Eric Schubert, the vice president of Communications and Public Affairs for Ecumen, a large senior housing and services provider, read the Star Tribune’s three-part series on nursing home falls and fired off an email.

Although Ecumen manages a nursing home where an 89-year-old woman died after a fall — and the state found neglect — Schubert isn’t taking issue with the series’ thrust, at least not to me.

Rather, his beef is with the page design. I’ll let Schubert roll it out:

I was struck by the photo on the front page in Sunday's paper. There's the title in all caps: DEADLY FALLS. Then there's an ominous photo of a wheelchair just sitting in a hallway in the dark. 

If you look at that photo, it spurs a lot of words in my mind, and I suspect others' minds, not many that are positive. Such as: ominous, lonely, isolated, scary, depressing, etc.

What most readers won't know is that the Strib didn't shoot this photo. It's from Istockphoto.com, an online stock photography databank. ... And the description says it's a hospital, not a nursing home.

In reality, none of us know what it is because the location is not placed on the photo. It's very likely that it's not even from Minnesota. Maybe it's not even from the United States.

As it turns out, Schubert is right: according to Istockphoto.com, the photo is a “silhouette of empty wheelchair parked in hospital hallway.” It was taken by Polish photographer Roman Milert, making it extremely unlikely the photo's from here.

So is it cool to staple an industry with an image unconnected to it?

Let’s state up front this is not the most important thing about the Strib series. Reporters Glenn Howatt and Pam Louwagie spend months chronicling 1,000 deaths related to nursing home falls, unearthing harrowing examples like the one at Ecumen’s Grand Rapids nursing home. It’s the sort of work that potentially spurs systemic reform and saves lives.

But at a time when visual veracity is very much in the news — think Fox News substituting protest footage to hype a Michele Bachmann rally — Schubert’s question is not inconsequential. In a high-stakes affair like “Deadly Falls,” shouldn’t the image that took up a fifth of Sunday’s front page be from an actual Minnesota nursing home?

Major disclaimer before we go further: My wife has done legal work for Ecumen. (Conflicts again; for more, see last week’s column.) Schubert didn’t know that when he wrote me, but he does now. I’m pretty sure I’d be writing about this anyway, since stock-photo issue is a new and interesting one to me.

The Strib did credit Milert and istockphoto on its front page, but credit text is small and not next to the photo. “I'm struck how every other front-page photo in this DEADLY FALLS series featured a photo caption with real people,” Schubert wrote. “I do not think in this case that a little attribution ‘istockphoto.com’ is sufficient.”

(By the way, the credit on the web version is simply “Star Tribune.” [Update: They fixed it.])

Schubert adds, “The Star Tribune has worked on this story for months. They used other ‘real’ photos. Why couldn't they use a real photo that they shot on the front page as they kicked off the story?”

Cory Powell, the Strib’s managing editor overseeing presentation, says there’s a simple reason for that: “Homes we contacted for access said no.”

Schubert isn’t buying it. “They ran a photo [Tuesday] of a guy in a nursing home. They ran photos of families every day. They could have run any of those photos” on the front page.

Powell says there’s a reason there, too.

“For the third day of the project, we did indeed run photos from Minnesota facilities. Since the Day 1 [Sunday] story was about the deaths themselves, we didn’t want to use a photo from a nursing home that was doing OK to highlight the deaths. It’s too easy for readers to assume we’re implicating that facility. None of the homes where a fall-related death occurred would allow us in to photograph.”

So did Schubert enable the very situation he now deplores? The Ecumen exec insists he never got a request to photograph the Grand Rapids facility, which is about 190 miles north of the Twin Cities.

Powell acknowledges, "It’s certainly possible we didn’t contact Ecumen. Though we looked statewide at death certificates, we did keep much of the focus closer to the Cities. And with more than 1,000 deaths, we didn’t call every facility for photo permission."

Since I brought up Fox’s chicanery, it’s important to consider just how misleading the Strib’s photo choice actually is.

I don’t disagree with Schubert that the empty wheelchair against a dark background is ominous as hell — after reading the text, you can practically imagine some poor old lady with a busted hip lying nearby.

