Where will we get our news?

Over the last couple of days, there has been a relatively nasty brouhaha between David Brauer of MinnPost and Jill Burcum of the Star Tribune editorial board. The scuffle is nominally about an editorial written about offshore drilling, but has come to signify much more. Sarah Janacek of Politics in Minnesota has an excellent redux, in which she also proclaims the death of the political impact of the newspaper editorial. I agree with her, but it's not just the impact of the editorial that's gone, in my opinion.

Also gone is the ability to write an unbiased headline. The Star Tribune ran the following, fairly innocuous story today:

An open house will be held beginning at 2 p.m. Sunday to discuss a Minneapolis Public Schools' proposed referendum, which is expected to bring in $60 million a year for eight years.

The headline for the story? Want to pay extra for Minneapolis schools?

But wait, that's still not all we've lost. As the Strib has slipped further into debt and lost staff because of it, there has been a slow but gradual decline in the amount of news being provided.  Now it's limited to only a handful of non-crime stories each day, and nearly no political news at all!

To me, that raises a frightening question: where will we get our news? I love MinnPost and the Minnesota Independent, but I have to be honest: I don't see them as a replacement for the Strib or Pioneer Press. MinnPost provides some great analysis of news I already know, and MN Indy is a great source for Lefty News. But we still need a non-partisan, (relatively) unbiased news source with quality journalism. And right now, I'm not sure there's anyone to fill that role.

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