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In the past two weeks I have met with three new Somali sources. They have confirmed everything we have previously reported here about Omar’s back pages. I have in addition continued to meet with my original Somali sources. Their reliability has been proved many times over. Taken together, they have made the following points: • There is widespread fear of Omar in the community. They do not feel free to speak out publicly. They require assurance that I will keep their identity in confidence. • At a meeting with two of my three new sources last week, we spotted Hirsi...

Suppose that there was strong circumstantial evidence that former Congresswoman Michelle Bachman had married her brother in order to fraudulently get him into the United States from Denmark. That she later filed a mysterious divorce petition claiming (under penalty of perjury) that she had no idea of his whereabouts. Even though he is on Twitter and Facebook under his own name. And suppose she used campaign money to pay her lawyers for what many believe was for a divorce as well as for unauthorized travel. Now suppose that she reportedly filed two years of joint tax returns with a man...

The Star Tribune informed an unspecified number of former employees from among a group of 29 who left the company last summer and fall that they might not get their full severance allotments because of the company’s Jan. 15 bankruptcy. An additional 14 employees who began receiving continuous severance payments before July 14 will have to put in bankruptcy claims as creditors to receive any remaining money they are owed. Separately, 42 more newsroom and other employees who left this month got full severance, either through lump-sum payments or continuous payments, under a company-requested motion that was approved by a...

Nearly a dozen Star Tribune employees who took the company's buyout money learned last night that their five-figure checks will bounce if cashed. Mike Bucsko, executive officer of the newsroom's Newspaper Guild, says company officials told between nine and 11 Stribbers that "their checks were not going to be honored. They're not going to go through." It's a nightmare scenario for workers who gave up their jobs for a lump sum that could now be a lump of coal. Last year, bought-out Tribune Co. workers found promissory notes turned into unsecured bankruptcy claims after the Chicago Tribune parent filed Chapter...

The Star Tribune newspaper has stopped making payments to its senior creditors, the chairman of the company said Tuesday. The decision to skip a $9 million quarterly payment on its $432 million debt allows the newspaper to conserve cash while attempting to restructure, said company Chairman Christopher Harte. All options, including a bankruptcy filing, are on the table as the newspaper and its advisers negotiate with the paper’s lenders. “We are looking at an incredibly wide range of options, but nothing’s imminent,” said Harte. The newspaper still makes money, Harte added, and he doesn’t expect the missed payment to affect...

Recommend to a friend Print Submit a Comment Strib tells AP: we're canceling It’s hard to imagine: the Star Tribune without the Associated Press. But that’s what could happen in 2010; the region’s biggest news source recently sent the nation’s most prominent wire service the required two years' cancellation notice, an AP spokesman confirms. If a split comes to pass, Strib readers will notice changes from the biggest international headlines to the smallest sports agate type. Just this morning, I counted at least 18 AP stories or photos in the Strib’s news sections; a wire-service credit was attached nearly all...

Star Tribune Co. declined to make a quarterly interest payment Monday to the holders of $96 million in second-tier debt that Avista Capital Partners raised to finance its acquisition of the news company last spring. But Chris Harte, chief executive of the Star Tribune, said in an interview that a lending consortium that holds senior debt of nearly $400 million was paid Monday. The Star Tribune has sufficient cash to make the payment to the "second-lien" debt holders, Harte said, but chose not to as the company works to complete a debt-restructuring plan with its senior creditors and works internally...

June 2, 2008 -- The beleaguered Minneapolis Star Tribune has asked creditors to delay its debt payments for six months while it cuts costs and tries to rescue its ailing balance sheet. But "The Strib," as it is known locally, is meeting resistance from creditors that want the owners to inject $50 million of new equity into the company before granting any concessions, sources said. Avista Capital Partners, the New York private-equity firm that bought The Strib for $530 million about 15 months ago, recently hired the Blackstone Group to negotiate with creditors. Requesting such a delay, known as forbearance,...

Those pesky conservative suburbanites and their market forces! They'll be the ruin of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, bellows Anonymous. Hugh Hewitt and Ed Morrissey have taken on the unattributed complaints of a self-described Star-Tribune ("Strib") veteran, who laments that his beloved paper is becoming a right-wing shill for, gasp, hiring a token conservative opinion columnist.: The Rake, a local alternative newspaper here in the Twin Cities, published an interesting cri de coeur from "one Strib veteran" about the direction of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The anonymous attribution wears thin in the first line of the quote: As one Strib veteran tells the...

