It is the height of insanity to fire your two writers most likely to make the reader think the Strib was still relevant in their lives. I would have put them on the front page, make them duke it out on the same issue once in a while, maybe a Hannity/Colmes newshow, cage matches, anything. They need to start channeling their inner Rupert Murdoch.

LAMBERT: I'm stunned to agree with you. But THAT would have been fun. Do a damn live video blog. The irony is that after creating partisan "balance" the Strib (under different management) recoiled at what it had wrought. Basically, Harte is extremely nervous about at least one half of his metro columnist duo, but getting rid without getting rid of the other would put him in an even more problematic situation.

Note also you have this new MyVoices feature on startribune.com, full of happy pieces that the newspaper doesn’t have to pay for. It’s turned into a vanity press.

LAMBERT: But an innocuous one at that.

As somebody who graduated from J-School in the late 1990s and cut my teeth at places like the AP and Arizona Republic, it is truly sad to see the state's largest newspaper devolve into a completely dysfunctional mess.

Newspapers are dying such a slow and painful death - why can't they see the future and get going with more lively, local and opinionated coverage? This is exactly what those two columnists did!

I read Reusse or Powers because I like somebody willing to get edgy and criticize/ridicule the local sports teams when they need it.

I read this blog because I love local media gossip and Lambert's commentary. Same goes for Brauer over at MinnPost.

Newspapers need to realize the days of being "the" source for national, state and local news are long gone.

If you ask me, the niche for the Strib or any local paper is (1) Offering up witty, edgy and entertaining commentary on national and local issues and (2) Great, in-depth reporting on local issues the people who live and work here care about.

Now, how you present those viewpoints (Blogs, print, online videos, podcasts, etc.) needs tweaking as well, but it's really not that hard.

Why is this so hard for folks like Mr. Harte to grasp???

LAMBERT: One explanation for the paring of "wit" and "edge" from daily newspapers is that the type of person required to manage these "profit centers" must by nature be hyper-cautious and nearly humorless. The days when newsroom managers much less publishers had any affinity for a funny line or cleverly constructed piece of provocative writing are long past. The people who take these jobs today are, as I think I've said often, dour by necessity.

I agree that Chris Harte seems to be missing the point that Coleman (and, once in a while, Kersten) actually does a decent amount of reporting.

Nick fairly regularly gets out there and asks questions -- questions that will in future only be asked by bloggers, it seems. And for the moment bloggers tend not to have the clout or the cash to do in-depth reporting.

So politicians, business people, scoundrels and the occasional really good/cool thing that needs investigation or attention will languish.

My dismay grows with each timid step the Strib takes. I don't think its hyperbole to say that without an active, engaged and funded 4th estate, democracy will suffer.

LAMBERT: Keep your antennae up for who is most pleased/least upset with the decimation of the newspaper business.

Brian, every time you raise this subject, you seem to be pleading Coleman's case to hang onto his stinking li'l column.

At this point, though, if he has the stones that a good metro columnist needs (and I'll say the same for Kersten too), then Nick should tell Chris Harte in no uncertain terms to stick his newshole where the sun don't shine. Begging in person, in print or through you for, please, please, a reconsideration of the big plan effectively neuters him. Coleman is talented enough and established enough to find his own way, unless he's gotten too comfortable with the six-figure salary and union benefits to still be the man of the people he claims to be.

I know all about tuition bills and mortgage payments, but this is one short life and those who want to call themselves journalists face a real choice RIGHT NOW: Stop enabling the suits and slugs who have taken over, taken away and run into the ground your industry, or bend over and clench your teeth while they snip-snip away what you were and what you are meant to be. People who stay on at joints like the STrib and the PiPress aren't doing it for journalism anymore -- that battle is over. They are doing it for their lifestyles. Time to get back to the subversive pamphlet days of journalism, despite its lack of 401k provisions or daycare savings plans. Bloggers and renegade Web site contributors at least can look in the mirror, knowing they're not selling their souls for cushy paychecks.

We know that reporters, editors and columnists can't make their true feelings about their newspaper bosses known through their fingers on the keyboards, because the bosses own those keyboards. But they can make their feelings known by putting their feet on the pavement.

LAMBERT: As I say almost every time I mention his name, Nick is a friend of mine. We talk often. But I am not his mouthpiece. He truly is a big boy completely capable of making his own case. But in this case I am in unequivocal sympathy. Nick is a reporter. Was a reporter before he became a columnist. Got to be a columnist because he was a good reporter ... who had the twin talents of a pugnacious personality and a gift for storytelling. In "old style" newspapering and "cutting edge blogging" that translates to someone people want to read -- because they agree with him or because he royally pisses them off.

I strongly suspect -- I DO NOT KNOW -- that the current Avista managers, like other recent newspaper managers in this area, are uncomfortable with with anyone who garners strong "partisan" response from the public. (The great irony of Harte's most recent memo is that he uses "partisan" points of view to rationalize his excision of Kersten and Coleman without making any reference to the fact that we've just concluded the longest election cycle in U.S. politics, a damned two and half year-long siege. What do you think columnists will write about? What do you think readers want to read?)

