Amid the crush of news, good, bad, horrifying and ridiculous, it is easy to shuffle past a piece from a largely unknown source burrowing into the bureaucracy of a respected state icon. But anyone who values serious, thorough reporting owes it to themselves to read all of Jay Boller’s exploration of the inner functioning of Minnesota Public Radio, (i.e. AMPG). If only because his story is the only thing like it produced in the past half dozen years.
Boller is a co-founder of an on-line local news start-up called “The Racket”, which more or less created itself from writers laid off at City Pages when the Star Tribune shut it down a year ago. The Strib owning City Pages, the last remnant of the Twin Cities’ once robust alternative press, was always problematic in that when functioning properly the alternative press regularly surveilled the Strib and other legacy media operations and reported on their weaknesses and failures. Failings with important consequences for their audiences.
Boller’s MPR story is remarkable on several levels, and I say that as someone once in the business of covering local media. (The fact my employer was far, far more interested in celebrity gossip is a story running on a separate but parallel track.)
There was far less of that kind of coverage when the Strib was paying the salaries of people like Boller, and Mike Mullen, to name one other whose by-line I miss. And there was none at all once they were cut loose.
I have railed on before about the way MPR … i.e. Minnesota Public Radio … was arguably the least transparent and forthcoming of any local media operation I had to deal with. (In later years, the Star Tribune managed to equal MPR in opacity.) The place was a vault, by design and edict .. as best I and anyone else who approached could ever tell. Feel free to tweet David Brauer and Adam Platt to see how much their experiences covering MPR differ from mine.
The comparison of conversations with any level of MPR and say one of the local TV stations was always startling. Most reporters and many managers enjoyed or at least tolerated the standard thrust and parry, shuck and jive of a fellow reporter digging into their business. Such people are proudly combative and hardly defenseless. But the inescapable impression from interacting with MPR, at any level for any reason, was that employees there were, to put it bluntly but not necessarily hyperbolically — fearful of saying … anything.
The essence of Boller’s piece is that a lot of changfe and attrition has been going on at MPR this past couple years and now, with so many newsroom casualties, some are willing to talk.
It’s a solid story with solid numbers. He and his sources focus on a highly-corporatized, boardroom-to-boardroom focused financial strategy rewarding executives at frankly absurd levels, for a public media operation, while ignoring commensurate “compensation” for news staff and women in particular, or so Boller’s sources argue.
The presence of Strib owner Glen Taylor’s daughter as MPR’s CEO naturally invites speculation as to why no one at the Strib has ever produced a story even close to Boller’s aggression.
Reading Boller, my spit-take moment was the $580,000 annual “compensation” for one high(er) ranking MPR executive. That character was memorable for once inviting me over for a friendly get-to-know-you coffee, a routine enough encounter with local TV and radio managers, but previously unheard of by anyone at MPR.
The chat was friendly and professional. But weeks later, when I naively assumed he would be open to commenting on the next MPR story I was working on, he recoiled, pleading that I needed to “protect” him. And then he was gone … into the familiar MPR ghost zone, never to be heard from again.
“Protect” him from who, for chrissake? And for what?
It wasn’t like I was asking him to confirm management had wheeled in hookers and blow for the MPR Christmas party. I forget the specific story, but it was standard management decision stuff. The kind of thing I could reliably get Stanley Hubbard on the phone to comment on. And Stanley doesn’t run a public company.
That all said, the one area I encourage Boller — or anyone — to look at more closely is the pervasive claim of gender discrimination at MPR. His sources paint a picture of systemic “old boy” culture and under-compensation for women. But given MPR’s history of women in news room management, on their news reporting staff and the near complete evolution from male to female jocks at The Current, I’d like a little more certainty supporting that charge.
Simultaneous with digesting Boller’s piece I came across this on the site of one of my favorite bloggers, Kevin Drum, formerly of Mother Jones.
Feeding off an Intercept piece on the internecine flight within progressive, non-profit organizations, Drum writes, “The widespread revolt of young staffers, especially in the nonprofit space, is the subject of endless talk within the progressive movement, but you’d never know it on the outside because it’s been written about only in bits and pieces that never quite add up to a full story.”
Adding, “The clash [Ryan] Grim describes between workers and management has been brewing for a while—since the election of Donald Trump, at least—but took off in earnest only after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Staffers at progressive nonprofits, in a game of follow the leader, all began issuing demands, writing manifestos, and declaring that the organizations they worked for were hopelessly misogynistic, classist, white supremacist, and, inevitably, ‘unsafe’.”
Point being: it’s a perspective on a kind of woke herd mentality, worth apply to and testing on at least one level of the MPR situation described by Boller.
Finally, here’s a link to The Racket … and your opportunity to be a … wait for it MPR fans … subscribing member. I haven’t checked their 990s, but I doubt Boller or anyone else over there is pulling down $580,000 in public “compensation.”
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