With the newspaper business in upheaval, one angle the Star Tribune is playing up internally and externally about new publisher Mike Klingensmith is that he is “entrepreneurial.” A key bit of evidence: he co-founded Entertainment Weekly 20 years ago.

I just got off the phone with Jeff Jarvis, EW’s other co-founder, who worries that Klingensmith might not be entrepreneurial enough.

Jarvis, an associate professor of journalism at the City University of New York, author of the influential Buzz Machine blog and the book "What Would Google Do?", believes Klingensmith fits the Strib in a not-exactly ideal way.

Jarvis, who consults with many big media companies, is perhaps the nation's leading cheerleader for radical organizational change. He says the silver lining of bankruptcies such as the one the Strib just exited is “an opportunity for newspapers to reinvent themselves. But the Star Tribune did not do that. So it fits that they hired a big corporate media person. The future is smaller and networked — a new, sustainable structure that people are trying to invent."

Jarvis contrasts Klingensmith’s resume — three decades at Time, Inc. — with that of John Paton, coincidentally hired today as CEO of the Pennsylvania-based publisher Journal Register.

Paton, Jarvis says, took his previous company, Hispanic media company ImpreMedia “out of printing, out of distribution, all of the things that didn’t add value to the journalism. He did a lot of innovative things, like local blog networks — he’s a brave, strategic thinker. I’m not saying Mike Klingensmith can’ do it, just that the Star Tribune didn’t bring in a brave strategic innovator.”

That said, Jarvis says Klingensmith definitely deserves credit for helping birth EW. Way back when, the magazine was an innovative guide to burgeoning multi-media entertainment options — making sense of clutter, which, if anything, resonates louder today.

“At Entertainment Weekly, the only thing entrepreneurial Time did was let us move out of the building,” Jarvis says with a chuckle. “I’ve seen entrepreneurial and we were not entrepreneurial.

“But Mike is a very smart guy and very good at corporate politics. I say that with respect. The magazine was rejected by Time, Inc. because they thought people who watched TV don’t read. It died and came back to life many times. I’d come up with the idea six years before, and Mike had the same idea, but he had the clout and the credibility to get the magazine through.”

Jarvis did not leave Entertainment Weekly on good terms — in fact, he walked out six months after it launched, one reason he hasn’t talked to Klingensmith since. In 1990, the New York Times reported “Jarvis wanted tough reviews and offbeat subjects to have a prominent place in the magazine, which covers videos, movies, books, music and television” while the brass — Klingensmith was not named — wanted a redirection “toward more of a middle American audience and to bring it into the mainstream of Time Warner's magazine group.”

“There were rough times, and went our separate ways,” Jarvis says.

Jarvis allows that Klingensmith could well have picked up many skills in his Time, Inc. travels, which included a stint as Sports Illustrated's president. The Strib has highlighted SI's move into multi-media as part of Klingensmith's appeal.

Star Tribune board chair Mike Sweeney says that Klingensmith’s big-company experience is not a strike against him. “Mike has creativity and flexibility, but running a big organization is a big piece of what we need here. There’s a lot of innovation to be done, and I know he’ll be a full partner in that.”

Sweeney has also made it clear to anyone who asks that his newspaper is not circling the financial drain, and that bankruptcy was transformational to that. (Even if 100 Strib staffers are in the process of being let go.) Before agreeing to come on board, Klingensmith "needed to make sure that we were dead serious as a board about maintaining quality, and stable financially," Sweeney says.