Editorial: Nonprofit expands on a leap of faith

Nov 26, 2009 at 06:23 PM

The construction supervisor putting the finishing touches on Open Arms of Minnesota's new headquarters still shakes his head in amazement as he recalls the nonprofit's decision to sign a building contract last January.

Minneapolis-based Open Arms -- which provides meals to those struggling with AIDS, breast cancer and other debilitating illnesses -- had launched an ambitious $8 million fundraising campaign when the economy was still humming along in May 2007. Seven months later, the economy had tanked, nonprofits across the nation were suspending similar campaigns and Open Arms was still $3 million short of its goal.

The gutsy nonprofit signed the deal with Watson-Forsberg Construction anyway. It was a leap of faith taken in the teeth of the Great Recession, one worth noting and celebrating. The spacious new building rising in Minneapolis' Phillips neighborhood is a testament not only to the importance of Open Arms' mission, but to the continuing generosity of Minnesotans in seriously tough times.

Between 1997 and 2007, charitable giving increased 67 percent in the state, according to the Minnesota Council on Foundations. Officials don't yet have data from all of 2008, so it's unclear if Minnesotans continued to open their wallets as the recession deepened. But Open Arms' success -- it has $75,000 left to raise by the end of the year to secure matching grants -- is a promising indicator that Minnesotans remain committed to helping those less fortunate in the communities around them.

Last week came another welcome reminder of that dedication. For 24 hours beginning on Nov. 17, thousands of Minnesotans went online during "Give to the Max Day,'' raising $14 million through GiveMN.org for 3,400 organizations across the state. That amount eclipsed by a mind-boggling $10 million the previous one-day national record set in Texas for such events.

This year, many Minnesotans may find themselves wondering if they can afford to continue holiday giving traditions. The reality is that it's never been more important. Soaring unemployment, skyrocketing health care costs and state cutbacks are straining the state's churches, food banks and other nonprofits. Down-on-their luck family, friends and neighbors may have joined the ranks of those who need these organizations' help.

Even if you're grappling with your own budget cutbacks, there are ways to make a difference. Smaller donations are still welcome. A volunteer's time remains one of the most meaningful gifts and increasingly is the key to many organizations' operations. At Open Arms, for example, about 1,400 volunteers regularly chop vegetables, cook, wash dishes and deliver meals. They'll play a crucial role in the months and years ahead as the new building's space, equipment and expansive refrigerated spaces (for storing meals and donated food) enable Open Arms to grow from serving 600 clients a week to more than 1,000.

Open Arms will hold a ribbon-cutting on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day, to herald the new building's opening in early 2010. Executive director Kevin Winge never doubted the decision to plunge forward instead of hunkering down. Bad times really do bring out the best in people, he said, and Open Arms' mission tapped into that. Said Winge: "In the best of times, everyone understands the need to eat. In the worst of times, there's an even greater connection with core human needs.''

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Jean K. Quam: American Dream lives on at the U

JEAN K. QUAM| Nov 26, 2009 at 06:23 PM

In her Nov. 22 column, Katherine Kersten suggested that the future of teacher preparation at the University of Minnesota will be a process of ideological indoctrination denouncing "the American Dream." Just the opposite is true. The American Dream lives and thrives in the College of Education and Human Development.

The college is engaged in a significant rethinking of its teacher education programs, and its main focus is on improving student learning across Minnesota. The Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, with support from education partners throughout the state, will be a national model for preparing teachers for the real challenges of a 21st-century classroom.

We do not take a narrow view of who is an American and who can achieve the dream. We expect and require that teachers of the next half-century take a broad, balanced view of that dream.

As the premier public research institution in the state, the university is uniquely positioned to develop this initiative by connecting ongoing research to teacher preparation programs and to partnerships with school systems in the state. We recognize that now is a critical time to address barriers to student achievement and to give teachers and administrators the tools they need to be effective.

The proposal for this initiative has taken more than a year to develop and has included the work of more than 50 faculty members and Minnesota educators. Seven task groups collected wide-ranging ideas last summer on important areas that inform the initiative: families and communities; special education; technology standards; English language learners; reading; assessment and learning; and race, class, culture and gender. Reports generated by these task groups are not policy, but a set of working ideas brought forward for discussion. The broader scope of the teacher education curriculum will be much more comprehensive than any one set of ideas and is still under development.

