Local Television Absorbs City Pages' Aaron Rupar

   

Aaron Rupar first caught my eye with his blogging at City Pages some years ago. Left or right, democrat or republican, if a story had legs, or he could provide it with some, you saw it written up on City Pages' Blotter in a style not seen in Minnesota journalism. We've never met.

This was fresh in a state overwhelmingly stale; it wasn't hard for me to smell fresh.

Mary Franson? We're so old we can remember when I was her only friend. True fact.

Or the in-front-of-our-eyes-brilliance of photographer Glen Stubbe, who, if memory serves and it does, I pretty much first championed?

I remember meeting him in Amy Koch's kitchen when she was preparing to give her first genuine, post scandal interview to Baird Hegelson of the Star Tribune. By that time Stubbe knew me by my Twitter name. I spoke about his manifest talent then unacknowledged & he thanked me for the noticing of it.

My point is not to champion myself, despite appearances, so much as to say that some things are seen just as easily from afar as from up close.

Over a short time Rupar became mainstreamed in a way I don't think he could have anticipated. Which is to say, more tiresomely and predictably liberal. The more he was, the less he interested me.

Still, when Aaron Rupar was absorbed by television I felt a sense of extinguishment.