Staffs gutted. Secrets stolen. A traitorous publisher forced to defend his actions in court. The future has never looked bleaker for the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press. by CP Staff Taking the stand in Judge David Higgs's courtroom, Par Ridder couldn't have looked more like a rich boarding-school kid. The 38-year-old publishing scion was decked out in country-club navy blue with a haircut that was square in every sense of the word. His counterpart, MediaNews CEO William Dean Singleton, a self-made media mogul from Graham, Texas, cracked wise with reporters in the gallery outside the courtroom. Shuffling on legs...

The publishers of the state's two largest newspapers are sparring over senior executives, salary data and a laptop computer. The squabbling includes a threatened lawsuit from the publisher of the St. Paul Pioneer Press over Star Tribune Publisher Par Ridder's decision to hire away a senior advertising executive from the St. Paul paper. The employee, Jennifer Parratt, ran the Pioneer Press' niche publications unit before coming to work for the Star Tribune this week. The interim publisher of the Pioneer Press, Fred Mott, said Parratt had a noncompete clause in her contract that prohibits her from working for a competitor...

The Star Tribune is looking for a new publisher. Keith Moyer announced Friday that he was stepping down from that position which he had held for six years. Moyer said that it was a "tough" decision to leave the Star Tribune and that his departure is in no way related to the newspaper's sale to Avista Capital Partners. "I say this unequivocally: I haven't been fired. Nor have I been asked to leave," Moyer said as he spoke to employees Friday morning. "I am not leaving because of the change of ownership. I have decided this is a perfect time...

...This likely comes as a surprise to each of you," Publisher Keith Moyer acknowledged during a late-afternoon staff meeting. "These are indeed challenging times for newspapers, especially larger ones, such as ours," Moyer said. Speaking to the Star Tribune staff Tuesday, an Avista executive said the firm was drawn to the Star Tribune by its dominant market share in the Twin Cities. The Star Tribune, which has been in operation under different names and owners for nearly 140 years, had 40 percent of the Twin Cities advertising market in the third quarter. "I'm here today because my partners at Avista...

McClatchy Co. said it plans to sell the Star Tribune of Minneapolis to a private-equity firm for $530 million, in a move to reduce debt. McClatchy said it decided to sell the newspaper to Avista Capital Partners through a private bidding process "after a strategic reevaluation of its portfolio of holdings" following McClatchy's purchase of Knight Ridder earlier this year. McClatchy said it expects a future cash tax benefit equal to about $160 million related to the sale, putting total cash proceeds at about $690 million. McClatchy purchased the Star Tribune from Cowles Media in 1998 for a total of...

"...Forget neoconservative dreams of making Iraq a democratic showplace that could change the political culture of the Middle East. Forget Bush's insistence that the "terrorists" in Iraq must be defeated. Forget creation of a single, strong Iraqi government in which Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds participate. The Iraqis don't want that and, truth be told, neither do Iraq's neighbors. The best hope now is for a confederation of semiautonomous states in Iraq -- Shiite, Kurd and Sunni -- among which oil revenues, mostly from Shiite regions, are forcibly shared. Who's going to do the forcing? Iraq's neighbors must do most of...

Over the weekend, we had an opportunity to interview Rochelle Olson from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who wrote a rather amazing article about the Republican candidate for Minnesota's Fifth Congressional District, Alan Fine, a little over a week ago. The interview exposed the thinking behind the editorial decisions of the local media, in the stories they cover and the stories they do not, and the facts they decide to publish and those they do not. We'll come back to that story in a moment. Today's Front Page Magazine article provides an example of the sins of omission in the local...

Stop us if you're heard this one before: A conservative talk-show host believes the media is guilty of liberal bias. That's pretty much the operating philosophy behind all right-wing radio. But California-based talk-show host and blog evangelist Hugh Hewitt has become obsessed with one specific mainstream-media outlet: the Star Tribune. "The worst major newspaper in terms of bias and chronic inaccuracy and axe-grinding is of course the Los Angeles Times," Hewitt wrote on his blog last week. "But among the second tier papers, the Minneapolis Star Tribune is as rotten a combination of no-talent tenured editorialists, biased reporters, and make-it-up-pollsters...