Then again, the image is pretty generic — Anycarefacility, U.S.A. (or perhaps Anyhospital, Poland). In that, it’s hardly Fox fakery.

It’s also true that stock photos have a long and proud history in American journalism — they’re in newspapers all the time, with no complaints. Powell says stock “aimed to capture a mood, which our designer did quite effectively.”

Still, with my conflict-of-interest noted, I’d judge the Strib guilty of a misdemeanor.

Investigative series are labored over and lawyered precisely because it’s critical to assure the details are true. The wheelchair was not an obvious photo illustration, and not some small stock icon. Perhaps some story targets put up obstacles, but that happens all the time. The Strib has great photographers capable of taking an iconic front-pager both genuine and responsible.

Look, it's far more important Schubert's company makes sure its nursing stations are staffed so an 89-year-old woman with osteoporosis and dementia has her bed alarm heard before she breaks her hip.

But the journalism has to be tidy, too. In our de-monetized age, stock imagery is likely to proliferate, and I worry the next situation won’t be so benign. If nothing else, this low-stakes moment in a high-stakes story is a cautionary tale. To me, it’s not worth falling down what could be a slippery slope.

Paul Demko, a staff reporter for the lefty news site Minnesota Independent, has quit. According to editor Paul Schmelzer, the site is looking for a contract reporter to cover state, local and county politics, so get those applications in, job-seekers.

Demko, a former City Pages staffer, was hired in April 2008 by ex-CP editor Steve Perry, then MnIndy's top guy. Perry resigned last year, and is now managing editor at Politics in Minnesota.

Demko, who has expertise covering St. Paul, among other topics, says he'd been thinking about leaving for awhile, but exits MnIndy "with no bad feelings." He says he has no plans but "possibilites include everything under the sun."

[Note: Editorial page editor Scott Gillespie's comments added below.]

Trust me, I had this little item on my list before Mike Bonafield's Katherine Kersten interview today ... though it somewhat informs that.

Last week, City Pages' Kevin Hoffman noted a Star Tribune op-ed response to Kersten's infamous gay-marriage column with, shall we say, a little extra disdain.

As it turns out, an even better example came out a few days later, in very same Strib op-ed section. L.K. Hanson's "You Don't Say" cartoon, featured above, sports a caricature that looks more than a little like Kersten.

The big-mouthed figure utters phrases like "Feminists have ruined things for ladies like me" while sitting under an Oscar Wilde quote that reads, "I have never come across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity."

Though no names are mentioned, Hanson — a retired Strib graphic artist — says, "As far as I'm concerned, let's just say you're not the first person to notice" the resemblance. It's not the first time Hanson has been accused of taking shots at Kersten in the Strib's pages.

By the way, Hanson, like Wilde, is openly gay. The opposition to Kersten might, as Bonafield indicates, be "liberal rage" or Strib groupthink, but sometimes, it's just that she's messing with people's lives.

Update: Fair is fair; I had my cheeky little headline, but editorial page editor Scott Gillespie wanted to make sure there's no doubt about his position on Kersten:

We’re definitely not conducting a “war on Kersten,’’ as your headline states. Katherine provides a perspective that adds to the diversity of opinion on our pages, whether the Editorial Board agrees with her positions or not. She consistently serves up strong, often controversial columns, and we value her contributions.

As for counterpoints: We’ve always felt that our central role is to host the debate, which means giving space to those who disagree with our views or those of our regular contributors. Katherine wrote an especially provocative column. We felt the parody was a creative and equally provocative response. L.K.’s pointed cartoon, as always, represents his own opinions.

Let’s be clear: Minnesota Public Radio’s $5 million grant from an anonymous donor for “enterprise” reporting is a great thing, a nifty boost for local reporting in an increasingly de-monetized era.

We don’t have many details yet about the grant — MPR CEO Bill Kling won’t disclose the donor’s name — or how precisely it will be spent. Chris Worthington, MPR’s Managing Director of Regional News, wasn’t much interested in talking after Monday’s announcement.

So how much can $5 million improve MPR?

Let’s start by noting how much $5 million really is. Taken in a lump, it would fund the Star Tribune’s newsroom for roughly three months.

