Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Editorial Shakeup for Eater Twin Cities
Shrewd listeners of RacketCast may have noticed that during our recent Food ‘n’ Drink Reporter Roundtable Justine Jones, former editor of Eater Twin Cities, mentioned she’s no longer with the online food/drink publication.
So who will be taking over her role? Well… no one. At least, not exactly.
Vox Media, which owns Eater in addition to sites like New York Magazine, The Verge, and SB Nation, announced a round of layoffs in December that impacted Eater. Jones had already chosen to leave, but as a result of Vox's restructuring, her former role as city editor has been eliminated. Going forward, Ashok Selvam, editor of Eater Chicago, will serve as Eater’s Midwest Regional Editor—he’ll be responsible for overseeing Twin Cities coverage, along with coverage at Eater Detroit, where Serena Maria Daniels learned her role was eliminated in early December.
So yes, Selvam is now covering food and drink for Chicago, Detroit, and the Twin Cities. Eater Detroit's former editor has also taken on a Midwest Editor role for the website (in a turn that surprised even her), and she's been responsible for a lot of the Twin Cities' coverage over the past month.
“I think we have a chance to do some great coverage in Detroit and Minnesota, but it's going to take some time to adjust,” Selvam wrote in an Instagram post earlier this month. “I visit family in Michigan regularly, so I'm more familiar… We'll see what we can do with Minnesota.”
Vox Media shared the following canned response:
Eater is committed to operating all current Eater sites and providing our audience with local dining news, recommendations, and more. We had to make the difficult decision to eliminate roles in certain markets as we adapt to changes in the business and transition to editors working across cities, including the ones where they are based.
"I've got a lot of mixed feelings about the plight of local reporting, the viability of media under a subscription-free model, parachute journalism, leaving culture coverage in the hands of social media influencers, and coastal elites and their use of the word 'flyover,'" Selvam wrote in his post about the transition, concluding, "If you've read all of this, I owe you a shot of Malört."
Buddy, whenever you make it to the Twin Cities, that shot of Malört is on us.
Hey, We Got a Brutalist Local Angle
Have you seen the Oscar nom The Brutalist yet? I, Racket movie guy Keith Harris, had mixed reactions. But that’s beside the point, because what matters isn’t whether a movie is good, but whether it has some connection to Minnesota. And The Brutalist, it turns out, is based on the construction of a church in Collegeville, Minnesota.
How can that be, since The Brutalist takes place in *aggressively Hungarian accent* Doylestown, Pennsylvania? According to a recent Guardian story, writer/director Brady Corbet based the fictional architect László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody, on the real-life European immigrant Marcel Lajos Breuer, the man also designed the Whitney Museum.
Breuer was hired not by Guy Pearce but by the Benedictine monks of St. John’s in Collegeville to build a Catholic church. And, if you’re a Brutalism appreciator like me, you’ll agree that the end result looks amazing. (Granted, I even dig the U’s Moos Tower.) There’s a book about the process, Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church: A Monastic Memoir, that Corbet consulted while writing the script, and according to the Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright, that story is much more engaging than “the hackneyed portrayal of the tempestuous architect-client relationship” we see in The Brutalist. Well then!
Anyway, roadtrip to Collegeville, anyone? We could be there and back in the time it takes to watch The Brutalist.
Xcel Believes Clients A-OK Paying For Exec Raises
If Xcel Energy has its way, you could see a spike in utility costs. But this time it wouldn’t be to cover things like extreme weather events in Texas, bettering service in low-income neighborhoods, or reaching its 2050 net-zero energy pledge. No, it would go toward paying the company's top 10 executives more. Because CEO Bob Frenzel, who took home over $21 million in 2023, apparently needs more money.
So far, the $38 billion company’s fight for better C-suite pay hasn’t gone well. In 2023, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission gave Xcel permission to hike rates by $440 million but also placed a cap on how much it could charge the unwashed masse directly to pay those salaries. Last week an appeals court deemed the decision lawful, the Energy & Policy Institute reports, but questioned the amount of the cap, leaving wiggle room in future negotiations.
Hilariously, Xcel lawyers argued that opposition to the hike “represent[s] an incredibly small fraction of Xcel Energy’s approximately 1.3 million customers in Minnesota” and claimed only a “minute subset” of users would be upset at the company merely keeping up with industry standards. It should be noted that the cap limits how much executive pay can come from user fees, not how much can come from other streams of revenue.
Hmm, maybe Xcel could spend less on lobbying or multi-year lawsuits?
TGIF. Let's Watch This MTV Segment on First Ave from 1991.
The Mighty Mofos and Man Sized Action rocking their butts off. Soul Asylum with Dave Pirner looking like an actual baby. Bob Mould smoking a cig. First Ave's legendary GM Steve McClellan. Paul Westerberg telling a story about Prince passively watching the 'Mats in the Entry. A British VJ that I, 37-year-old Racket staffer Jay Boller, had never heard of. All that and more is packed into this John Norris-narrated 120 Minutes scene report on First Avenue from 1991, and we urge you stop working this instant to watch all seven-plus minutes of the recently YouTube'd MTV clip.
