Stephen Regenold is a Minneapolis writer whose Ultrafit column in the StarTribune is one of our most important regional bully pulpits for cycling and a physically active lifestyle. I commend him for his attention to cycling not only as a sport but also as a means of transportation - even in Minnesota in the winter. His column a few months ago on winter cycling is very informative, as is an accompanying video.

I also appreciated his March 19 column, “A large fella on a bike,” which concerned Scott Cutshall, who has lost nearly three hundred pounds after taking up cycling - his only real option for exercise when he weighed over 500 pounds, he and Regenold say. Cutshall eventually moved from New Jersey to Minneapolis so that he and his family could “embrace the cycling lifestyle,” he said. He was drawn to Minneapolis at first because it is home to the man who built his custom-made bike: Bob Brown, of Bob Brown Cycles. See Scott Cutshall’s impressive blog, Large Fella on a Bike, and hear him speak eloquently of his journey in an audio slideshow.

Regenold’s column is just one example of the StarTribune’s praiseworthy coverage of cycling and transportation in general. Regenold also writes on outdoor gear for a wide variety of publications; see his web site, thegearjunkie.com.

The weekend before last I saw Northfield News publisher and editor Sam Gett at our church. I recognized him from his photo in the paper and I introduced myself. We talked for quite a while about Northfield, the newspaper business, and local efforts to promote biking and walking. I learned that Sam’s wife has been a diabetes educator, so he already knew about the toll that physical inactivity can take on health.

I was delighted to find a few days later that Sam addressed the topic of health and physical activity with gusto in his column, titled “Let’s develop a healthy city.” Here’s an excerpt: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been following the new Minnesota Public Radio show The Loop as it seeks to become a full-fledged program. Host Jeff Horwich and staff member Sanden Totten manage to create radio that is subsantive without being too heavy - a difficult thing to pull off.

I haven’t been able to attend any of the show’s creative gatherings recently, nor have I been able to go to the live productions. However, I did recently submit a short essay about being a work-at-home and stay-at-home dad for its recent show on work life. It’s entitled “I’m a Lucky Guy.” The essay didn’t get put on the show, but they’ve included it on the show’s web page along with other submissions. Scroll down the page to see it.

I recommend this beautifully written essay on the recently deceased celebrity. I particularly liked these words on the two Annas, younger Playboy centerfold and older reality-show actress:

what’s striking is how in these two incarnations she traveled light years from unattainable fantasy to attainable mope, snaring wildly different audiences in each orbit. Is there any other such journey in cheesecake history? I imagine neither crowd liked the “other” Anna, particularly not the sweaty strict constructionists who’d rebel at the idea of their fantasy amazon going post-modern schlub.

I love the image and sound of “sweaty strict constructionists.”

In writing the previous entry I was delighted to find that the New York Times has an option for permanent links to its articles - that is, links or “permalinks” that do not expire or require the user to access a restricted archive. This is something I’ve wanted from newspapers, and according to The Next Net, the Times started doing so at the end of last year (2006). With Times articles, click on “Share” near the beginning or top of the article on that page (on the right), then “Permalink,” and you’ll have the link you want. The Times even has this cool “link generator” for finding permalinks to its articles.

From what I can tell, the StarTribune, the principal newspaper here in the Upper Midwest, does not have permalinks for its articles. For example, when I wrote about a biofuels study in an entry a few weeks ago, I linked to a Dec. 7 StarTribune article on biofuels. When I click on the link for the latter now, I get this “file not found” message: Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago, Minnesota Public Radio began asking listeners to help contribute ideas to a new show that they planned called The Loop. I answered the call, posted some ideas on the Loop web site, and went to a couple of meetings in St. Paul. I enjoyed meeting MPR reporter and Loop host Jeff Horwich, whom I believe is now focusing on The Loop, and producer/web master Andrew Haeg.

The show is now on monthly on Friday nights at nine and is recorded in front of a live audience. The last show (which I was not involved in) focused on crime and it contained humor (including satire of local news), personal commentary, interviews, and songs. It reminded me a bit of “This American Life” because of the way it allows people to tell their stories. At the same time, its variety show quality makes it a little bit like “A Prairie Home Companion.” It will be nice to see how the show evolves. Regardless of its outcome, host Jeff Horwich appears to have a bright future in radio and perhaps beyond.