But the money won’t be spent that way. MPR Public Relations manager Christina Schmitt terms it an endowment. The safest assumption is that the $5 million principal would basically be preserved, and Worthington’s newsroom will get the investment income. Let’s call the return 5 percent, which works out to $250,000 or so annually. Depending on expenses and reportorial experience, you could be talking three or four reporters.

That’s not enough for a news revolution, but working at MinnPost, I can tell you it’s enviable. And the reporter corps might turn out to be bigger than that, if MPR uses the $5 million as seed money to lure other donors.

In my live chats and tweets, I’ve loudly proclaimed MPR should use the money on stories that frog-march bad guys in jail. In 40 years, that sort of high profile, high-impact investigation has never really been MPR’s style. But if public radio is truly in the big leagues now — Strib board chair Mike Sweeney forecasts MPR as his big-media rival — the public should demand Pulitzer-quality takedowns once in awhile.

Yes, MPR has won investigative awards — 2007’s “Toxic Traces,” about 3M pollution, is a good example. But Kling’s management culture — so expert at netting trustees with interlocking corporate connections — doesn’t excel at aggression, even though there are news-gatherers inside pining for more of it. Too often, public radio’s indelible decorum — its blessing, and curse — turns investigations into explainers, and impact into uh-huhs. (MPR is hardly alone in that department.)

All the money in the world won’t change limp top-down directives — NewsQ? Really? — but existential threats might. Despite the Strib’s recent upward revision of MPR’s web traffic, the site isn’t a killer, even though management has made it a priority. MPR is adding the Minnesota Today news aggregator, which is good, but it won’t improve top-end reporting. Bolder, original content is the key. After all, MPR already has the dutiful market.

That’s why I was somewhat depressed when Kling announced the grant was for “enterprise reporting,” not “investigative reporting.”

The terms are all a bit squishy, but “enterprise” means stories not spoon-fed via press releases, news conferences, or breaking-news ambulance-chasing. Basically, stuff you unearth yourself, even if you’re working off of breaking news. Enterprise can include investigations, but can also be forgettable mush of unique flavor.

Hopefully, Worthington hears “investigations,” when Kling says “enterprise,” though it should be said that enterprise can be great. MPR had a perfect example earlier this month: Sasha Aslanian’s story on 1,250 undocumented janitors “quietly” losing their jobs, which showcased a hidden story of massive family upheaval and Obama-era immigration enforcement. You can make a case that week-in, week-out scoops are better than the months-long, homer-or-strikeout investigative efforts newspapers attempt.

Despite the Strib’s teeth-baring, MPR’s newsroom remains relatively small; its reporting corps numbers in the 20s while the Strib tops 100. MPR has beat reporters who can beat the dailies — Laura Yuen on Somali issues, Tom Scheck on politics, Lorna Benson on H1N1. But too often MPR editors follow the papers, or defer to wire services on big, breaking stories that should be public radio naturals. For example, today’s NewsQ piece on Hennepin County Medical Center’s $25 million cut — with a potential massive dislocation for indigent clinic users — comes from the Associated Press.

Endowment-funded reporters — working on unique stuff, available for big stuff — could plug many such holes.

MPR has other newsroom needs. While many reporters are conversant in computer-assisted reporting, MPR doesn’t have a permanent full-time CAR specialist, a la Glenn Howatt at the Strib. Think of how that person could buttress a beat reporter, working a unique angle on a breaking story.

There have been times this week when I’ve wondered whether Sweeney and Kling are working in cahoots: Sweeney gets points inside the Strib for flashing a fighting spirit; Kling gets to project the image of a growing organization.

But for MPR, it’s not quite that simple. The newsroom no longer has a researcher, a newsroom coordinator, or as many newscasters. Redeploying resources web-ward may make sense, but Worthington has faced more tough choices than the recent headlines (including mine) indicate. And, like any manager, he has to worry his bosses won’t claw back the $250,000 by cutting his budget elsewhere, or by re-labeling existing expenses as endowment-funded.

I’ve brushed up against Worthington enough to know he has an edge to him; his importation of several Pioneer Press reporters in the last couple of years marks him as a change agent. But MPR — its leaders, editors and reporters — need to demonstrate more of that Pioneer Press bulldog spirit, online if not on-air, especially if Kling wants his troops to be the Strib’s true rival.

