to find something to do with my free time.

"The Deadline"

With everything that I've got to do as Publisher I haven't had time to tell you about some new developments with my screenplay.

First off, I've come up with a title. "The Deadline". It's like you can just picture someone saying at the end of the preview, "we have to make the deadline!" And then it just cuts to a black screen. When I came up with the title I told it to one of my buddies. He said, "Dude, there's got to be a movie called Deadline already." I hadn't thought about that because the name is so good. I had my secretary look it up on the internet and yeah there's a bunch of movies called Deadline. But it's cool because I added "the" in front of the title to set aside the name of my screenplay from the other Deadlines.

I'm also wondering if part of the film should be set in Europe. Right now I don't really have it set anywhere except a really gritty city that takes a strong character to survive, especially in the journalism business.

And to tell you the truth, I was thinking about dropping Elle MacPherson from the project. I found out that she's kind of old to be a lead and I hadn't seen a picture of her lately. But then my buddy sent this picture of her to me and she's still smoking hot. Having an older actress play Emily Scott will also give the movie some drama cred.

More Truth from the Trial

I found some more information on my trial in the media. No, not local media or internet of course! They're too busy with sex offenders and murders and Karl Rove. It's from Editor & Publisher, where they actually report accurate information on publishers.

At my trial, OhSang Kwon, one of the founding partners behind Avista gave a deposition. You should read the excerpt. Kwon basically says that I let him know that in getting ready to move from Saint Paul that I found some old non-compete agreements in my secretary's desk.

You know how when you move you find stuff you forgot you had? That's what these papers were like. My secretary and I talked about shredding them. That way they wouldn't be a big deal. But first I checked with Kwon to see if he thought they were worth saving. He didn't know and told me to ask my lawyer. And they weren't a big deal until we got sued by that ass Singleton.

The other thing about the non-competes is that they don't really matter anyway. I'm the publisher and could void them if I wanted. Which I did.

Kwon also mentions that he wishes I didn't take those spreadsheets with me when I came over. Believe me, me too. He even says that I wish I didn't. He also said that nothing was done that was illegal. Take that Singleton.

The Truth Will Set You Free

The truth is finally making its way out to the media about my trial. Well, some of the media. I've checked through the local papers and looked on the internet hack sites, but no one seems to care that transcripts with important points from my trial are now out there.

Let me tell you a little about publishing. It's not like being the editor. Editors just sit in their offices all day and say "this story will get traction" or "that angle won't work, find another one". Every once and a while editors will also get a story idea and tell a reporter to go out and report on it. Then the editors check in with each other and see how the paper turned out. Big deal.

It's not like that for publishers and managers. They have to direct everything that's happening for their paper. They have to know how their business is doing, whether they are succeeding, getting people to purchase their paper. They have to also know their market, like how other papers are doing. And not just papers, but other places advertisers are placing ads.

If you read my testimony, you'll see that management at newspapers get information on competing papers in their markets. They do this because a lot of those papers don't have similar sized competition in their area, so it's tough to set benchmarks to measure success. You can't know how successful you are or aren't unless you have a way to measure. You also can't measure performance.

Take Tiger for example. If Tiger didn't play with any other golfers, he wouldn't know if he was good or not. But when he beats everyone for the PGA Championship, he knows and everyone else knows how awesome he is at golf. And playing with other pro players on different courses, he can also see where his game needs improvement.

It's the same with publishing. We need to know how we're doing. And some of us are like Tiger. We're good, but we still care about improving our game. If our paper is losing money from not managing the labor line, we need to work on that part of game. But we can't work on it unless we know it's a problem.

Here's a question for you. If it's okay to get information for benchmarks on papers in totally different parts of the Midwest, why wouldn't it be okay to use the information you compiled yourself for the last several years at a paper that's in the same city? It's like Tiger from this year playing against Tiger from a few years ago!

Hopefully more of the trial will make its way out. It's helpful to clear up the misconceptions people have on what really happened.

(And congratulations on the PGA Championship, Tiger.)

