In Mike Royko's town it's been a while since you boarded a bus or train at rush hour and met the "newsprint curtain." In its day, the wall of newspapers spread eagled in front of intent readers was such an institution, poet Allen Ginsberg satirized it by poking a hole in his paper and peering through.
Nor do most Chicagoans wake up anymore to the Chicago Tribune or Chicago Sun-Times with their cornflakes. Or end the day with the Chicago Daily News and a martini in their easy chair. (Who remembers easy chairs? Martinis?)
With its tail between its legs, the Tribune Company which own the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, other newspapers, WGN television and the Chicago Cubs, just went private under a $8.2 billion buyout engineered by local real estate tycoon Sam Zell.
Bedeviled by a $1 billion tax bill from buying Times Mirror and Los Angeles Times in 2000--it was a taxable sale not a restructuring says the IRS--the Tribune Company is now owned by an S-corp ESOP employee stock ownership plan which makes "selling for parts" difficult in the near future since it pays no corporate taxes.
Not that anyone's happy. This month the Los Angeles Times lost its third editor since the sale, James O'Shea, a Tribune Company lifer. It also lost publisher Jeffrey Johnson and two editorial page editors since the Tribune takeover.
And why was outgoing Tribune Chairman and Chief Officer Dennis FitzSimons rewarded with a $17.7 million dollar severance package, many are asking? Not just $10.7 million but $4 million to cover his tax liabilities from the $10.7 million? What would he get if he left the paper profitable--his own island?
Things are even worse at the Chicago Sun-Times where Conrad Black and F. David Radler siphoned off millions in phony noncompete agreements they paid to themselves as officers of the parent company Hollinger International Inc., now Sun-Times Media Group, whose celebrity board featured Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle and former Illinois Gov. James Thompson. The pair are prison bound unless their appeals succeed.
In a perverse twist, the Chicago Sun-Times actually had to pay $17.4 million of Black's legal fees--thank you Director & Officers insurance!--on top of losing $60 million of its shareholders' money.
This month, Chicago's "other" newspaper terminated 17 reporters, editors and newsroom staff after merging its suburban Daily Southtown and Star papers, shutting down three weeklies and farming out newspaper delivery to the Chicago Tribune failed to total the $50 million it is seeking to trim off its operating budget
The Chicago Reader, considered the granddaddy of free weeklies, is even struggling after three decades of seeming imperviousness to newspaper vicissitudes.
In July the four-section quarter fold paper known for its long format articles was purchased by Florida based Creative Loafing, rapidly becoming a standard flat tabloid with one page articles that no longer jump and half the number of pages.
Asked about the shrinking size and staff--four top reporters were let go--editor Alison True and Publisher Mike Crystal both replied the pub had no choice.
Two free monthlies that were formerly newsprint, Today's Chicago Woman and Conscious Choice, an environmental magazine, have survived by adopting a glossy look and generic content and reducing local focus and staff.
And while the Chicago Tribune's five-year-old tabloid daily, Red Eye, passed out free at city "el" train stops, has found a readership, it had to dumb down content to two paragraph stories and celebrity "cellulite news" to do so.
Even Northwestern University's Medill school of journalism is caving.
Thanks to Martha Rosenberg for this informative column. Newspapers generally are suffering from Internet competition and papers in the more literate cities, such as Boston and San Francisco, are taking the biggest circulation hits. Few newspaper readers ever read the entire paper; most just turned to the articles that were of interest to them. The Internet gives them this opportunity to scroll to only what they want to read --- sports, foreign news, etc. So reading the Chicago Tribune is like using a blunderbuss instead of a rifle to hunt for what you like. The more literate daily readers are the first to switch, leaving dailies with less educated readers---usually those with the poorest demographics, further weakening the advertising base. Newspapers doing best are the specialty publications such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, which may be counting giveaway copies in motels and hotels as circulation. As for author Rosenberg's comments about staff cuts in Chicago, she's right on target, and that's virtually universal. Instead of providing more in-depth coverage and special reports, publishers are cheapening the product by reducing qualified staff in order to pad their profit margins. Meanwhile, reporters --- members of a profession that is critical to the public well-being -- are paid far less than what they're worth and are increasingly limited in what they can say by corporate ownership. The concept of "the liberal media" as decried by truth-twisters such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, of course, is a preposterous canard. Publishers historically have endorsed Republican candidates for the White House. Overall, the picture in Chicago, and elsewhere, is not encouraging. Only the Internet offers hope for providing all shades of opinion for the future--- which is the reason the government wants to bring it under its control just as the Chinese government has gotten Yahoo to do its bidding. Of one thing we may be certain. If the government finds a way to control information on the Internet, human ingenuity will find creative alternatives. It should be noted that the broadcast industry is also suffering from the rise of the new media and the day may come when sponsors switch en masse to outlets that feed the cell phones Ms. Rosenberg described in the hands of mass transit riders.
Sherwood Ross
Ex-Reporter
City News Bureau, Southtown Economist, Chicago Daily News
by
Sherwood Ross (146 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 78 comments)
on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 at 8:05:41 AM