I've only met Pioneer Press photographer Ben Garvin once, but he sure seems like a nice fellow. And combing through the pages of "Ant Farm," his new collection of PiPress photographs, you won't have any reason to doubt his humanity.

Garvin captured images like the one above, adding micro-interviews that have just the right touch — not cutesy, not condescending. He calls them "glimpses of daily life in Minnesota," but they really stay with you longer than that. Earlier this year, I noted his human touch in this video he did to help homeless youth.

So now it's time to give a good guy two good plugs. Garvin has a gallery show and book-signing tonight (Thursday), 4:30-6 p.m. at the Pioneer Press, 345 Cedar Street, St. Paul, and you can order the book via Ben's website — look for the "Ant Farm" menu item. He'll also be at the Border's in Rosedale, 7-9 p.m. Friday.

All of you crying racism, SHUT YOUR F---ING MOUTHS. Just shut the f--k up. None of us care, or want to hear it anymore. These little N---ERS need to be lynched. Period. Racism is the only logical answer to a community of blacks that feel they can get away with anything. And don't bullshit me that "ohh white suburban kids would do the same things." I guess you've never been to a suburban black community. It's not the same, and crime rates ARE higher. Blacks represent less than 15% of the population but commit nearly 50% of the violent and property crime. Call me a racist, it's a moniker I'm proud of.

Tuesday morning, City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman was on Twitter when he noticed people linking to a YouTube video of eight men knocking people off bikes, chasing kids, and punching people. He alerted one of his bloggers, Hart Van Denburg, who whipped off an item about it, with the embedded video.

The perps were black, probably Somali. At 2:34 p.m., the comments started rolling in. By the next morning, MinnPost blogger Max Sparber tweeted that there were 9 25 comments with the n-word and 25 explicitly racist/anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim ones, amid a rip-roaring debate about CP’s sensationalism.

Welcome, folks, to another episode of the Comment Cesspool.

At a time when the Strib has stepped up comment moderation, CP has gone the other way. Hoffman says that approximately a year ago, corporate owner Village Voice Media decreed that comments would be posted automatically, rather than filtered by staff.

Critics see CP’s let-alone attitude as an especially noxious example of a “made-you-look” web strategy that emphasizes cheap web hits rather than original reporting, context and curation good journalism should provide.

While it might seem excruciatingly obvious that posting video of wilding black men would provoke less-than-reasoned discussion, the n-fest apparently snuck up on Hoffman. He says he and Van Denberg had gone home by the time the epithets rolled in, after 5 p.m. When Hoffman saw the Twitter criticism the next morning, he instructed staffer Ward Rubrecht to pull the worst comments.

But given VVM’s open-door policy, you can’t bar the door to hate: even after the initial expungement, the comment at the top of this piece was posted at 11:50 a.m. Wednesday. (The dashes are mine.)

Hoffman says Internet discussions happen in real time, and he and VVM agree that’s how CP comments should flow. The editor says this is only the second time the policy has proved problematic on the news side; the first involved the murder of a child.

“Like it or not, when they say speech wants to be free, it’s not just pretty speech,” Hoffman says.

Still, some readers expect sites with editors to, well, edit. That’s a big reason the Strib started moderating its comments — because knuckleheads were damaging the brand. The Minneapolis paper turned off comments in its stories on the video.

Hoffman says he would not turn off CP's comment thread. One of the virtues: the potential for tips when folks were trying to identify the perps, and their victims.

The Pioneer Press took middling route between the Strib and CP. Its discussion (hosted by third-party provider Topix) contains no n-words — likely the result of a server-side filter. Still, there are plenty of “send ‘em back” and a little “string ‘em up.” Folks with opinions: Is that a huge improvement over CP’s threads?

City Pages is an alt-weekly, and its brand is different.

Hoffman noted that his audience is younger — 18 to 34, or perhaps 44. “Maybe a little more used to the Internet; they don’t need things sanitized,” he said, calling the controversy “a tempest in a teapot; if you’re using the Internet, this is not something you haven’t seen before.”

I asked the editor there was a bottom-line benefit to hosting such garbage.