Building A Championship Team

It wasn't easy to hear about KG getting traded. What in the world are those front office folks thinking, I thought. But I've thought about it a little more. And after some thinking, sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do, either to win a championship or in the case of the T-Wolves to build a championship team.

It's the same with being running a newspaper. Yeah, there are people who've been on your team for a long time. People that the fans really like. Faces of the franchise. But sometimes it doesn't work out with those players and you've got to let them go. Remember J.R. Rider? Lots of people had J.R. Rider jerseys on at the games back when he was playing. But Rider wasn't helping the team win and the team got rid of him. For the good of the team. And it turns out Rider was just a thug and it was the right move.

The Wolves have had some good players and some really good players and even a great player with Garnett. And the Star Tribune has had some good people work for it. But if the paper is going to be a championship paper, the front office will have to make some hard moves.

We've already traded some of our key players. And it helped. We're already a better team than when we were two years ago. But we're not great. And we want a great team. So we're going to have to let more people go to help the team become a championship team.

Glen Taylor didn't like to see KG go and I don't like that more people are going to go from the Star Tribune. The biased coverage against us is almost enough to never let anyone go ever again. This next round will probably be another shit storm of people saying that the sky is falling without even looking at our bottom line. But that comes with any business, whether it's publishing or coaching a basketball team.

I'll miss you, Kev. But we can catch up after the Wolves make it to the West Coast Finals next year.

"The Guild does not get to decide who is publisher of the Star Tribune."

That's what Harte had to tell the Reporter's Guild yesterday. I think they forget that. Harte also reminded them of something else, this:

"Star Tribune Chairman Chris Harte said the newspaper's owner, Avista Capital Partners, has full confidence in Ridder."

The story that has those quotes also says the Guild represents about 300 reporters and other people who work at papers. We'll see how many it represents after tomorrow's vote and after Avista keeps me as the Publisher. The report even points out that I just took the spreadsheets from the Pioneer Press so I could remake them at the Star Tribune. It's because they're complex spreadsheets that would be hard to remake. But that's I guess not what the reporters want to think.

Back Fire

Lambert's attack column today back fired on him.

Look at what he says I did at the Pioneer Press: "reorganized", "right-sized", and cut overhead costs on the "labor line". Exactly. Those words might sound too professional to Lambert, but it's the job of a publisher to captain the company's ship. Being a captain means making sure the ship sails as well as it can. Being a captain means sometimes you have to cut some crew. Those thing are not easy to do, but that's why it's important to have a good captain.

It's also not easy to have your ship change owners. If your paper gets new ownership, it takes more effort to direct your crew. It should be obvious that's why I received the extra $600,000 payment. It's for, as my contract says, the sale of the company and the "adverse effects" of the new management. It's for the extra effort of running the changed ship.

The status quo wasn't going to work for McClatchy. My management team and I had to tighten our belts and the ship's sails. That's why we pursued disciplinary action against reporters who had ethics violations and discipline issues like attending a Bruce Springsteen concert. Having reporters argue with management might seem like a good idea to Lambert, but insubordination to cutting costs and crew is not productive for a paper.

Earning My Salary

It's not easy being the manager of a major Minnesota paper. There's a lot of scrutiny. Reporters like to think they know everything about running a big business. They also like to report on me instead of reporting on the news.

Here's a blog report from the City Pages. It really an attack on me by reporter Mike Mosedale. He tells everyone how much I make, which is fine. I want people to know how much I make. But I also want people to know how hard it is to earn that much.

Working my way up from an account manager at the Washington Post to publisher in California to the publisher position at the Pioneer Press and then to the publisher position at the Star Tribune has not been easy. I didn't get the positions just because my dad is CEO and chairman of Knight Ridder, the company that owned and sold the Pioneer Press. It's because I've got experience, I'm from a publishing family, and I know how to publish a newspaper.

Making sure a major paper works as a business takes a lot of time and talent. And that's why I make as much as I do. Also, getting my start in newspaper advertising, I know about bringing in money to a newspaper. You've got to spend money to make money. And you've got to spend money on a good publisher to have a great paper.

That's what I'm building at the Star Tribune, a great paper.