Kersten's primary concern is that the initiative addresses the reality of how issues of race, class, culture and gender play out in classrooms and affect student achievement. Her position is that discussion of these issues equates to indoctrination. Our belief is that acknowledging these issues is essential to teacher and student success and that ignoring them will not make them go away.

Research indicates that teachers need to understand that teaching encompasses a range of knowledge and skills, including the teaching of subject matter, shaping teaching processes to build on cultural repertoires and varying abilities of students, and collaboration with other professionals and parents.

The National Academy of Education has outlined key curricular areas for teacher preparation programs, including preparing teachers to work with diverse learning populations. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards also holds as one of its core propositions that teachers are committed to respecting the cultural and family differences students bring to the classroom.

A teacher with expert subject knowledge but without skills to connect with students or to be flexible and inventive in the classroom is an ineffective teacher. Under the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, teacher candidates, regardless of background, will learn how to adapt to diverse learning situations and to diverse learning needs among their students.

We value diversity and encourage exploration of all viewpoints and ideologies. This was recognized by both the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education in its 2006 evaluation of the college and by the Minnesota Board of Teaching.

The Teacher Education Redesign Initiative is not about narrowing teacher preparation along a particular ideology; it's about creating innovative models that allow our teachers to succeed and to in turn cultivate the potential of their students. That means opening up the possibilities of the American Dream to all students.

Jean K. Quam is dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development.

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Washington Post: Russia's claims about ending corruption have a fatal flaw

FROM AN EDITORIAL IN THE WASHINGTON POST| Nov 26, 2009 at 06:21 PM

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg. restaurant.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev keeps giving speeches about ending the lawlessness and corruption that have overtaken his country. That would be encouraging -- except that Russians who try to act on the president's words keep turning up dead.

The latest victim of what Medvedev calls "legal nihilism" is Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer and father of two who was reported to have died last week in a Moscow prison, after more than a year of detention without charge.

Magnitsky was working for Hermitage Capital Management, once one of the largest foreign investors in Russia. After its high-profile American-born owner, William F. Browder, was banned from the country four years ago, a criminal group including senior police and security officials took over several of the firm's Russian holding companies and used them to steal $230 million in government funds, according to the company.

After Magnitsky presented evidence implicating Interior Ministry officials in the theft, he was arrested by those same officials, denied bail and held in increasingly harsh conditions until his death. As the head of his law firm noted, Magnitsky's death was, in one way or another, brought about by the Russian authorities whose corruption he sought to expose.

Browder was once conspicuous in his loud defense of Medvedev's mentor, Vladimir Putin, even after the persecution and imprisonment of the country's biggest private businessman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Once authorities turned on Browder, revoked his visa and drove his business out of the country, Putin publicly denied that he had ever heard of the famous investor.

From London, Browder has been doing his best to expose Russian corruption and to warn foreign investors; he even produced a YouTube video about "how companies are stolen, criminals take over banks and murderers dictate to judges." Now he will have to add the death of his own lawyer to that litany.

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Chicago Sun-Times: Oprah success story rivals fiction

Nov 26, 2009 at 06:19 PM

Photo by Associated Press

Oprah Winfrey taping segments for “The Oprah Winfrey Show” at the Texas State Fair on Oct. 12: She’s lived her dreams and more.

Oprah Winfrey has said one of her favorite books growing up was "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn" by Betty Smith, a novel about a smart girl with a big heart who blossoms beautifully in a world of poverty, violence and family disintegration.

This makes perfect sense.

In obvious ways, she could not be more different from the novel's heroine, "Francie Nolan." Oprah is African-American, not Irish-American. She grew up poor in rural Mississippi and a poor corner of Milwaukee, not in a crowded Brooklyn tenement. Her father was absent altogether, not stumbling home drunk at night.

But in "Francie," Winfrey surely saw herself -- the girl who yearned, the girl who rushed ahead, the girl inclined to see the good in others.

Chicago got lucky. More than 25 years ago, all that passion and brains brought Winfrey to our city, where she first hosted a little TV talk show that has grown into a global media empire.

And, dare we say, Winfrey got lucky. She landed in a town that has helped keep her grounded -- as much as any billionaire can be grounded -- by filling her audiences with armies of sensible Midwestern women who have dreams of their own.

She has been a cheerleader for hard work, for a healthy sense of self-esteem, for giving back, for good books. She has been a role model for millions of people, but especially for women and girls -- and most especially for African-American women and girls.

She has changed race relations in America for the better, simply by being herself, paving the way for the nation's first black president. It's hard to be a white bigot when this woman you see on TV every day feels like a girlfriend.

