The BlogDog signs off

Somewhere around 2009, we were ready for a new dog following the untimely death of Otter the Wonder Dog (whom my wife thinks was poisoned by a neighbor).

We went to a pet adoption day to see if  a dog we saw on a website would be into us. She (he?) wasn't. We took her for a walk behind the store and the dog had zero interest in us.

Somewhat dejected, we returned the dog to the store and started to leave. That's when a paw reached out of the kennel and stopped us.

It was Lucie, then known as "Star".

Lucie had been adopted once before and taken to Kansas with her new family where at some point she knocked a toddler down, the story goes. And so the family - helicopter parents who denied their kid the joy of growing up with a great dog - put her up for sale on Craigslist.

That's against the rules of adoption and, fortunately, someone in the Twin Cities saw the listing, and Lucie was retrieved from the home and brought back for another try.

So she decided in that store that we were the right humans for her.

Every dog is a perfect dog in its way and Lucie checked all the boxes.  An Australian shepherd mix, she kept track of us. She was the first dog that wanted to be with me. And every morning, I'd wake up early to write the blog for Minnesota Public Radio, but not until "the BlogDog" got her walk.  Lucie was never interested in hearing an excuse for passing on a walk; we were going. Period. Snow? Rain? Doesn't matter. We were going or she would nag you until nightfall. 

Not that I didn't try to get out of it, mind you. But you can't write a blog while a good dog is using her superpower to command you to action.

That routine continued for another 15 years.

She'd greet me every evening when I returned home, a "Tigger" stuffed animal in her jaws to be thrown and retrieved.

Lucie was the perfect traveler, joyfully sticking her head out the window for a treat from the tollbooth collector. Her only flaw was a general disdain for the ocean.

She loved the Woodbury dog park and would begin howling a mile away once she realized the destination. It is there we'll spread her ashes.

Lightning fast, she was a champion rabbit hunter although her career stats for catching squirrels are not impressive. She failed at every one, and on our recent walks, she'd make a threatening step or two when she saw one, possibly remembering the joy of the chase, but no longer able to do much more.

Lucie had some quirks. She disdained Carolie's cough but would find mine acceptable. Weird.  (Video link)

At certain times if you sat down in a room in which she was sprawled, she'd get up and go to another room.  She valued her "alone time."

Carolie reminded me today that her main trick was sprawling on her back and sticking out her tongue if you'd say, "show me a dead dog." We didn't teach her that so maybe her time in Kansas wasn't a complete waste.

She was - as all dogs are - a good dog; the best we've ever had.

In recent years, time took away a lot of the Lucie we'd come to know. She went deaf a couple of years ago.  She mostly just slept, though she would become a puppy again for a few minutes when she realized that I was about to take her for a walk. But otherwise, there was a sadness in her eyes that was disconcerting. 

In the past, I'd walk at my pace and Lucie would follow. But now, the walks were long as I allowed that it was her walk, not mine. No blade of grass went unsniffed along the route. Her hind legs no longer worked quite right but she was not given to complaining. She was outdoors and in her happy place.

I'm not a believer in God or Heaven but I'm open to the possibility of a dimension where dogs live long lives and catch the squirrels they chase and where they sleep on the furniture and dream of the humans they once raised, content that theirs is the best life a dog ever had.

MPR is wilting but it's got company

 I had lunch with a long-time best friend colleague during my working years yesterday. She came out to the hangar for a picnic.

She left MPR a few months ago, which surprised me because she was an indefatigable supporter of the place; one could easily make the argument that she was the foundation. I've never asked the circumstances of her exit but one thing she said to me revealed a lot. "I rarely listen anymore," she said.

She said this after I learned that Mike Reszler, probably the smartest digital news person I've ever known, was shoved out last year in what remains of Minnesota Public Radio's expertise:  reorganization. The deck chairs are moved around every few years, and the Board of Trustees is none the wiser that they end up being moved back to where they were a few years earlier.

Reszler's exit - and my friend's - was but the latest release of talent from an organization that has a dwindling amount of it.  The two newspaper people who fled their own dying industry years ago and now run MPR, are trying the same strategy for saving it that they used in their previous industry: shed talent , move the deck chairs, and see what happens.

To be sure, there are still amazingly talented people working at MPR, although I know very few of them anymore. But like the Pioneer Press, which still has a handful of hardworking journalists putting out a paper every day, it's not enough to grow; it's only enough not to die quickly.

This, of course, is not unique to MPR.  

Yesterday, WGBH in Boston announced it's cutting 30 people and canceling shows

“We made these hard choices only after implementing a range of other cost-saving measures and operating efficiencies,” wrote Susan Goldberg, GBH chief executive in an email to staff. “The basic reason for these reductions is simple: revenues are flat and the cost of doing business has gone up. A lot.”

“Susan [Goldberg] has repeatedly assured newsroom staff in multiple meetings that local news is of utmost importance to her,”  Zoe Mathews, a steward and senior radio producer at GBH, tells the Boston Globe. “Today’s layoffs are in direct contradiction of her statements about and directly to the newsroom. ... [What] happened today — and the way it happened — is a disgrace to an organization that holds itself up to the public as a vital source of community news, transparency, and accountability.”

There's a lot of that going around.

A newsroom member said she had no idea of the financial condition of WGBH up to that point, which is odd, given the wildfire of public media's collapse should not be escaping notice of any newsroom.

Just up Commonwealth Avenue, WBUR axed employees last month, including my college best friend. The upper crust of public radio - KQED,  Chicago Public Radio, NPR - are all presently following the same path.

Each organization president utters the same thing. They'll turn to more digital offerings. MPR did that 10 years ago under Chris Worthington and - wait for it - Mike Reszler. It was glorious before their bosses decided to slash the newsroom digital operation and send more money to Marketplace in California and set up a podcast operation.

Worthington is gone. Reszler is gone. Most of the podcast operation has shut down.

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there," the late senator, Dave Durenberger, quoting Lewis Carroll, said about U.S. economic policy.

And that's where public broadcasting is: desperately trying one road, then another, with no idea, no vision, no strategy, no innovation in mind and no acknowledgement of the reality that a dead end is just around the corner.