Media
KUMD station manager position still in limbo
Maija Jenson
When Maija Jenson transitions out of her role as interim station manager at KUMD in August it will mark the end of an era that started in 2008 when she was one of three major hires there. What the next era holds will likely be decided in the coming months.
The 62-year-old public radio station at 103.3 FM, operated by the University of Minnesota Duluth, is expected to learn soon whether the college will seek to hire a new general manager to guide it. Whether it does or doesn’t, KUMD will likely continue with its usual programming, but not hiring a new GM leaves its leadership in question and might put grant funding at risk.
“We have not made any final decisions yet,” UMD Marketing and Public Relations Director Lynne Williams said in a statement today. Williams is the university’s administrator of KUMD and reports to UMD Chancellor Lendley Black. (more…)
Gallery of Defunct Duluth Literary and Arts ’Zines
In addition to the various (“legitimate,” if you will) literary and arts magazines and journals in the Duluth area, past and present, there is a long tradition of renegade ’zines circulated for short periods of time. What’s technically the difference between the two? Well, a magazine or journal tends to have a glossy cover and be governed by an institution or a nonprofit board of directors. A ’zine tends to be printed on a photocopier for limited circulation and produced by an individual or disorganized group. (more…)
Duluth Broadcast Television Station Guide for 2019
Changes to broadcast television channel offerings used to be rare. From 1966 to 1999, Duluth had four channels. From 1999 to 2009, there were five. In the ten years since the switch from analog to digital channels, the total has climbed to 18. (more…)
R.I.P. Transistor
The Transistor, a weekly arts ‘zine published by Adam Guggemos, has folded. The publication existed from Valentine’s Day 2004 to Valentine’s Day 2019. For more than 14 years the Tranny existed in print; most of the final year’s issues were published online only.
Duluth News Tribune: “Publisher declares end to Duluth’s Transistor“
Duluth’s Best Website
In 2011 Perfect Duluth Day chose as its official slogan “Duluth’s Duluthiest Website.” It was a statement we felt pretty confident making. Maybe other Duluth websites are better, but certainly none are Duluthier.
But this week we’ve been wondering if PDD truly is Duluth’s best website. This line of thinking was prompted by the Duluth Reader weekly newspaper conducting a poll and ultimately publishing in its Jan. 31 “Best of the Northland” issue that PDD won the title of “Best Local Website.” (more…)
Duluth featured on Supernatural again
Last night’s episode of Supernatural took place in Duluth. The episode “Gods And Monsters” aired on the CW network.
This isn’t the first time Duluth has been featured in the long running show. The second season’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” episode had a character who was working at a Duluth bar. Several episodes have featured other Minnesota towns, such as Hibbing and Stillwater.
BusinessNorth owners purchase Lake Superior Magazine
Left to right above: New Lake Superior Magazine owners Beth Bily and Ron Brochu, former owners Cindy Hayden and Paul Hayden
Two longtime, Duluth-based media organizations with a combined 66 years in existence are now under the same ownership following the Aug. 31 sale of Lake Superior Magazine and its associated books and merchandising operations to the publishers of BusinessNorth and Scenic Range News Forum. The entities announced the sale in a news release today. (more…)
Challenge: Describe other things like Rolling Stone describes Duluth
The way Ana Marie Cox describes Duluth in her article “A Night Among the Trump Believers Way Up North” really needs its own genre. Here’s a quote from the original piece to give you a sense of it:
Lake Superior’s merciless beauty crashes up against a town whose shoreside skyline is dominated by stolid, brutalist mid-century relics and precarious-seeming industrial shipping contraptions, rusty and mostly silent. Downtown, every surface is covered with a thin layer of grime. It is, in other words, Trump Country.
Genius, right? In the comments, leave your ideas for how Ana Marie Cox would describe other things in Duluth! (more…)
Duluth-area Radio Station Guide for 2018
The Duluth/Superior radio market is noted for two striking characteristics — an uncommon number of public-interest stations and an uncommon number of Christian stations. The commercial broadcast signals that fill out the rest of dial are mostly owned by two entities — Midwest Communications and Townsquare Media — although there are a few smaller station owners, like Northwoods Radio and Twin Ports Radio. (more…)
Way up North, Gay up North
Duluth newscasters Dan Hanger and Edward Moody share their stories of being gay news anchors in Lavender magazine.
Guide to Duluth-related Blogs in 2018
As far as blogs go, obviously Perfect Duluth Day isn’t the only show in town. And it must be noted the line where a blog crosses over from one person’s musings into becoming an online magazine is a fuzzy one. In spite of the inherent problems associated with labeling anything, below is PDD’s updated list of Duluth-area community blogs — an every-couple-of-year salute/guide to the individuals and small groups who crank out content like it’s 2007 instead of (or in addition to) just Facebooking, Instagramming and whateverelseing. (more…)
North Country Girl in the Saturday Evening Post
Gay Haubner’s memoir about growing up in Duluth during the 1960s has been running as a weekly serial in The Saturday Evening Post since May 24, 2017. It’s at 36 chapters and counting, indexed on the page linked below.
Video Archive: Plugging the hole of the thousand-foot shitter
It was ten years ago that KBJR-TV news reporter Julie Pierce made her famous slip-of-the-tongue while referring to the 1,000-foot motor vessel Walter J. McCarthy Jr. The video clip above, viewed more than 200,000 times in the past decade, also shows KBJR misspelling “McCarthy” on its graphic; so it goes. (more…)
Duluth weather on CBS This Morning
Duluth appeared briefly on CBS This Morning‘s story “Heavy snow and winds wreak havoc for holiday travelers.” At the 1:46 mark in the video above, Duluth is shown as reporter DeMarco Morgan notes “Minnesota had windchills as cold as 35 degrees below zero.” (CBS forces a commercial at the front of the video; PDD apologizes for it.)