But now her show is winding down -- she announced last week she's calling it quits in 2011.

We wish her well, just as every reader wishes "Francie Nolan" well at the end of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."

Just as Oprah Winfrey has wished us all well -- and has done something about it.

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

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George F. Will: Before you go out shopping, consider this:

George F. Will| Nov 26, 2009 at 06:22 PM

Another hurricane is about to slam America, destroying billions of dollars of value. Another Katrina? No, another Christmas.

This voluntary December calamity is explained in a darkly amusing little book that is about the size of an iPhone. "Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays" comes from a distinguished publisher, Princeton University Press, and an eminent author, Joel Waldfogel of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school. He says that the crux of Yuletide economics, which common sense suggests and research confirms, is:

Gifts that people buy for other people are usually poorly matched to the recipients' preferences. What the recipients would willingly pay for gifts is usually less than what the givers paid. The measure of the inefficiency is the difference between the yield of satisfaction per dollar spent on gifts and the yield per dollar spent on recipients' own purchases.

By calculating the difference between the consumption of holiday goods (e.g., jewelry, but not gasoline) in December as opposed to November and January, you get a rough estimate of Christmas spending. Waldfogel's conservative estimate is that in 2007, Americans spent $66 billion on gifts and produced $12 billion less satisfaction than would have been produced if the recipients had spent the $66 billion on themselves.

At least the Christmas stimulus strengthens the economy, right? Wrong, says Waldfogel. If all spending justified itself, we would pay people to dig holes and then refill them -- or build bridges to unpopulated Alaskan islands. Spending is good if the purchaser, or the recipient of a gift, values the commodity more than he does the money it costs. Otherwise, there is a subtraction from society's store of value.

Christmas etiquette involves composing one's face to feign pleasure when unwrapping an unwelcome windfall -- say, a sweater of an appalling color and style. Price of the sweater: $50. Value to recipient: $0.

But, you say, what about sentimental value? Don't you value the thoughtfulness of dotty Uncle Ralph who gave you the sweater? Actually, Ralph's sentiment in selecting it was like your sentiment when you selected for him the candle shaped like Gandhi -- desperate bewilderment about what he might like.

Were it not for sentimentality about sentiments, which are highly overrated, we would behave rationally, giving cash, thereby avoiding value subtraction. Cash for Christmas, or semicash in the form of gift cards, no longer seems so tacky. Gift card sales are about one-third of Christmas spending and rank near the top of lists of preferred gifts. Grandmothers, especially, should give cash to grandchildren.

A tenth of gift cards' values, worth billions of dollars, are never redeemed. Waldfogel proposes that after a year, gift cards expire and the unredeemed values be given to charities. Furthermore, he says, particularly for the rich or ascetic person who has everything he or she wants, why not gift cards usable only for charities? Some organizations (e.g., Charity Navigator and charitygiftcertificates.org) facilitate this.

"There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got." So said Harriet Beecher Stowe-- in 1850.

Waldfogel says every generation thinks it invented both sex and Christmas excess. But retail sales statistics demonstrate that the "Yuletide bump" was a larger share of GDP in 1935. Data from 1919 actually show that Christmas sales as a share of the economy is about half as large as it once was. This means proportionally less value subtraction.

Hallelujah.

George F. Will's column is distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group.

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Letter of the day: Grant shows football coaching is about culture building

Nov 26, 2009 at 06:17 PM

Photo by Star Tribune

Eden Prairie head football coach Mike Grant.

ERIC SCHUBERT, INVER GROVE HEIGHTS

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Readers Write for Friday, Nov. 27

Nov 26, 2009 at 06:15 PM

CUTS AT HCMC

I read with interest recent articles about the Hennepin County Medical Center. I first went to HCMC as a 10-year-old with no job or insurance, but I was given excellent care. It has remained my choice for clinic and hospital care for almost 40 years, even though I have health insurance and could go elsewhere. Why? Because of the superior care and tremendous doctors and nurses.

Many years ago, I was brought into the HCMC emergency room after midnight, by ambulance, for a life-threatening asthma attack. Dr. Dave Plummer stayed by my bedside talking to one of my clinic doctors, Dr. Con Iber, who was at home, on the phone for hours until I was out of the woods. Dr. Scott Davies has been my pulmonary doctor for close to 30 years. When I was having severe asthma attacks for no apparent reason, he dug through all the research to come up with answers, and my asthma has been under control now for more than a decade.

