What the Star Tribune is doing to its Jimmy Olsens

It looks like all the young talent at the Star Tribune has been put on probation -- indefinitely! For a union-paper about to enter contract negotiations, that's a clear sign that Avista Co., the Star-Tribune's parent company, is going to use the youngsters as a bargaining chip in a blood-bath of a contract dispute that will surely see an end to the STRIB as we know it. These are tough times. Sigh. Sigh.

MinnPost / MPR media media critic David Brauer has been following the re-re-restructuring of the Star Tribune, which has been so dizzying over the past few years that he deserves a cigarette and a band-aid for paying so close attention. I mean, it's like watching rough sex, man.

Just click the headline above to find out about the push toward weekly suburban coverage, and then the push away from it in favor of folding coverage of the 'burbs into the zoned daily editions, and now back toward the weekly model. Jeez criminy!

At least the Strib is honest about the fact that this is advertiser-driven. Advertisers apparently prefer being associated with a once-a-week insert that was dotted with news than with a daily package that was sparse on it.

Here's a little footnote to this advertiser-sponsored indecisiveness: The 7 or 8 20-something cub reporters who wrote for weeklies like "Strib South" and "Strib North" were folded into the newspaper (and the Minnesota Newspaper Guild / Communications Workers of America labor union) as the Strib went to daily zoning. Now, despite their AFL-CIO cards, they could all lose their jobs!

Here's why: These hard-working Jimmy Olsens were all treated as new employees and put on 3-month probation when the Strib began zoning their daily editions a couple of months ago, even though some had been with the paper for more than a year.

Well, those "three-month" probations are "over" but they just got extended ... to 9 months!

This is a bare-faced bargaining tool for parent corp. Avista Co. You're jerking your 20-something reporters around, and expecting loyalty to the paper and to the profession as the newbies mature into the profession? Ouch. Is Minnesota Public Radio hiring??