The return to status of the Twin Cities' most successful radio manager of the past generation--Mick Anselmo (soon taking over WCCO-AM, WLTE-FM, and JACK-FM)--spawned several conversations on the subject of what to do with a medium--commercial radio--that people still enjoy but in an age of digital convergence (i.e. iPods, satellites, etc.)? Everyone knows audiences will abandon the second they are given something equally cheap and easy to consume.

There's a theory out there for every avid listener. This is mine.

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On either December 1 or December 8, he isn't sure, Mick Anselmo will take over WCCO-AM, WLTE-FM, and JACK-FM, CBS Radio's three Twin Cities properties. The former boss of all that is Clear Channel in these parts toiled in comparative ignominy for Denny Hecker's car rental company this past year before being summoned from the wilderness to put The Good Neighbor and its two sisters on some kind of course to relevance.

But can he?

After a week of playing phone tag, I caught Anselmo this afternoon and began by asking what he really has free reign to do.

He in turn began by asking, "Why do you keep writing stuff calling me a bull sh** artist?" (In a previous post, I had let that slip, I guess.)

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[ADDITIONAL MATERIAL]

I called Tom Bartel to gossip about the re-branding of his web-site, the death of MARQ, the Strib's improbable "luxury" appendage and see what his crystal ball was telling him in these increasingly bleak times.

Before coming over here to Mpls./St.Paul, I had a deal with Bartel for almost a year and found him to be much less fearsome than I had been warned. The guy's got an "instant on" switch for pugnacity, but it is rooted less in genetic jerk-dom than a honed survival instinct. He also happens to be smart about what can and cannot be done. He and his wife, Kris Henning, (a.k.a. "the nice one") built City Pages into something both financially successful and journalistically credible, (with no small amount of help from editor Steve Perry, now over at Minnesota Independent). Bartel and Henning cashed out pretty well on City Pages and reappeared with a six-year run with The Rake, which stopped dead-tree publishing last March, and then this past week dumped The Rake name entirely, in favor of secretsofthecity.com, which also houses the popular local chat forum, MnSpeak.com, although that name too has disappeared. (The new "MnSpeak" is nicely filtered so you can easily navigate away from political trolls if some restrauteur scandal is more your thing.)

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I spent a big chunk of the weekend wading through a couple weeks' worth of issues of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. By the time I finished, I realized I hadn't felt so nauseated since the time I accidentally chugged ten ounces of curdled milk. We have only just begun to fall off the cliff.

If ignorance is bliss, I'd like to roll the clock back to the good old days when the ritual this time of year was ogling the new cars from Detroit and thinking, "Man, are we cool or what? The damn Rooskies don't have anything with fins that big."

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Much as I'm inclined to gas on about the auto industry "bailout," I am making an effort to devote more attention to the purely "media" end of this blog, better programming in particular.

To that end--and because, of course, the title caught my attention--I spent ninety minutes enjoying Filth the other night. You should, too, this Sunday when it plays on Masterpiece Theatre--Contemporary (8 p.m. TPT, ch. 2).

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I had a plan to post a review of the most recent Frontline, "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story" . . . you know, before it ran this past Tuesday night. As Donald Rumsfeld says, "Stuff happened," and I was left searching for a hook to get it up now. To that end, thank you very much, John Hinderaker, local attorney, once upon a time "Blogger of the Year" (so said Time magazine), co-author of the blog Powerline, an oft-quoted Koran of sorts for serious head-bobbing conservatives and . . . and . . . recipient of the First Annual Golden Wingnut Award, given for the single most jaw-dropping loss of intellectual gravity displayed anywhere on the Internet in the past year (so said Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly).

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[UPDATE: Proving, I hope, that I only go with rumors that have a high probability of achieving reality, Mick Anselmo was in fact announced this morning as the new top boss at CBS Radio's Twin Cities properties, with current GM, Mary Niemeyer, re-labeled a VP of Sales. No new boss opens with an explosion of formats, but it is safe to assume that Anselmo isn't being brought in to maintain the status quo.]

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It was a bit odd watching an election night I had obsessed over for so long from inside a bloviator's bubble. Somehow I feel more connected to the process ranting like a Tourette's victim at my own TV screen, sloshing beverages, and frightening my dog cowering under the couch. Out at FOX9, with Kathryn Pearson from the U of M, David Woodard of Concordia University, and Sarah Janecek of Politics in Minnesota, I felt an odd obligation to sober, adult decorum. I even wore a tie.

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I'm tempted to paraphrase Gerald Ford at this moment. You know, the business about "Our long national nightmare . . .?" But I'll wait until tomorrow, or maybe January 20, since Dick Cheney could revoke the Constitution between now and inauguration day.

As the guy who long ago predicted Obama by eight points nationally, this election appears to be working out much like I thought. There will be countless postmortems tonight, tomorrow, and in the days to come. But in short, the Democrats will have one man to thank beyond all others if the polls and pundits are correct . . . Karl Rove.

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