I am but one of thousands of people who owe their lives to the fine doctors and nurses at HCMC. The loss of staff and programs at HCMC will hurt not only the uninsured, but all of us.

BAZILLA (BUZZY) BOHN, MINNEAPOLIS

HCMC, the care provider of last resort for our county's poorest brothers and sisters, is forced to cut hundreds of jobs. A food assistance program for citizens with special dietary needs is cut. Spokesmen for the governor say that there "might" be other programs available to supplement these peoples' needs, and that these cuts were "necessary in order to balance the state's budget."

The level of callousness and indifference these actions and statements exhibit is appalling, even more so because they were deemed "necessary" solely to serve a political agenda.

And the man responsible wants to be president? And the legislators who enabled him want to be reelected?

People of conscience, take note. We can and must do better.

ALAN HUSBY, MINNEAPOLIS

EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE

The best way to direct limited resources

Americans need to understand that we have a limited supply of money to spend on health care. The use of evidenced-based medicine allows us to direct these funds to tests and treatments that provide the greatest benefit to the largest number of patients.

The anger expressed when new evidence contradicts long-held beliefs is misguided. The new breast cancer guidelines simply suggest we may be able to save more lives by applying that money to other tests or treatments. Patients who feel they need a test that is not recommended may still receive that test by paying out of their own pockets.

DON ANDERSON, MAHTOMEDI

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Typically, the federal government is taking a backward, costly approach to providing "affordable" health care. Paying for this boondoggle with fees on insurers, pharmaceutical companies and medical device companies simply drives up the cost of health care, while doing nothing to address the already high price for insurance.

Economists have long advised that government subsidies for medical education, drug development and medical equipment could significantly lower the cost to provide medical care, with a subsequent drop in rates for insurance.

And where are the provisions that would impact medical malpractice? It is no secret that much of the testing and other medical practices patients undergo are designed to protect doctors from malpractice suits. Unnecessary use of medical practitioners and expensive equipment accounts for a huge portion of the health care burden.

The officials elected to serve Americans are forcing on us a health care system burdened with top-heavy costs at the outset. While we all would like to see health care coverage for all citizens, the means do not justify this end.

TIM CONAWAY, MAPLE GROVE

Northstar rail

If train's not running, try an express bus

Jill Burcum's Nov. 22 column about the new Northstar rail line said that because of the Northstar's "inflexible" schedule, she went back to fighting traffic en route to and from work.

I wonder if Burcum has ever used Metro Transit's express bus service, since there are bus routes that run through Coon Rapids, one of which operates during off-peak hours. Even though buses use the same roads as regular vehicle traffic, they are authorized to use shoulders if traffic slows down. Burcum's other option would be to find a different route to work that avoids the one she normally uses.

Just some advice from a one-time bus rider.

DANIEL WICHT, FRIDLEY

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Editorial: 'A thing of the heart and not of the lips'

Nov 25, 2009 at 10:04 PM

Photo by Hulton Archive via Getty Images

A family sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, circa 1935.

As another year draws to a close, the people of the United States are once more united in the observance of a day of thanksgiving. According to the adjurations of the official proclamation of the day, it is one on which a nation and its people "give thanks to an almighty God for the blessings of life." Being thankful is a thing of the heart and not of the lips, and how fully we enter in the deeper spiritual significance of the day cannot be measured in our faithfulness to the outward habiliments of a holiday that by custom and tradition we delight to honor. ...

[T]he spirit of thanksgiving and the gift of a thankful nature is not a matter of official holiday or presidential proclamations. These are individual gifts the lack of which cannot be supplied by exhortation. The gifts of thankfulness, of sincerity and of humility are unevenly distributed and find devious ways of expressing themselves. None of us is completely lacking in this respect, but the lives of some are richer in these qualities than others. Frequently it is those whose material comforts are the most meager who are really the most appreciative of the few good things that have come to them.

The day, having become a fixed part of American tradition, has lost none of its freshness or any of those qualities which are part of our aspiration as a nation. It calls to the mind of the nation the sturdy faith of the Pilgrim fathers. It reminds the American people of the deeper spiritual blessings of life which the events of the moment make it so easy to forget. In prosperity as well as in adversity it calls upon the nation to give thanks for those things which can forever be ours and to cherish those loftier aspirations which the finest idealism in our life, as a nation, has sought to express.

