City Pages and Rake Magazine founder Tom Bartel, who gave countless journalists jobs and spiced up the local media scene, is on the verge of fleeing the country.

The extradition is voluntary. On June 7, Bartel will depart for Quito, Ecuador, where he’ll teach English to businesspeople under the auspices of a company called the Wall Street Institute. It’s the first time the famously independent entrepreneur has drawn a regular paycheck from someone else since 1979, the year he started City Pages predecessor Sweet Potato.

“When people ask me why I’m leaving, I tell them Tom Emmer is the last straw,” Bartel deadpans. “I’m being facetious. Obviously, there are a million reasons to be dissatisfied with Minnesota and the U.S. But I think ever since we sold City Pages, I’ve been looking to move. [Wife and business partner] Kris [Henning] and I spent a year and half in Spain before we started City Pages, teaching English. I speak Spanish, I’ve always had an affinity for the Hispanic culture, and they offered me a job.”

Tom Bartel

Bartel has never lacked for confidence, and since City Pages’ 1997 sale to Stern Publishing, hasn’t really lacked for dough. (The Porsche, he says, was sold off awhile ago.) But since The Rake ceased printing in early 2008, the 58-year-old hasn’t been much of a local media player.

With his kids grown up, it was as good a time as any to ditch his digs in Minneapolis’ Lowry Hill and resume a foreign adventure. Bartel completed the University of Cambridge’s English-teaching course this winter in Costa Rica, receiving his CELTA certification.

Henning will join him in a couple of months, and Bartel says the family’s remaining local-media outpost, Secrets of the City, will be run by editors Cristina Cordova and Kate Iverson.

Asked if he and Henning plan to move back here eventually, Bartel replies, “Oh, I don’t know — it depends; not necessarily. We’ll see how it goes. My idea is to move around the world; there are different opportunities in Turkey, Japan, China — all kinds of places. There are lots of places I want to be.”

The sand in the oyster
Bartel’s exit ends a long chapter in local media history. During a long, fruitful and contentious partnership with editor Steve Perry, City Pages eclipsed the once-dominant local weekly, the Twin Cities Reader, in page count and, arguably, influence. (I worked for both, but as a CP freelancer, didn't have many direct Bartel dealings.)

When Bartel bailed, the masthead also included Monika Bauerlein (now co-editor of Mother Jones), Britt Robson, Dara Moskowitz, Jennifer Vogel, Michael Tortorello, Dan Corrigan, Brad Zellar, Julia Caniglia, Rob Nelson and Will Hermes, among other worthies.

Nearly a decade later, Bartel got several of those names together for The Rake, a monthly aimed at that always-elusive younger-than-55 glossy-mag demographic.

“People said we were crazy to start City Pages and they were wrong; they said we were crazy to start The Rake and they were right,” he quips. “At the end of 2006, it was profitable, and we got ourselves up to 128 pages, but then the recession and media revolution hit, and we started losing money again.”

Winning the alt-weekly war
Henning is often credited as the one who kept things flowing smoothly; Bartel was more, shall we say, the sand in the oyster. (One ex-employee suggested this headline: “Tom Bartel: He’s Ecuador’s problem now.”)

At The Rake, his byline began appearing on cover stories, touting private schools and guns, along with media criticism and political analysis. (He's also written a book, "El Diablo," based on his father.) But in the media biz, job creation often begins with an ego, and even if Bartel's jabs were relentless and he mucked around in editorial more than some editorial employees preferred, they probably would have had less interesting careers without him.

For all the jobs he helped create, Bartel also played a part in killing off the Reader, which had been home to pros like David Carr, Jon Tevlin, Claude Peck and others. Bartel didn’t actually have the blood on his hands — Leonard Stern bought and quickly closed the rival, creating a monopoly that was good for City Pages but bad for readers. Still, Bartel finding a big-money buyer made it less likely that anyone else with serious cash would fund an alt-weekly war. (Phoenix-based New Times, then the likeliest rival, eventually took control of the paper in 2005 as Village Voice Media.)

“I actually counseled Stern not to close the Reader,” Bartel insists. “I thought the backlash in town was not worth the trouble — and besides that, the Reader was going to die anyway. [Then-owner American City Business Journals, had acquired the Reader when it bought what is now the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal. ACBJ didn't own any other alt-weeklies.]

“Here’s what I was afraid of — that someone else would start a strong competitor, so it was good to have the Reader as a weak competitor. But no one did, and things changed considerably in the journalism business. When my brother [Mark Bartel] was running City Pages, it was enormously profitable — I’d count the ads and think, God, those people are shipping a lot of money to New York.”

‘140 characters isn’t exactly Seymour Hersh’
I asked Bartel to assess today’s media environment, where legacy publications are withering but the Internet lowers the barrier to modern-day information insurgents.

“I think it’s infinitely worse,” he quickly shot back. “I don’t think that’s particular to the Twin Cities, but the climate for the media is dreadful, both as a business and from the journalism side as well — and they do go hand in-hand.

“When I see how big City Pages used to be — in the 120-140-page range, and now it’s 72 — and with the Strib going from enormously profitable to bankruptcy, it’s easy to see it’s just a bad media climate and I don’t think there’s any chance in the foreseeable future that online will generate the revenues to support the kind of journalism we’re used to.”

But what about blogs, independent journalists, social-networking? “That’s drivel, 99.9 percent of it,” Bartel said. “140 characters off an iPhone isn’t exactly Seymour Hersh.”

These days, he says his media consumption is limited to the New York Times: “Otherwise, I sit around and read books. I’m way out of the media business and glad to be so. It’s depressing; it’s something I love that has morphed into something that is barely hanging on by its fingernails, often doing stuff that is not interesting. I can’t imagine anything less interesting than the Strib Variety section.”

Different values
Always an expert needler, Bartel turns earnest when contemplating becoming an ex-pat. “It’s a new culture — I can’t say Ecuador is going to be like this, but Costa Rica was just a different mindset. You don’t get up every day and think about work, that ‘What I’m doing is of great importance.’ It’s ‘How am I going to enjoy myself, do something interesting?’

“We spent some time recently in the wine country of Spain, and we spent one Sunday doing what Spanish people do: barhopping. Not like America, where you’re hammered and fall into the gutter. We went to three different bars, had tapas and a glass of wine, 45 minutes to an hour, just sat and talked. It’s a very familial culture — you go with wife and children, all the way down to the babies. Everybody in Spain takes a walk in the town every evening. It’s just a different life, appreciative of different things. I think it's good for Americans if they spent time outside of this blessed country."