Is the Minneapolis Star Tribune a rag mag or a legitimate news source?
Less than two years after it was bought by a private equity group, the Star Tribune has filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Associated Press reports: Like many other newspapers, the Star Tribune has been dealing with declining print advertising. Since 2007, the Star Tribune has made $50 million in cuts through attrition, layoffs, buyouts and other cost-cutting measures. The Star Tribune filing is the latest sign of the struggles facing the newspaper industry, which is coping with a deadly combination of high debt and declining advertising revenue amid a deep economic downturn. Read the full article here. It’s not just the newspapers Magazines too are experiencing desperate times. There is even a website devoted to listing magazines as they die, kind of an obit to the mags and rags: Magazine Death Pool. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported: In 2008, magazines, along with all media, experienced their worst year in decades, with ad pages plummeting 9.4 percent from l
The traditional-jazz and ragtime communities lost their long-established principal voice with the passing of Leslie Carole Johnson on Jan. 17 and the apparent end of her Mississippi Rag. Leslie, 66, lost a 3-1/2-year battle with a rare form of cancer that didn’t stop her from completing 35 years of editing and publishing monthly issues of the journal, which had readers in all 50 states and 26 foreign countries. At the start of 2007 the RAG switched to online-only publication, to ease Leslie’s workload during her illness and because of the cost pressures of printing and mailing the tabloid, which usually ran to 40 or 50 pages. For a year it was a PDF file available to subscribers; then it became a free Web-based publication (www.mississippirag.com). She suspended publication with the December 2008 issue. Leslie Johnson, a University of Minnesota journalism graduate, started the RAG at home in 1973 with $200 and the encouragement of her husband, Dennis Johnson. Both were strong tradition