However imperfectly we, as a people, may fulfill the challenge which a national day of thanksgiving throws down to us, these annual summonings are one of the golden threads that run through our national life. It is well to be reminded, as we are by President Roosevelt's Thanksgiving proclamation, that "during the past year we have been given courage and fortitude to meet the problems which have confronted us in our national life. Our sense of social justice has deepened. We have been given vision to make new provisions for human welfare and happiness, and in a spirit of mutual happiness we have co-operated to translated vision into reality. More greatly have we turned our hearts and minds to things spiritual. We can truly say, 'what profiteth it a nation if it gain the whole world and lose its own soul.' With gratitude in our hearts for what has already been achieved, may we, with the help of God, dedicate ourselves anew to work for the betterment of mankind."

Whether there has been a material deepening in our sense of social justice and whether we as a nation are any more spiritual today than we were a year ago, is not for us to say. Of necessity the eyes of the nation have been centered upon the horizon seeking signs of a material recovery. In the time just past our sense of social and spiritual values has been put to a severe test and how we stood the test the future will be better able to say than can we. Whatever the immediate gains for America as a people and as a nation may have been, the day of Thanksgiving and the spirit in which it is proclaimed should awaken in all of us a deeper sense of gratitude for that which is ours and a finer sense of responsibility in the fulfillment of the promise of American life to every partner in its commonwealth.

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Pamela Hill Nettleton: This tradition, yes, breaks the mold

PAMELA HILL NETTLETON| Nov 25, 2009 at 06:30 PM

“The Parting of the Red Sea” — a recreation in Jell-O.

I stayed up half the night trying to build a tiered wedding cake out of orange gelatin. Engineering problems -- mainly gravity -- obliterated my efforts, and the whole thing splatted like a jellyfish all over the kitchen table. On the other hand, my pastry chef daughter's entry was brilliant. She made clear gelatin from scratch (who knew you could?) in the mold of a B-52, and stuck an itty-bitty plastic superheroine into the pilot seat. Voila! Wonder Woman's invisible plane.

But the winning entry came from Uncle John, who poured blue Jell-O into a fish bowl, submerged a miniature deep-sea diver under the keratin waves, poked Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers and gummy worms down in there at varying levels, and carried a lit votive candle around behind it to cast watery-looking shimmers.

He won, but controversy ensued. Two other uncles had labored mightily to create ring molds of cranberry, lemon and strawberry and pretended to be incensed at Uncle John's sidestepping the "edibility rule"--which, of course, had yet to be written.

"Next year," said my sweet little sister, shaking a finger at Uncle John, "you're goin' down." The Playtex gloves were off, and an annual tradition was born.

One year later, she and her husband duct-taped an 8-foot-long hollow Plexiglas tube to the frozen drainpipe outside their front door, erected a ladder, and set the alarm clock. Every few hours, they woke up, mixed up a fresh flavor of Jell-O, walked outside, climbed the ladder to the top of the tube, and poured another color in to settle atop the already-set layers below. The rainbow Jell-O-meter was born. But it faced stiff competition.

Uncle John designed his own molds out of rope, Styrofoam and who-knows-what to cook up a realistically rendered Jell-O hamburger (with lettuce, tomato, and a Kaiser bun), fries, and a malt. It was a thing of beauty.

Yet he was beat out by my daughter-in-law, Megan, who cooked up gigantic twin Cherry Cokes out of Cherry Coke-flavored Jell-O with Jell-O cherries and Jell-O froth.

Before the turkey comes out of the oven, Jell-O competitors must solemnly parade their entries around the dining room for all to see, accompanied by the strains of Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance." This rule survived only three years. Megan's Jell-O cello licorice strings and frosting f-holes were too fragile for the march. Chris' Emerald City and fields of poppies from "The Wizard of Oz" couldn't be lifted, and Gretchen's life-sized ruby slippers wiggled so much they split in half like the Titanic.

I don't recall the year, but once my husband made champagne-flavored Jell-O out of gelatin sheets and a bottle of something (I hope domestic) he found laying around. From the junk drawer, he unearthed a fiber optic flashlight with long, squid-like plastic fronds. He turned it upside-down, shoved it into the half-set Jell-O, and turned it on. Electric Jell-O. He won. What were the judges thinking?

I've only won once: last year, for my epic "Parting of the Red Sea." An Indiana Jones action figure was Moses and birthday cake pirates wrapped in raffia were the Pharoah's army. OK, so using the Arc of the Covenant was historically inaccurate, but hey, it came in the blister pack with Indiana. The thing took $30 worth of red Jell-O, and like Cecil B. DeMille, I'm not telling how I got the seas to rise up into watery walls to let the children of Israel pass.