He said no — that the bulk of the traffic came from the original item, not the comments themselves. But he does acknowledge a potential cost; Sparber, who co-writes MinnPost’s Daily Glean, threatened to link to CP less. If other aggregators follow, there’s a remote chance traffic would dip. Then again, there are probably many more sites anxious to link to the hot stuff.

I asked Hoffman if anything would change as a result of the incident.

He acknowledged there are "certain basic norms," adding, "Our policy in the past, when we had pre-approved comments, was not to publish anything with racial or homophobic slurs, or threats of violence, or that’s potentially libelous. ... In the future, we’ll be more sensitive, now that we’ve seen it happen.”

Since corporate policy likely won’t change, that means after-the-fact removal as soon as a 15-person staff can get to it. Hoffman encourages folks to email the paper if they see something that should be removed.

Shaping up like MPR day in this corner ...

On Monday, several of us questioned the web-traffic numbers in the Star Tribune's story on Minnesota Public Radio. The paper reported that MPR and MinnPost were "neck and neck," with MPR having 251,000 page views and 67,000 unique users, according to Nielsen NetView.

I can tell you, that shocked even those of us on the Hometown Team: we're plucky, but were we really matching the public-radio behemoth's much-promoted web site?

Sure enough, the Strib corrected itself Wednesday: "Minnesota.publicradio.org averages about 4.3 million page views a month and 180,670 unique users a month, based on Nielsen's NetView service."

Page-view-wise, they were only off by a factor of 17 — and no, I don't think any anti-MPR conspiracy was afoot, even though board chair Mike Sweeney ripped Bill Kling's operation in print and at Monday's Future of News forum. Mistakes happen, as my regular readers know, and corrections are no fun.

For what it's worth, our guys assert our Nielsen stats are low, too, but not that low. We're currently at about 820,000 monthly page views and 233,000 unique users, according to Google Analytics. Page view-wise, that's not close to MPR, and Google Analytics is not Nielsen. Still, I'd encourage our side to vet our Nielsens too, even though we don't subcribe to the service.

Later today (I hope), I'll have more about MPR's $5 million reporting grant, announced Monday at the Future of News conference, and what I think it means for the local infosphere.

Until then, newsies and fellow travelers should check out this take from Ken Doctor — one of the conference's presenters, and a former Pioneer Press news exec and now an industry analyst and author.

Doctor's jumping-off point is Star Tribune board chair Mike Sweeney's declaration that MPR will be the Strib's number-one competitor, arguing that Sweeney "might have left more worried" had he heard Bill Kling's Tuesday pronouncements. Kling notes that public radio has all the tools to be an "alternative media company" that supplants faltering newspapers. Doctor then catalogs broader news moves from National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

At the same time, Doctor notes — wisely, I think — that MPR's newsroom remains relatively small compared to the dailies, and the organization relatively bureaucratic. (How efficiently will those reporting dollars show up on the web page, or the air?) Another real problem: the Internet is a level playing field that MPR, for all its history and breadth, hasn't come close to commanding. Doctor downplays the controversy over taxpayer funding, and encourages the moguls to retract their claws and more creatively expand the infosphere.

"My suggestion and challenge for them all: Before you go to the mattresses, in a war of words and attrition, look to how you can collectively use the new tools of the trade — smart content management, cross-promotion, win-win aggregation, pro-am bridges, smart syndication, regional sales networks and more — to produce more worthy-of-Lake Wobegon above-average journalism, rather than less."

The Associated Press — which has been laying off folks nationwide Tuesday — did not let go anyone from its Twin Cities bureau. With pink slips still flying throughout the profession, their absence, as Sherlock Holmes might say, qualifies as news.

As cash-bleeding newspapers have complained about the wire service's pricing and threatened to cancel contracts, AP has pledged to cut global payroll costs 10 percent, according to rival AFP.

The Star Tribune gave AP its cancellation notice last year, but I expect it will pull that back before next summer's drop-dead date, in part because the paper has an AP board member on its new board. The Strib could've terminated the AP contract even earlier in bankruptcy proceedings this year, but chose not to.

Because you know our very own ex-pat New York Times media writer could dominate this potential HBO project like James Gandolfini did.