Here I am, a James Lileks fan, and I can’t think of a thing to say that hasn’t already been written about his predicament. Maybe I shouldn’t have read all of the articles and a number of the blogs on his, er, transfer.
“Transfer.” Lileks has been a humor columnist for the Star Tribune of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The newspaper’s new management is laying off personnel inside and beyond the newsroom and is moving him to local general-assignment reporter. It’s a demotion but when the guy keeps full-time employment, with insurance and 401k, while colleagues are being enticed to quit with severance packages, it could be worse.
I don’t read his column often but do check the blog, Bleat, on his Web site several times a week. That he’s not getting paid for, and it has no part on the Strib. But the national outcry largely is due to his site’s popularity. When it comes to Web design and content, Lileks is a passionate amateur, in the best sense. You want slick, go see the Uncle Ben’s Rice site: Pros set that up. You want fun, thoughtful, and fast-opening, go to places such as lileks.com.
Critics, including Proper Journalists, decry personal columns. Being PJ, they avoid cliches, but if they didn’t they’d call them all naval gazing. Jim does that, but it’s fun. Here in the Ozarks, Jennifer, Peggy and Stephen columnize about home, family and themselves, and they’re good at it. There’s a market for it. Readers like to have writers with whom they can empathize. No good human-interest columnist, of the sermonizing sort or the comedic, actually is common or writes toward some standard demographic. It is precisely its specificity that makes the copy genuine. Readers like that.
Lileks’ blog Bleat has that effect but with the ‘Net’s elasticity: It has his little daughter, it has his battles with home landscaping, rating local coffee shops, and TV show summaries. I’ve been to Minnesota perhaps four times in my life — I’m not home to watch “24” — and none of this makes any difference to me yet I devour all of it. It’s the quality of the writing and the quality of the intelligence and personality behind the writing.
The issue, though, is the day-job: Lileks’ Strib work, The Daily Quirk. It was the latest incarnation of his humor column, out for just two or three years. Rather than a few times a week, as Backfence was, this is seven days a week. That’s one novelty. The other is brevity, perhaps not as short as the defunct Starbeams of The Kansas City Star, but it is 300 words, four to six short paragraphs.
Quirks are funny. Funny should help Strib circulation. They’re nearly always about local sites, local issues. Local should help the Strib. Even when Quirks were about nationally available over-the-counter medicine, that still is local because local people get indigestion.
This is hard for even better publishers to understand about “local.” Local is not every proclamation, giant check donation and soccer team photo, for which there is no circulation stability. Local is what local people do. If they watch cable TV, then Rachael Ray is local. If SUVs waste gas, then worry about mileage is local.
Lileks will do fine. He also has had a nationally syndicated political column and been a frequent guest on some conservative radio talk shows. Jim is the current canary in the silver mine that should be news media. -30-
