User:Jayweiner

Jay Weiner

Jay Weiner, a Minnesota-based journalist, is the author of "This Is Not Florida: How Al Franken Won The Minnesota Senate Recount." Since 2007, Weiner's work has appeared mostly at MinnPost.com, a new-model non-profit news organization based in Minneapolis.

Weiner worked for more than 27 years as a sports reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. There, he covered major league baseball, the Olympics and off-the-field sports issues. For the final 14 years of his career at the Star Tribune, he specialized in the various stadium debates in Minnesota.

With the Star Tribune's finances in a shambles in 2007, Weiner was among a group of dozens of reporters, editors and photographers who took buyouts. He left the newspaper on June 15, 2007.

In November 2008, upon returning from covering the Beijing Summer Olympics, Weiner was asked by editors at MinnPost to "help out" on coverage of the Al Franken-Norm Coleman U.S. Senate recount. Helping out turned into eight months of daily coverage and then his work on "This Is Not Florida," which was published by the University of Minnesota Press in October 2010.

Early life and education Jay Weiner was born in Philadelphia, Pa., on July 2, 1954. His father, Sam, was a meat cutter at a super market. His mother, Hilda, was a bookkeeper at a hospital. His brother, Ed Weiner, is an author and editor at the Philadelphia Daily News.

Weiner graduated from Philadelphia's Northeast High School in 1971; he was sports editor of the school newspaper and played varsity baseball.

He graduated from Temple University in 1975 with a B.A. from the College of Liberal Arts. He attended Oberlin College in Ohio for two years, when he was a sophoore and junior. He was the sports editor of the Oberlin Review. At Oberlin, Weiner was a protege of radical sports sociologist Jack Scott, who was Oberlin's athletic director from 1972-1974.