IN, THROUGH AND AROUND BEIJING — Today broke sunny and sultry, a sky of bluish gray with the water a greenish gray. Olympic history was about to be made, and your correspondent was there. By day's end, I was virtually everywhere. The task at hand: attend as many Olympic events as possible. Goal: eight different sports. Methods of transport: official Beijing Olympic buses and human feet.

Read the rest: http://www.minnpost.com/jayweiner/2008/08/20/3035/crazy_eight_a_very_busy_day_in_the_life_of_your_olympic_correspondent

Habib Koité is a different kind of griot. Normally these West African storytellers roar like lions, their pride woven into family lineages that extend back centuries. When they open their throats to sing, the gale of history rises up past their diaphragms. Listen to Salif Keita, the great albino griot, unleash his voice and proclaim his stature, and you intuitively feel that the Keita clan once ruled Mali for 300 years. Read more at http://www.minnpost.com/brittrobson/

Beginning this week, MinnPost.com will expand its coverage of politics, arts, business and sports by adding several new journalists and features.

Kathryn Pearson and Blois Olson are joining MinnPost.com to report on and analyze state and national politics.

Kathryn, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, specializes in American politics and Congress. She has written extensively about the state and national political scene, and has appeared on Minnesota Public Radio and "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."

Blois has been a contributor to online political coverage and commentary in Minnesota for years. After working on several campaigns, he cofounded MN-Politics.com, a leading online source for Minnesota political information. He's now an executive vice president at Tunheim Partners, a communications firm in Bloomington.

The addition of Kathryn and Blois is part of an effort to expand our political coverage. The national political conventions are just weeks away, and MinnPost.com journalists will be reporting from the Democratic gathering in Denver next month and Republican convention in St. Paul Sept. 1-4. We're also making ambitious plans to cover this fall's campaigns in Minnesota.

But as regular readers know, there's a lot more to MinnPost.com than political reporting.

More music coverage
We'll be expanding our music coverage with the addition of regularly anchored posts by Jim Walsh and Britt Robson.

Jim is a frequent MinnPost.com contributor who's been posting missives from his "Mad Ripple Hootenanny" in New York the past few days. A longtime Twin Cities musician, editor and writer, he is the author of "The Replacements: All Over but the Shouting." Look for his "Monday Morning Playback" post each week; in it he'll touch on music he's hearing on the air, in clubs and on CDs and either loved or loathed.

Britt will conduct interviews and showcase a wide variety of music each Tuesday and Friday, beginning Aug. 5. Britt has written knowledgably about every kind of music from opera to punk to hip-hop, and his music posts will be a habitual read for people who want to know what is going on in town.

We're also expanding our business coverage, introducing a lively weekly feature by John Reinan that taps into the thoughts of some of the leading marketing thinkers and practitioners in the Twin Cities. John will delve into the dramatic changes caused by new media, changes that affect businesses, consumers and careers throughout Minnesota.

John is well-connected in the Twin Cities marketing world and is a senior director at the Minneapolis marketing agency Fast Horse. A three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, John has reported for seven newspapers, including three years as consumer/marketing reporter at the Star Tribune. Check out his first post, which appears today.

MinnPost will be doing more with sports as well.

Next month, for coverage of the Olympic Games, our man in Beijing will be Jay Weiner. Jay has covered every Winter and Summer Olympics since 1984. He'll use that experience to offer perspective on the 16 days and 17 nights of Olympic competition and pageantry. Jay will not only chronicle the efforts of Olympians with Minnesota ties but also cover some of the social, cultural and political controversies facing China as it takes its turn in the international spotlight. Look for stories, posts, photos, podcasts and more throughout the Games.
Additional changes

Careful MinnPost readers will also notice some other changes on the site.

We've launched a new Comments presentation that makes it easier for readers to view comments and to post comments. And we've added an easier way for readers to use social networking sites to share content on MinnPost.com.

Beginning today, we're dropping the MinnPost in Print feature. Readers will continue to be able to print stories from the site. But as more and more of you are reading MinnPost online, we found too few readers were using MinnPost in Print to justify continuing putting together a printable summary of the site.

