Star tribulations.

In short order, Minneapolis' Star Tribune has experienced an ownership change, two rounds of staff reduction, a top-to-bottom newsroom reorganization--and its publisher is being sued by its archrival in St. Paul, where he used to work. Editor Nancy Barnes is banking on beefed-up suburban coverage and enhanced online offerings to bolster the embattled paper's future.

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Nancy Barnes returns to the charge that she is dumbing down the Star Tribune in Minneapolis as if scratching the bite of one of those fat Mississippi River mosquitoes.

Barnes, the paper's editor, is letting this preoccupation cool a nicely grilled salmon and asparagus at the Atlas Grill, a couple of blocks from the Star Tribune building downtown. The grim talk of the future of newspapers adds a touch of irony to her wearing a bracelet made out of typewriter keys.

It seems all she's done for the past several months is outline her plan for the new Star Tribune. She talks of owning the online market in Minneapolis and St. Paul. She touts the creation of an enterprise team devoted to serious reporting for the region. She reminds people that she resisted breaking up the newspaper's investigative team.

Barnes has said goodbye to 68 newsroom staff members in two buyouts just three months apart. She engineered one of the most ambitious reorganizations of a major metro newspaper in recent years at the same time her publisher, Par Ridder, was being sued by his former employer, Barnes' rival on the other side of the Mississippi River, the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

She is well aware that some of the roughly 330 people who still work for her do not believe their managers can be executioners of the staff and saviors of the paper at the same time. Some think it cold that Barnes planned ahead before their colleagues were shown the door. Others wonder why she said nothing to try to stop some of the best and most recognized talent on the paper from leaving.

As rotten as her first few months have been, Barnes also faces a precarious future. Whatever false comfort Star Tribune staffers once felt at being owned by a company primarily involved in producing newspapers has been torn away by Avista Capital Partners, a New York investment company in the newspaper business for the first time.

Barnes has had to carry on while her publisher is preoccupied with a lawsuit that has many in the community questioning not only his loyalty to the paper but also his honesty. Some see Par Ridder's jump to the Star Tribune as an early signal that one inevitable day the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press will be one newspaper.

And as Barnes attempts simultaneously to remake and stabilize her newsroom, Joel Kramer, the former publisher and editor of the Star Tribune, is looking for investors and considering snapping up the paper's forgotten stars to create a powerful new online news source in the market.

Just now, however, Barnes, 46, can't seem let go of that dumbing down charge. OK, so she reassigned experienced editors and reporters to the suburbs. Can't the critics see this is where readers and potential readers are? Don't they know these people want to know what's going on where they live? But no matter how she explains that the dateline on a story does not dictate the quality of the story, it always comes out the same way.

"I have said it over and over that local doesn't necessarily mean the chicken dinner out of Coon Rapids," Barnes says, stabbing an asparagus tip. "When I say local, I mean owning our market. I mean hard news. I mean enterprise. And, oh, maybe some of those enterprise stories will come out of the suburbs. And still community leaders keep telling me that they think all we are going do is dumb down the paper."

However much it rankles, the skepticism is understandable. Readers have a right to wonder just how, exactly, will the Star Tribune deliver more with less.

It's a question being asked of newspapers throughout the country. Reorganizations have followed newsroom cuts over the past year at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Dallas Morning News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others. In addition to shrinking the payroll, the new alignments feature a heavy emphasis on local coverage and online operations.

Anticipating the criticism that Barnes has endured, Morning News Editor Robert W. Mong Jr. assured his staff that "a more local focus does not mean less sophistication or ambitiousness."

Serving the local or immediate news needs of the people most inclined to read your paper or view it online makes sense, media analyst John Morton says. The suburbs are the last best hope for the Twin Cities newspapers to turn their circulations upward. "Take a look at those weeklies in the suburbs. They are full of advertising," says Morton, who writes a column for AJR. "These are small and medium businesses that have up to now been priced out of the Star Tribune market. The suburbs are up for grabs."