From time to time I’ll revise the list of links that appears on the right side of the Northern Letter homepage. No list of Upper Midwest-related links on this page can be comprehensive, and mine will continue to reflect my own idiosyncratic outlook. That said, I’ll try to keep the list relevant to topics that appear frequently in this column, including regional geography, literature, weather, media, and politics. What follows are some comments on links I’ve added today.

MNspeak.com was voted best blog of the year by Mpls St. Paul Magazine, although it seems like much more than a blog to me. It’s an innovative website that covers Twin Cities culture and media. (Should it be called TCspeak.com?) One highlight of the site is its aggregator, which “collects posts from 200 locally-authored blogs and media sources” (including this column-slash-blog). It’s a handy way to organize the regional blogosphere, and there’s even a geographical view. Also interesting are the site’s “phlogs,” or phone logs–audio comments that participants add via phone. Mnspeak.com claims to be the first place on the Internet to host a phlog. See the upper right of the MNspeak.com homepage to find the current phlog. Finally, check out Rex Sorgatz’s April 2005 post on the founding of MNspeak.com for more about this cool website.

The academic in me is encouraged by the existence of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And the weather nut in me loves Minnesota meterologist Paul Douglas—both his writing and his broadcasting. See his Star Tribune column and his WCCO-TV Weather Notes blog for his take on the latest regional weather and more. His more occasional personal blog, Weather Trends and Technology, is excellent and frequently describes the scientific evidence for global warming. It’s got nice pictures too.

I grew up in a newspaper-reading family. Every day began with a perusal of the paper. Sitting at breakfast, we were each absorbed in our own section, swapping them as necessary. On Sunday mornings the paper would get strewn around the living room floor. When we traveled, we enjoyed reading the local paper wherever we were staying.

For a time we even got two newspapers, one in the morning, the Minneapolis Tribune, and one in the evening, the Minneapolis Star (both published by the same company, Cowles). But mostly I remember reading the Tribune in the morning, retrieved from the plastic tube beneath the mailbox.

Newspaper reading therefore became a habit. Following the news, opinion, sports, and comics just seemed like part of life.

Newspapers have changed since I was a kid in the 1970’s. Some of the more obvious changes include the use of less text and more graphics and photos, the addition of color, and the overall shrinking of the page size.

The names and ownership of the local papers changed too. The Star and Tribune were combined into the Minneapolis Star and Tribune in 1982. Then, in 1987, the paper became the Star Tribune, Newspaper of the Twin Cities. In 1998 Cowles sold the paper to the McClatchy Corporation, publisher of the Sacramento Bee. On the other side of town, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch, published by Knight-Ridder, became simply the Pioneer Press in 1990.

Of course, newspapers are also becoming less of a habit as people increasingly rely on television and online news sources–many of the latter being the web sites of newspapers. As a result, the circulation of printed newspapers is declining. In early May National Public Radio aired a story about declining newspaper circulation in the United States. Their online article led me to the web site of the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), which has a list of the top 150 newspapers in the United States, by circulation. (There are some discrepancies between the NPR and ABC lists, for some reason.)

The Star Tribune is ranked 14th in the nation by ABC at a Sunday circulation of 655,000, about 16,000 less than the previous year–which seems like a large drop. Among the top 20 newspapers, only the New York Times and New York Daily News increased their circulation between 2004 and 2005.

Is it inevitable that we move beyond the costly, resource-intensive distribution of the printed newspaper? Why kill all those trees just to deliver the news?

I will admit to being attached to print, probably more so than younger people. I worry about losing easy access to a diversity of opinion and news. When you scan the sections and headlines of a newspaper, you get a wide swath of news. When you spread out the editorial and opinion pages of a good newspaper, you get a large “screen” containing editorials, letters, and opinions from all parts of the political spectrum. When you look at the opinion page of a newspaper like the Star Tribune, you’re likely to see George F. Will alongside Thomas Friedman, Molly Ivins sharing the same page with David Brooks. If newspapers die, will we only read the opinions similar to our own, the ones that are most comfortable to read? Will we each go to web sites that have been crafted for our own peculiar niche of opinions? Has the change already occurred?

My fears about a balkanization of the news-consuming public may be unfounded. There may still be a similar number of people who try to read a wide range of news and opinion–even opinion that challenges their own biases–as compared to the past. Online news is cheaper to distribute, so theoretically high-quality news sources could be distributed at a lower cost, making them accessible to more people–perhaps even free. Of course, getting online access requires some kind of device and connection in order to do so–neither of which are particularly cheap. We shall see what the future brings.