Finally, humor writer Al Sicherman will be taking on a new role. We're discontinuing "Verse or Worse," and have asked Al to offer his unique take on events and news developments in town from time to time.

MinnPost is less than a year old, and we've received many valuable suggestions from our readers since we launched in November. We will continue to make changes on the site and add enhancements to meet your needs for information and analysis. Even now we're planning significant improvements in our content and presentation that you'll be hearing more about in the coming months.

In the meantime, I'm pleased to report that reader interest in MinnPost.com keeps growing. We had more than 125,000 unique monthly visitors last month, as measured by Google Analytics, an increase of more than 10 percent from the previous month. We now have 932 members, people who have decided to support financially the nonprofit journalism that MinnPost.com provides.

I'd like to hear your thoughts about how MinnPost.com is doing. Feel free to add your comment at the end of this article, or if you prefer to communicate privately, email me at jkramer [at] minnpost [dot] com.

Joel Kramer is CEO and editor of MinnPost.

By Eric Black
Friday, July 18, 2008

WCCO-TV, for evil purposes that only it knows, invited a few dozen independent bloggers to a Dunn Bros. in downtown Minneapolis to listen last night to likeable 'CCO reporter/blogger Jason DeRusha and your humble ink-stained wretch talk about our fabulous careers, especially the contrast between working for mainstream traditional news media and blogging.

They called it a "bloginar" (copyright pending on that word, which I take to be a combination of blog and seminar).

DeRusha did most of the talking and was very funny. I tried to shock the audience by ranting against the so-called objectivity paradigm that I believe is a "spent force." (I stole that phrase from a Canadian journalism professor I heard talk last year.) But, perhaps because they were a bunch of bloggers, the audience wasn't too shocked.

Read the rest at minnpost.com

http://www.minnpost.com/stories/2008/07/18/2621/blogging_and_talking_about_mainstream_media

MinnPost: What would it take for Ventura to defeat Republican incumbent Norm Coleman and DFL challenger Al Franken?

Barkley: He'd have to run.

MP: Could he finance a campaign on such short notice? (In the governor's race of 1998, when Ventura got 37 percent of the vote to defeat Coleman and DFLer Skip Humphrey, Ventura had the benefit of public financing. There is no public money in Senate races.)

DB: laughing: He won't put his own money in the race. That's a given.

MP: So where would the money come from?

DB: He's one of the few people who could simply put up a website and he'd have people from across the country contributing.

MP: But this race may become the most expensive Senate race ever run with Franken and Coleman each spending $16 million. Can Ventura find that sort of money?

DB: He doesn't need to. He'll get so much free press that they could each spend $60 million and it wouldn't matter. I think one of the hardest things we'd have to do is find enough time to handle all the requests for interviews he'd have.

Read the rest at MinnPost.com

You're invited to WCCO's Bloginar, a networking and blogging seminar featuring WCCO's Jason DeRusha and MinnPost's Eric Black, Thursday, July, 17, 5pm at the Dunn Bros.-Freight House at 201 3rd Avenue South, Minneapolis.

Please RSVP by Tuesday, July 15, to wccointernet@wcco.com

Make a mental picture of your favorite drive along a rural road: cattails ring a small pond to the right; over to the left, black and white cows mow a sloping pasture; beyond a turn just ahead, corn is well into the magic of growing from small seed to towering stalk in just a few weeks.

It's an iconic American experience, especially in July when so many of us escape the city's concrete gridlock for a few days in the quieter countryside.

But a starkly different picture of the rural drive emerges from crash data. Without getting too graphic, imagine a pickup truck barreling down that same road, taking the turn at the corn field too fast and rolling over. No one inside was wearing a seat belt. And the nearest emergency room is 25 miles away....

Read more of Sharon Schmickle's essay at minnpost.com

MinnPost journalist Eric Black will analyze John McCain's Iraq position and Mitch Berg will respond on Berg's radio show at 2 p.m. Saturday on AM-1280 The Patriot.