WEBC radio clip from Nov. 18, 1967
WEBC 560 AM is the oldest radio station in the Duluth-Superior market, dating back to 1924. These days it feeds the 106.5 FM translator branded as “Sasquatch 106.5.”
The audio clip above includes commercials broadcast between songs on Nov 18, 1967. In addition to station promos, the clip includes spots for Ski Hut, WEBC / Jeno’s Pizza Battle of the Bands, and the Big Bash with Dave Gordon and the Expressmen.
Lost and Found Duluth Relics from Morgan Park and WDSM
Above are the letters that adorned the exterior wall near the entrance to Morgan Park School. They are for sale at Bauer Brothers salvage in Minneapolis. Below is an old WDSM-TV camera discovered at Axman Surplus in St. Paul. (more…)
Duluth Broadcast Television Station Guide for 2017
The number of broadcast television stations in Duluth has reached 14. Keeping track of them started getting confusing in 2016, when reorganizing at KBJR/KDLH led to “CBS 3” broadcasting on channel 6.2. In an effort to prevent the whole thing from turning into an Abbott & Costello routine, Perfect Duluth Day periodically provides an updated list of channels.
There have been two changes since the 2016 KDLH/KBJR shuffling. In early 2017 WDSE-TV dropped its “2nd Chance” programming on channel 8.2 and adopted a new broadcasting stream, PBS Explore, which is focused heavily on programs for children. On Sept. 27, WDIO-TV added subchannel 10.3, broadcasting the Ion television network. An updated list is below. (more…)
Lake Superior Aquaman Interview on DNT’s Pressroom Podcast
In which I field a bunch of excellent questions.
Pressroom Podcast: Lake Superior Aquaman - Duluth News Tribune | News, weather, and sports from Duluth, Minnesota
You may have seen his videos on Perfect Duluth Day or perhaps you've seen him in the act diving into the big lake with his scaly-orange T-shirt. Amateur freediver and video enthusiast Jim Richardson, aka Lake Superior Aquaman, shares his origin s...
duluthnewstribune.com
I have taken the liberty of transcribing this, below the fold.
Newspaper name change: UMD Statesman becomes the Bark
The Statesman is changing... Here's why — The Statesman
For 70 years, the Statesman has been the Statesman. In 1947, the campus newspaper officially changed its name from the Fortnightly Chronicle to the Duluth Statesman (which later evolved to the UMD Statesman).
theumdstatesman.com
Why The Bark? Here's what our new name means to us — The Bark
After 131 student, faculty and alumni submissions and hours of conversation with students and faculty in different departments on campus this summer, we have chosen the new name for our student news organization — The Bark. We wanted something fresh and modern that would keep up with the ever-evolv
thebarkumd.com
Duluth featured on Gear Junkie website
Gear Junkie, a Minneapolis-based online publication for outdoor adventure news and product reviews, published a feature on Duluth this week as part of its series on “The Great Urban Outdoors.”
Hansi Johnson’s “Photo that Won’t Die”
It was shot just a few hundred feet from Duluth’s Aerial Lift Bridge, but it evokes the spirit of being in a far more remote part of the planet. Hansi Johnson’s “photo that won’t die” is so-named because in recent years it’s been in Outside magazine, the Red Bulletin, the Italian news magazine Panorama, a few calendars and as Johnson notes, it’s “been ripped off and passed around more times than I care to admit.”
Add two more to the list: Men’s Journal recently included the image among its “25 Best Adventure Photos of the Past 25 Years.” The back cover of a new book from Outside magazine, “The Edge of the World,” also features the image. (more…)
What’s in the box? A gift I’ll never open
Someday, hopefully years from now, someone will face the task of going through all the “stuff” in my office and will find a box.
It is postmarked April 2, 2010. It has an address label on the side:
From: John Hatcher
To: Sam Cook
Here’s my request: Don’t open it.
Here’s why.
If you simply have to know what’s in it, I can just tell you that part: It’s one of those sporty Nalgene water bottles. I can’t honestly remember what color or what style, but I do know it has a University of Minnesota Duluth logo on it. What the box contains isn’t why I’ve kept it unopened for nearly seven years now.
The water bottle was a gift, not to me but from me. The intended recipient was Sam Cook, longtime (that’s polite for old) journalist and columnist for the Duluth News Tribune. It was a way of thanking him for coming to my journalism class. (more…)
Flashback: Denfeld and Marshall defeat Milford … in a comic
It was New Year’s Day of 2007 when the first of a series of Gil Thorp comics that referenced Duluth was published. According to a Duluth News Tribune story that week, writer Neal Rubin typically uses the names of actual high school teams in the comic, and simply liked the team name Denfeld Hunters. Frank McLaughlin is the artist who drew the strip. (more…)
The Hillsider newspaper returns, along with former GM/editor
The Hillsider, a nonprofit neighborhood newspaper aimed primarily at the Central and East Hillside of Duluth, will resume publishing in October, according to general manager and editor Naomi Yaeger.
Yaeger is returning to The Hillsider after a five-year stint as editor of the Duluth Budgeteer News. She previously served The Hillsider from May 2006 to January 2011.
“I miss journalism so bad. I miss being out there and just pulling everything together,” Yaeger said. “I enjoy listening to people and hearing their stories and I enjoy telling other people those stories in an accurate way. … I have a passion to do this.” (more…)