New Star Tribune owner's resume: off-shore oil drilling and direct mail

Strib columnist Nick Coleman today has the best analysis I've seen so far of the Star Tribune sale to the Avista Corp., whose major holdings include nothing in newspapers, but plenty in the area of direct mail and off-shore oil drilling:

http://www.startribune.com/357/story/903516.html

I used to work for an Avista-like company that also had no knowledge of the newspaper field, and no interest in learning. It was called Fidelity. And it owned a chain of about 100 weekly newspapers, where I was a lowly cub reporter.

As reporters and editors began to quit, Fidelity decided not to hire any staff to take their place. Instead, under-staffed papers would borrow more and more articles from the neighboring towns. The result was laughable at best, but to longtime readers it was straight out offensive.

Just imagine opening up the "Bloomington Weekly News" and finding only coverage of St. Paul and Edina!

It got to the point where the weekly papers were cobbled together by one reporter and one editor. And then just an editor. And then by no regular staff at all, with the task of laying out articles performed by whomever in the shared newsroom happened to have a hand free.

Of course, from Fidelity's perspective, the staff was completely expendable. After all, it's advertisements that pay the bills. So why not get rid of content entirely and just fill the paper with ads? After all, everyone loves waking up in the morning to a cup of coffee and the weekly supermarket shopper. Am I right?

Of course not.

Suffice it to say, Fidelity eventually got out of the newspaper business. Let's hope Avista is a quicker study.