To your point about "six figure salaries" and "union benefits". I gotta tell you I think good reporter/writers have every reason to expect as much. There's this bizarre idea that such people should forever remain semi-impoverished. I don't buy that. As we will soon see our local culture will be a less vital place with former newspaper writers turning out PR copy for frozen burritos than squeezing one of the mayors for the truth on some bungled police raid. Put another way: If no newspaper writer should ever be allowed anywhere close to an upper middle-class lifestyle, who should? Tom Petters' "salesmen".

Good one. The alleged equivalence of Kersten and Coleman is not only perversely ignorant but an incredible insult to Coleman, who reported for years before become a columnist, in contrast to KK, who was NEVER a journalist, despite the lies told about her by the former readers' rep.

LAMBERT: Just to repeat a point I've made often. I have never had any objection to Kersten on the staff. A local conservative. Fine. Make your arguments. Incite a debate. Good. But in her specific case, the Strib had to apply a double standard to the qualifications for METRO columnist. Her experience qualified her for the Op-Ed pages.

OK, Brian, if we accept that it's OK for journalists to make upper-middle class salaries, that still doesn't address from whom they're drawing those paychecks. Avista gets to do what it sees fit, and a journalist who hangs onto his principles goes somewhere else to ply his wares.

Besides it sounds like Harte is open to Nick going back to what he was so good at: Reporting. Let Nick be one of the few left who can squeeze the local politicians and polluters. No shame in stepping back into a reporting role. In fact, when newspapers do go under for the last time, it's the hardcore news and investigative stuff that society will long for, not a partisan voice or more sports and recipes.

If Coleman can't at least feign objectivity in a professional manner for his paycheck, then he probably should move on to a blog or Web site.

LAMBERT: Look, I'm hardly ignoring the likelihood that no one will be paid middle-class, much less upper middle class salaries. (Hence my idea a while back for BBC-style financing of bona fide news sites in every major city.) My comment to you was in the context of this misplaced sense of schadenfreude over veteran writers losing "six figure salaries" and "union benefits". The are after all the people providing the content that the Avista's of world intend(ed) to exploit for THEIR somewhat grander lifestyles ... which is always what happens when you commercialize news.

The curiosity now is whether Avista intends to strip away long-accrued merit pay from these salaries. The union is already reeling. They're closer to that perfect world of 50 year-olds with 30 years of experience working for first year cub reporter wages every day.

What I find interesting is Harte's description of the op-ed page, which is a cringing suck up to the right.

To begin with, anyone who describes Thomas Friedman as a liberal is likely to get a sternly worded letter from the Liberal Protection Society. Nor does he address the proportion. I willing to bet that the professional conservatives on the page out number liberals about 3:1. There is a reason to print Krugman; he just received a Nobel in economics. Look at yesterday's strib. There are two pieces, one vaguely conservative (Mr. Nuke, your friend) and one vaguely liberal (mid-wives good, medical establishment bad), but the point is that they're both interesting and not on the five or so predictable talking points from the Brooks, et. al. gang. The third piece is by Wm Kristol who Steve Benen recently, and accurately, described as "Dollar for dollar, the worst newspaper columnist in America [who] was a constant source of predictable drivel and misguided predictions."

Why does Harte fill that page with worthless wankers, just because their officially conservative?

LAMBERT: One non-official (as in from the Op-Ed department, but not Harte) explanation for the glut of "usual suspects" and the lack of anything passingly interesting from the local right is that ... they can't find anyone to do it regularly. Mitch Pearlstein is getting wheeled in. Jason Lewis will give it a shot from time to time. But neither of those gentlemen is quite in Brooks' league as a wordsmith. More to the point, even Lewis falls short of the "base appeal" the Strib wanted in Kersten. I think I've said before that if you know a local conservative who can make a coherent argument and maybe mix in a clever line or two, have them call Scott Gillespie. (Then there's the matter of the pay ... ).

Re: Crocus Hill in bloom. Check it out before running it down. The lilacs are amazing. They give us something to live for and remind us that there's more to life than a pair of columnists losing their jobs like everybody else in this doomed economy. Nick will go on to have a popular blog and the talentless Kersten will be put out of her misery and find more suitable employment, maybe in fundraising for the Christian right. Either way, the lilacs will bloom, thank God.

LAMBERT: I have checked it out. The lilacs are lovely, as is just about everything on Crocus Hill. They just aren't news, and telling folks its spring and they're back doesn't qualify as reporting. On the other hand no editor will take an angry phone call from some nutball shrieking about "bias".

The OpEd this morning is all of 4 pages, i.e., one piece of paper folded in half. I feel so ripped off, then to make matters worse, the OpEd front page story is by Mitch Perlstein. Just pull the plug.

LAMBERT: Mitch is a nice guy. But he doesn't exactly inspire a passionate response. (Which of course is the new and highest criteria for anyone allowed an opinion.)