At 53, Minnesota's Martha Nause will be the oldest player in the Women's U.S. Open this week at Interlachen Country Club in Edina. Read Steve Date's story and watch his video here: http://...com/4hz2d6

Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra with Special Guest Carla Bley
Saturday, Sept. 27, 8 p.m., Ted Mann Concert Hall
Co-presented with Walker Art Center

Bass player, composer, and bandleader Haden formed the Liberation Music Orchestra in 1969 as an artistic statement against the Vietnam War. He reassembles it for key political/historical moments. This year it's all about our presidential elections. Pianist and composer Bley was a member of the original group.

The LMO's most recent recording, "Not in Our Name" (2004), made with Bley, is Haden's response to the disaffection many people in America and around the world feel about how the Bush administration is conducting its affairs at home and in the global arena.

Historical notes: Bley has appeared in the Northrop lineup just once before, in July 2003, when she brought her big band to town. The Liberation Music Orchestra was the first concert Schatzlein scheduled for the first Northrop Jazz Season (1993-94). Bringing them back is a nice touch.

Yusef Lateef with Douglas Ewart, Roscoe Mitchell and Adam Rudolph
Saturday, Dec. 6, 8 p.m., Walker Art Center, McGuire Theater
Co-presented with Walker Art Center

Grammy-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Lateef was playing world music before anyone called it that. He is a virtuoso on many instruments: tenor saxophone, flute, oboe, bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, argol, sarewa, Taiwan koto. Lateef and his longtime collaborator/percussionist Adam Rudolph will be joined by Twin Cities-based musician and instrument builder Douglas Ewart and longtime Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell. This will be one for the books.

Historical notes: Lateef hasn't performed in the Twin Cities for more than a decade, and he's new to the Northrop Jazz Season. Ewart brought his Inventions Clarinet Choir to the McGuire in March 2006 and it was amazing.

Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling sings Coltrane/Hartman featuring Ernie Watts, the Ethel String Quartet, and the Laurence Hobgood Trio
Friday, Feb. 20, 8 p.m., Ted Mann Concert Hall

Elling is arguably the top male jazz singer of our time. He and pianist Hobgood (whom Elling always introduces as "my collaborator") share a communication equivalent to a Vulcan mind-meld. They'll be touring with their creative re-imagining of "John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman" (1963), one of the most romantic recordings ever released.

Two-time Grammy winning saxophonist Watts has been described as playing in "a virtuosic post-Coltrane style" by JazzTimes magazine. The Ethel String Quartet wants you to call them ETHEL. All are Juilliard alumni.

Put Valentine's Day off a few days and make this your celebration.

Historical notes: Elling's most recent Twin Cities dates were at the Dakota in March 2007.

Jason Moran: In my mind: Monk at Town Hall
Saturday, May 9, 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., Walker Art Center, McGuire Theater

The Walker likes Moran. He first performed there in 2001 and spent his rehearsal breaks looking at the museum's collection. This did not go unnoticed by performing arts curator Philip Bither, who commissioned Moran to create a new work to mark the opening of the Walker expansion. The multimedia production premiered in May 2005; selections are included on Moran's latest CD, "Artist in Residence" (2006).

Moran returned to the Walker in February 2007 for a public conversation with Bither that remains for me a highlight of the year. You can see it on the Walker Channel.

The Northrop Jazz event will be a multimedia performance built around a legendary 1959 recording, "The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall." Moran has said that Monk is the reason he started playing piano. He'll integrate samples of Monk's music, conversations and photos with his own interpretations of Monk tunes. More than a tribute, this event will bring Monk into the 21st century.

Historical notes: Moran appeared with his small ensemble, the Bandwagon, in the 2004-05 Northrop Jazz Season.

Ticket information
Tickets to individual performances are $40 and available starting Monday, Aug. 4 at 10 a.m. Season packages are $128 and available now; in addition to discounted pricing, subscribers enjoy priority seating and invitations to special events. Call 612-624-2345.