Bob Collins retired from Minnesota Public Radio in 2019 after 12 years of writing NewsCut and pointing out to complainants that posts weren’t news stories. A son of Massachusetts, he was a news editor 1992-1998, created the MPR News regional website in 1999, invented the popular Select A Candidate, started several blogs, and every day lamented that his Minnesota Fantasy Legislature project never caught on.
Today’s must-read item comes from Mara Gottfried at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, who tells the story of Ali Bility, a 17-year-old who was in the starting lineup last night when Como Park’s football squad took the field.
Suffering from depression, Bility had attempted suicide last winter. Read more →
The people who work at newspapers drive the local news agenda. What they can’t do — as the St. Cloud Times’ story today proved again — is provide coverage of the execution of a community’s soul. Read more →
We have a little more information to share with you today on yesterday’s top story where police in Portland, Maine arrested a tree while cross a street. Asher Woodworth said he wanted you to rethink your expectations. Read more →
There’s a pretty good joke making the rounds ahead of the World Series, which starts tonight in Cleveland.
‘It’s been so long since the Cubs or Indians have won a World Series that the last time they did, the presidential campaign of 2016 hadn’t even started yet.’ Read more →
I’m in the radio business for one last day today, filling in for Tom Weber on MPR News. Read more →
Hoover was a World War II fighter pilot, a former Air Force test pilot and the chase plane pilot for Chuck Yeager when he broke the sound barrier for the first time. Read more →
Here’s what I learned from yesterday’s radio show on obituaries: Quite a few people have obits of people they didn’t know taped to their refrigerators. Read more →
We’ve got plenty of taprooms now, but the neighborhood hardware store is vanishing in a hurry.
Kraemer’s True Value Hardware will close in December. The owner of the business, which has been around for 109 years, says it seems like a good time to retire. Read more →
It might be a bit more difficult to be a good Catholic if you’ve dreamed of having your cremated remains scattered to the wind in some idyllic location. Read more →
If Chicago can’t rally around a 97-year old man who survived Pearl Harbor, there’s something wrong. All you have to do, Chicago, is give up your tickets to a Cubs World Series game. Read more →
On an otherwise calm day in the world of news, we have learned that dressing up as a tree can be as suspicious as being a clown. Read more →
Perhaps we’re going to have to go back and listen to more of Bob Dylan’s music because we think we might have done it wrong the first time around. Read more →
It’s tempting to note that it’s quite a coincidence that John Oliver’s focus last night on Last Week Tonight was the opioid epidemic, coming as it did on a weekend in which authorities announced that two people are dead — so far — in a wave of nine overdoses of opioids in the Twin Cities. Read more →
We can think of few other deaths for which this shaming over non seat-belt use so routinely and consistently appears. Read more →
The normally conservative Fargo Forum is declining to endorse a candidate for president. Not since Lyndon Johnson was challenged by Barry Goldwater in 1964 has the Forum editorial board not endorsed the Republican presidential candidate. Unlike its other editorials, the Forum hands the endorsements to the company CEO and his son — William C. Marcil, Read more →
Bob Collins