The Strib Files For Bankruptcy, and Other News From The Media Depression .

Like most everything else these days, the local media is taking a sharp hit from the foundering economy. Let us count the ways:

• It's finally happened. After months of hemorrhaging revenues, employee layoffs and mismanaging a once-great newspaper by owner Avista Capital Partners, the Star Tribune announced on its website that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They are the second media company to do that, with the Tribune Company (publishers of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times) having filed a few weeks ago. The paper will keep operating as it is, they say. Once the company comes out of bankruptcy, look for a drastically different paper. If there is one at all.
• Is WCCO ("Newsradio 8-3-0" as they now bill themselves) being run into the ground by owner CBS? The former "Good Neighbor to the Northwest" has shown three talk show hosts--Al Malmberg, Brad Walton and Jack Rice--the door in the name of more budget cutting, and have asked the remaining on-air staff to take pay cuts. Night-owl hosts Malmberg and Walton have been replaced by the syndicated Overnight America, a talk show based out of CBS station KMOX in St. Louis. As for Rice, whose midday current-affairs show always sounded as if it was bound for syndication, he's leaving at the end of the month. The problem with WCCO isn't just that most of their main demographic has one foot in the grave, but it's also the amount of commercials that break up a program's flow, leaving its remaining listeners to change the channel. And CBS doesn't seem interested in fixing the problem.
• Over at KARE, the Twin Cities' NBC affiliate, owner Gannett has told its employees to take an unpaid one-week vacation between now and spring to save the company money.
• KSTP-AM now has Patrick Reusse co-hosting its morning show with Jay Kolls, after the previous co-host was dropped during station budget cutting. (Imagine that. A liberal talk show host on otherwise conservative KSTP) Reusse will continue to write two or three sports columns a week for the Star Tribune, but you have to wonder how long it will be before he gets whacked over there. Maybe that's why he took the radio gig. No word yet on who's replacing Tommy Mischke middays.
• Minnesota Public Radio, busily lobbying to get the new light rail line away from its St. Paul headquarters, has canceled its remaining jazz program--a Saturday-night affair hosted by Maryann Sullivan (It must have been tough replacing a legend like Leigh Kammann). In its place on MPR's news service is "Radio Heartland", two hours of quirky music hosted by Dale Connelly that's normally heard on its HD channel (uh, what's that?). It's the successor to "The Morning Show", which recently ended its run on The Current, 89.3 FM. Now Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" has a real one on Saturdays.

All right, who's next to go on the chopping block?