The Jell-O competition is now in its something-or-otherth year and has become an essential part of our Thanksgiving tradition. It doesn't hark back to my grandmother in her Iowa kitchen, the way making lefse on Christmas Eve day does for my children. It doesn't conjure up my aunts singing Lutheran hymns in the kitchen the way baking sugar cookies using Aunt Mary's recipe does for me. My ancestors didn't craft mountains out of Jell-O, although cumulatively they probably carried that much of it in aluminum cake pans into church basement suppers. It is a new bud on the ancient tree of generations, our Jell-O competition.

Yet it is in the moving forward that it becomes a tradition for those unborn people who come after us. This Christmas, my first grandchild arrives, and he will never have known a world without the Jell-O competition. To him, "Pomp and Circumstance" won't mean "graduation," but "Uncle John won again!"

Pamela Hill Nettleton is a Minneapolis writer.

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Rex Smith: Sometimes it's silly, the topics that have teeth

REX SMITH| Nov 25, 2009 at 06:28 PM

My day job usually requires me to pick which stories will wind up on our newspaper's front page. Some days the choices are easy, because the topic of a story is vitally important. But sometimes stories get attention because people care deeply about them, even if they don't matter greatly in the scheme of things.

My night and weekend job often involves other stories -- those told by a 14-year-old girl. My daughter has some of the interests you would expect of someone her age, like school sports and friends' adventures. A lot of it doesn't matter much in the long view, either, but dads do their best work when they pay attention.

It was clear months ago that "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" would be a very big deal. A Hollywood-hyped sequel to a blockbuster isn't going to drop lightly into the cultural mix. Nor does an editor have to be the father of a teenager to recognize that a movie generating so much buzz merits coverage in the newspaper.

Is "New Moon" important? I hope not. Climate change, terrorism and disappearing nest eggs have me concerned enough, so I don't have time to worry about the emergence of vampires and werewolves. But topics don't have to be important for people to care about them.

Last week there was another reminder that rational decisionmaking can't fully account for human interest. It came in a story involving an animal, which often will draw attention all out of proportion to the impact that one nonhuman creature could have.

Two men working on the Hudson River dredging project were swept over a dam Tuesday after their small boat capsized. One man drowned. But the focus of what we call the "second-day story" on the front page was on the barking dogs that had alerted a woman who lived on the river that something was amiss. But for those dogs, the second man may have died of hypothermia after crawling out of the water onto an island.

There was another water rescue the same day, when a heroic 52-year-old construction worker from Castleton, N.Y., Steven Jung, pulled a stranger from drowning in the Mohawk River. The Mohawk rescue was published on the cover of our regional section. Alongside that account was another dog story, this one about a Schenectady, N.Y., woman charged with animal cruelty for failing to get medical treatment for a puppy whose leg was broken.

Which story was most important? Which did more people care about? We can't measure readership of newspaper stories, but we do know how many people read articles online. Maybe you can guess the answers.

The story about the barking dogs alerting the woman to the man in peril on the river was the most-read story on our website that day. It drew almost five times the readership as the story about the man being rescued by the construction worker. And the animal-cruelty story got about 50 percent more traffic than the human rescue.

Certainly readers pay attention to stories on topics of substance. But I'm reminded of John Grogan, the newspaperman whose "Marley and Me" became a best-selling book and a movie. His column about the death of his 13-year-old yellow Labrador retriever got more response than anything else he has ever written, Grogan says.

We understand that at our house. Last week was perilous for our hound, who is not yet 3 years old. He hovered near death, victim of a once-rare tickborne illness that has emerged more frequently in this era of warm winters and wet summers. My kid would like you to know that Otter has made a miraculous recovery.

It's a story that I could tell here and make you cry. That's because we read not only with our heads, but also with our hearts.

We can't help what we care about, and there's nothing wrong with a newspaper reflecting that.

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Letter of the day: The trophy is nice, but now Mauer must get the money

Nov 25, 2009 at 06:26 PM

Photo by Star Tribune

Minnesota Twins catcher Joe Mauer posed for a picture with his family after winning the American League’s Most Valuable Player trophy Monday.

JOHN GAMOKE, RICHFIELD

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GEORGE A. FARR, PLYMOUTH

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LOLLIE EIDSNESS, ST. LOUIS PARK

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