Stern bought City Pages in February 1997 for an undisclosed sum. The other shoe dropped a month later, when Stern purchased, then immediately shuttered, the Twin Cities Reader. "It wasn't my proudest moment--going to tell people they are out of a job is not pleasant," Schneiderman says. "But in terms of it being a business decision, we had no choice--not when there was still a chance somebody could come into the market and compete strongly." He wanted to pick up as much of the Reader staff as possible, Schneiderman adds: "Which mostly didn't work--we didn't anticipate the antipathy that existed between the two papers."
In a February 19 editorial, Steve Perry described the mood of his staff as "cheery." "Visions of plenty...dance round our heads," he wrote, adding, "The change looks to be about as bump-free as such things can be." Bartel and Henning seemed sanguine as well, with the former assuming a new position as Web director in July while the latter took charge of City Pages as publisher. Yet before the year was out, all three would be gone.
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Perry was the first to go, in August. (A confidentiality agreement precludes all parties from discussing his departure; Perry also declined to participate in any aspect of this 20th anniversary issue.) Next to go was Bartel, who--perhaps inevitably--lasted all of three months in his new position. "It was not my vision in life to answer to some corporate type, and Stern Publishing is extremely corporate," Bartel says of his decision to leave in October 1997.
"I have enormous respect for Tom's intelligence, and I like him personally," David Schneiderman responds. "It is understandably difficult for a [former] owner and boss to work for someone else, and that's what it came down to: Tom thought he was taking a lot of orders, and I thought I was leaving him alone."
A month later Henning departed, for much the same reason. "After Tom left, I was naive in thinking Kris could stay on," Schneiderman says now. "I didn't see how she was caught between us in that situation. I was surprised and disappointed when she left."
Keeping the publisher's position within the Bartel family, Schneiderman hired Tom's brother Mark Bartel, a longtime sales manager at the paper. The search for Perry's replacement, meanwhile, lasted for months. In late November 1997, Schneiderman announced that Tom Finkel, then the managing editor of Miami's New Times, would take over as editor in February, replacing managing editor Monika Bauerlein, who'd been running the paper in the interim. "Tom had had a lot of experience as ME at a major alt-weekly, so I knew he could edit, but he also seemed to have a probing, curious mind that would want to adapt to the challenges of a new city," Schneiderman says of what impressed him about Finkel.
On the other end, Finkel says he wasn't certain he would accept the job until he met Schneiderman and discovered broad areas of agreement on how to improve City Pages. In particular, both felt that opinion had begun to encroach on reporting, and that the paper had strayed from its local mission with nationally oriented material. Finkel also believed coverage of local music was virtually nonexistent, and that the listings sections were suffering from neglect.
While the trenchant editorials that marked Perry's tenure are gone, City Pages hasn't abandoned passionate reporting, as evidenced by stories like Beth Hawkins's chronicle of racist violence in Anoka County (an article that garnered a top award this year from the National Association of Black Journalists), David Schimke's heart-rending portrayal of a St. Paul school for homeless children, and freelance writer Steve Healey's recent riveting first-person account of teaching inmates in Stillwater. There is also no shortage of more offbeat material--such as Mike Mosedale's against-the-grain defense of unpopular ex-Vikings owner Roger Headrick, Katy Reckdahl's tale of the entrepreneurial rise and fall of the local nonprofit that put green Adirondack chairs on the lawn of the White House, and Burl Gilyard's profile of a crotchety county librarian who agitated himself out of a job. "I have very much liked what Tom is doing with the paper," Schneiderman sums up. "It is relentlessly local, and there is an unpredictable mix to the stories."
Finkel envisions more improvements. "I think there is a void in local coverage of local politics and the municipal infrastructure," he says. "I'd like to see us get inside the way the various municipal governments work, so we can give a context that the daily papers don't provide. I think that is an investment you make, and we are just beginning to do that. Another area I'd like to look at is getting inside the criminal-justice system from both sides. This paper has done a great job of comforting the afflicted, but sometimes at the expense of great stories or investigations of people who are committing crimes."
As Finkel looks ahead, what do Bartel and Henning think when they look back on what they've wrought? "Our legacy?" Bartel responds, seemingly surprised by the question. "I don't think we have one. But someone once asked me who City Pages readers were--they expected me to spout off some neat little demographic niche. And I said, 'I think it is people who read.' They thought I was being a smart-ass. But I said, 'No, no: People who read as opposed to playing softball or watching TV.' That's the way I always imagined our readers. The smart people.'"