More on National and Regional Newspaper Circulation

The ABC ranking of the Star Tribune as the 14th largest newspaper in the country are slightly ahead of what one would expect given size of the population, particularly given the fact that many of the largest newspapers are national papers (such as USA Today, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal). The Star Tribune has a higher circulation than the San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution–papers that are in larger metropolitan areas. According to the Census Bureau, the Twin Cities metropolitan area is the 16th largest metropolitan area in the country by population, at about 3 million people. For comparison, the largest, New York, is 18 million. Chicago, the capital of the Midwest, is the third largest at nine million. Atlanta, the capital of the South, is 11th at 4.2 million. USA Today, by the way, has by far the largest circulation of any newspaper in the nation.

The Upper Midwestern papers in the top 150, with their national ranking and circulation, are below:

14. Star Tribune (Twin Cities) (655, 198)
26. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (411, 749)
48. Pioneer Press (Twin Cities) (247, 495)
50. Des Moines Register (239, 367)
86. Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, WI) (148, 292)
144. Green Bay Press-Gazette (82, 379)

Last week I wrote about my disappointment with Twin Cities commercial radio in my youth. Although I learned about much new music on local radio during my teenage years in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, there was still more new music that never got any airtime. Years later, when I realized what I’d missed, I saw that my feelings were captured well by Elvis Costello in his 1978 song “Radio, Radio”: “The radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools / tryin’ to anaesthetize the way that you feel.” Of course, I had to wait years to hear that song too.

The new generation should have less trouble exploring a wider range of music via the radio. That’s because 89.3 The Current (KCMP), a new station owned by Minnesota Public Radio, has been operating since January 24 of this year.

Locals will likely know that The Current replaces classical music station WCAL, owned by St. Olaf College. The college sold it to MPR, which changed the format to an eclectic mix of music. The sale angered many devoted WCAL listeners and created some controversy.

I was more sanguine about the station’s change. I figured I’d like the new format, and I could still listen to classical music on MPR’s classical station, KSJN. It turns out, though, that reception of KSJN isn’t all that clear here in my town of Northfield, hometown of the former WCAL and The Current.

It’s a good thing, therefore, that I’ve been impressed by The Current. The music is amazingly varied, mixing lots of brand new stuff with vintage music that most commercial stations wouldn’t play. I’ve heard Hank Williams, Chet Baker, and Johnny Cash alongside Beck and the Chemical Brothers. The focus is more on new music, and they play lots of stuff from performers I’ve never heard of, like the Mountain Goats, which is fine by me. They’re also good about playing lots of local music.

The Current reminds me of WXPN, another non-profit, “listener-supported” radio station. WXPN broadcasts out of Philadelphia, and I used to listen to it when I lived in New Jersey. WXPN introduced me to the music of Richard Thompson, Beth Orton, Richard Ashcroft, and many others, and it allowed me to keep up with bands such as The Jayhawks. I expect The Current will bring me more of the same.

Apparently the station is doing pretty well. The Arbitron ratings of listeners age 18 to 34 show The Current ranked 11th in the Twin Cities, higher than its closest competitor in the “adult album alternative” format, Drive 105. Remember, though, that there really isn’t a format for The Current. And don’t forget, there are no commercials.

On a Daily Show January 25, correspondent Rob Corddry interviewed a local official in downtown St. Paul’s Rice Park. Corddry concluded the segment by an attempt at a joke: he began shouting about the cold weather, yelling, “Why would anyone in their right mind live here? It’s f—— cold!” As Corddry went on, the official–who was taken aback, as most Daily Show interviewees are–gave a stock regional reply that was probably missed by most viewers as Corddry continued his rant: “It keeps the riff-raff out.”

Corddry’s comment was similar to one uttered by Liam Gallagher, the snide frontman for the British band Oasis, at a concert I attended at Northrop Auditorium in Minneapolis in the late nineties. It was a cold winter night, and, though it was warm inside, apparently Mr. Gallagher didn’t like the weather. “Why the f— do you people live here?” he asked in between songs. I didn’t know how to take the comment–as a punk-rock insult hurled from the stage and part of the show, or as the comment of an insensitive, ignorant boob? I’ve always though of it as more of the latter, and I’ve never liked Oasis much since then. Certainly I’ve never bought another Oasis recording.