by Dan Feidt
Contributed post adapted from Facebook
Shocked to hear that my friend (and publisher for 4.5 years) Sarah Janecek died while doing what she loved, international traveling. The memorial notes about Sarah have not really addressed how good Politics In Minnesota (PIM) actually was (especially in the notoriously sexist fields of media and politics), so I should share a tiny slice.
Sarah hired me on the basis of a single phone call in January 2005 - I was still reeling from Bush getting re-elected and needed to find some political job to correspond to my last semester poli sci class in college.
I got a lot more than that: a full-blown years-long insider education into Minnesota politics and journalism. Until July 2009 I worked on three editions of Politics in Minnesota: The Directory, a thick tome requiring interviews with dozens of state politicians. When there was enough money, I also worked on the Weekly Report and prepped the HTML on Morning Reports.
After she split the business from Blois Olson (in an exciting Friday afternoon battle I totally reversed Blois' attempt to kick us off the digital systems!), Sarah trusted me to build a new Drupal website that weekend. We added new features like a complete legislative election directory, and a Yahoo! Pipes based Capitol Twitter aggregator. She gave us green lights as long as she felt we could "corner" something on the Internet.
She had a lot of faith in me and the others on our scrappy team that we could build a viable model for statehouse Internet news coverage - she totally accepted that this Internet stuff was the future and we knew how to deal with it. Countless times she would work the phones for hours to figure out some story and let me eavesdrop on whatever the PR honchos had to share. If someone at the Capitol knew you were a friend of Sarah's and under the PIM flag, they would often open up and tell you WTF was *really* going on, off the record.
She was a great writer who would turn out excellent pieces on topics that got little attention, and even though I had a totally opposed worldview and ideology, I learned to appreciate the importance she put on gathering the facts, the numbers, putting a substantial analysis and only after that putting the opinion on top.
Our prime directive was to keep digging on topics where the major media was not - and there was always so much to find at the Capitol unreported. We accelerated forwards the Age of Twitter, ever more "in the mix" kind of curving into the event horizon of unfolding news.
Believe it or not, we spent a bunch of time tracking Jared Kushner back then, since it seemed like he was trying to corner statehouse reporting as "Politicker" also using Drupal sites like we were!
Sarah really wanted to give us on staff some economic security, a major reason she sold her businesses to Dolan Media Company. In the deal she personally negotiated a higher salary for me than Dolan's standard reporter package, which I am really thankful for. CEO Jim Dolan knew that our model was vital to the survival of his company.
Working for Sarah at PIM was perhaps the best possible way I could have applied both my poli sci and geography major/minor. Although it was intensely stressful it was also really rewarding to break ahead of the pack.
Sarah and the unstoppable office manager, copy editor and brain of the things, Ricé Davis, always respected me so much up to the minute I walked out the door. If Sarah had not given me that chance then I would basically be ignorant of what really constitutes the political scene and how it works. I decided after PIM I would work commercially in web development because of what we had reported about the state of the media industry itself, but I still worked on noncommercial media projects every year thereafter.
In my life I have usually been reluctant to develop mentoring relationships but in early 2005 I figured I had to do something wildly out of pattern, so I worked for this Republican insider with a great sense of humor, who would grab her desk as if she were on a spaceship spinning out of control, who would make hilarious faces and cross her eyes in reaction to something absurd on a speakerphone convo. (I won't specify Ricé's favorite gesture for the many bloviating males on the phone, but it was wholly appropriate).
I should add one other memory, I sat in on a long and kind of exciting conversation she had with her dear friend David Carr (the NY Times media industry guru). It is bewildering I'm the only person still alive from that convo.
You could not possibly ask for a better mentor in this field, and I am not alone in this conclusion. "Kudos" to you, Sarah, and "Ciao".
Photo: Sarah Janecek (front) and Dan Feidt (standing, second from left). Via Facebook.
A native of Hudson, WI, Dan Feidt lives in Boston, MA, where he works as a full-stack web developer at kor group and CEO/Owner of Dan Feidt Design LLC. He is a founding member of Unicorn Riot, a decentralized, educational 501(c)(3) non-profit media organization of artists and journalists. He asked that Bluestem lightly edit and reprint this memorial.
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