On the morning of June 15, when Star Tribune reporter Jon Tevlin was scheduled to have a cup of coffee with me, he opened the newspaper to find that Avista Capital Partners had sold the Star Tribune's parking lots to the Minnesota Vikings for $45 million.

On top of everything else, talk has been going around that Avista wants to sell the Star Tribune's headquarters altogether and move out of downtown to a cheaper place to operate. Tevlin is sure the staffers who will gather to say goodbye to some of those taking buyouts this afternoon will be talking about the latest surprise move. "We've gone from being a newspaper to being a real-estate opportunity," Tevlin says.

Tevlin is one of the lucky ones, assigned to the enterprise team. He is seen as a newsroom leader. But Tevlin doesn't feel so lucky. Nothing feels right anymore, not in the newsroom, not in the whole news business.

"My friend used to call me. He'd say, 'Let me guess. Morale has never been worse.' It used to be a joke. Now it's true," Tevlin says. "Everybody asks you about it. 'Is your job safe?' For me, in the short term, it is difficult to feel any sort of relief when so many talented colleagues are leaving. For the first time in my career, I'm no longer certain that if you can write and report, there will be a job for you. It's very hard emotionally."

Events have occurred in Minneapolis in such cold succession that they mock emotion.

The Star Tribune was for generations the pride and joy of the Cowles family, who continue to exert an enormous influence on the economy and the culture of the region. Given what was to follow, the warm nostalgia for the Cowles era is understandable. The family sold Cowles Media Co., including the Star Tribune, for $1.2 billion to McClatchy in 1998. If the newspaper had to be sold to a chain, the common wisdom went, you couldn't do much better than McClatchy, with its reputation for putting the newsroom first.

The romance lasted eight years. Gary Pruitt, McClatchy's chairman and CEO, stunned Star Tribune employees the day after Christmas last year by announcing the paper was being sold to a private equity firm in New York, Avista Capital Partners. The billion-dollar company was now a $530 million property. Pruitt explained that McClatchy got a great tax break by selling.

Shortly before the sale was announced, Anders Gyllenhaal, editor of the Star Tribune for almost five years, told his staff he would be leaving in early March to take over as editor of McClatchy's Miami Herald.

A few weeks before Gyllenhaal left, Star Tribune Publisher J. Keith Moyer announced that Nancy Barnes would replace him. Barnes had been a protege of Gyllenhaal's when he was editor of Raleigh's News & Observer, also a McClatchy paper. Gyllenhaal had lured Barnes to Minneapolis to serve as assistant managing editor for business in 2003, and by 2005 she had become a deputy managing editor.

Moyer, effusive in his praise for Barnes on Wednesday, by Friday had had enough of the upheaval. The publisher since 2001, Moyer told his stunned staff that he had no plans for the future, other than to spend more time with his family.

The new owner didn't wait long to spring a dramatic surprise. On March 5, the day Avista officially took over, Christopher Harte, chairman of the Star Tribune Co., convened a company meeting to announce that Par Ridder would start as publisher that very day.

To most people outside Minnesota, Minneapolis and St. Paul are the Twin Cities, as though they are conjoined. But the Mississippi River that separates the two is as much a cultural as a geographical divide. Minneapolis on the west is the corporate, urban hipster while St. Paul to the east is the solid, middle-class working stiff. In a time of tremendous pressure in the marketplace, the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press cling to distinct identities and remain bitter competitors.

Until that Monday, Par Ridder was the publisher of the Pioneer Press. What's more, Ridder was a remnant of the longtime Knight Ridder ownership of the paper. His father, P. Anthony Ridder, engineered the sale of the family business to McClatchy, which in turn sold the Pioneer Press to William Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group.

Ridder explained what had just happened with breathtaking understatement. "Since 1927, my family has been trying to chase the Star Tribune out of St. Paul," the Minneapolis paper quoted Ridder as saying. "And I recognize this is going to take all of us a little time to get used to." Soon after he began, the paper offered 24 buyouts to newsroom employees, two weeks' pay for every year of service up to a year's worth of severance and a six-month extension on health coverage.