What's Happening in Chicago?

Do Its People Really Care?

At my request, Jim Warren, who has spent decades in Chicago journalism and is an expert media observer sent me this selection of stories about the confrontation between the city’s leaders, residents, ICE and the Trump administration over immigration and crime. Also attached is an audio piece from the Columbia Journalism Review about coverage in Block Club, the leading digital start-up covering the city.

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In the heyday of its 178-year history the Chicago Tribune called itself “The World’s Greatest Newspaper.” That braggadocio was never actually the case. But in the era when major metropolitan dailies were as important to city identities as major league sports franchises, the Tribune was, in fact, a great newspaper.

Because of the self-importance of the New York-Washington power corridor, where the New York Times and the Washington Post competed for the status of primus inter pares, the Tribune was never credited with the qualities of journalism, especially in reporting, features, and criticism, that it deserved.

I have followed the Tribune for years (especially when our son Evan worked there for a decade in Chicago, New York, the Middle East, and China). Two of its leading editors in heady times — Jim Squires and James O’Shea — authored books that I proudly published. As the Tribune began to falter in 2009, O’Shea, along with the former Washington bureau chief Jim Warren and a small group of other luminaries from the paper, launched the nonprofit Chicago News Cooperative, where I was involved in formulating the vision and fundraising.

CNC was ahead of its time as a concept for the development of digital-based local news coverage and ended when the leadership of its board of directors instead decided to buy the Chicago Sun-Times, deepening what was a business debacle afflicting all of Chicago’s once formidable news ecosystem.

Today’s Chicago Tribune, as a news enterprise, is a desiccated remnant of its notable past. It is owned by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that buys newspapers across the country, in a cynical ploy to make them profitable by reducing them, essentially, to real estate assets, with news-gathering operations that are a fraction of what they once were.

The Tribune’s news staff — which once numbered as many as 800, with eleven foreign bureaus and a Washington office of more than twenty — is now about 150 (maybe less). They do what they can to cover the metro area. National and international coverage is bought from wire services and syndicates. Many if not most of the features are written by freelancers. And the cohort of formidable cultural critics has been almost entirely eliminated.

A former sports editor said he had “62 full-timers when I started, plus a small army of prep stringers for all that zoned coverage we did. These days I’d be surprised if they had more than ten. I think they’re down to two on the Bears, one each on the Cubs, White Sox and Blackhawks…and no enterprise.”

As has happened across the country, an infrastructure of digital news outlets has evolved in the Chicago region, with the goal of developing nonprofit business models and sustained by local sponsorships and donations. The outstanding example has been the merger of WBEZ, Chicago’s National Public Radio station, and the Chicago Sun-Times, which continues its tabloid traditions in format and emphasis.

By size and intention, this innovative combination of nonprofit media organizations is the most ambitious Chicago news source. Merging them is by general consensus still a work in progress. They are not comparable in range to the news coverage that was once provided by the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the long gone but once significant Chicago Daily News (especially famous in the 1930s and ’40s for its foreign coverage).

Block Club Chicago the most prominent start-up in hyperlocal coverage, is said to do a good job on meetings and features about neighborhoods, “but it never puts any wood on the ball,” as a former Tribune investigative reporter put it, lacking the resources for that in-depth work.

Jim O’Shea’s book The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers published in 2011 by PublicAffairs, described the saga beginning in 2000 with the Tribune Company’s misbegotten acquisition of the Times Mirror Company and culminating in bankruptcy in 2008 after the real estate predator Sam Zell left the enterprise in tatters with about $13 billion in debt.

More mismanagement would follow, leading to today’s Alden Capital troth.

Watching this happen as the Chicago News Cooperative came together, I would question the many prominent Chicago real estate and financial leaders we were asking for money how much they wanted to reinvigorate Chicago news.

The short answer was not much. They said that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were sufficient to provide the national, international, and business reporting they wanted.

And in a city and state with enduring social, economic, and political problems, elites and too many elected officials seemed satisfied with what declining local coverage there was. The reality is that the powers that be find challenging journalism a nuisance and a hindrance to their interests.

So here is the irony of their attitudes.

This summer I attended a preseason football game at Soldier Field, between the Chicago Bears and the Miami Dolphins. It was a sell-out, with tens of thousands of fans adorned in Bears merch and unstinting in their enthusiasm, reflecting the extraordinary attachment Chicago has to its sports team. (Okay, I know local sports enthusiasms are pretty much ubiquitous.)

But long renowned as a metropolis second only in scale to New York, Chicago took exceptional pride because unlike Wall Street on one coast and Hollywood on the other, Chicago’s main identity was its own character, the rough and tumble City of the Broad Shoulders.

How does metropolitan Chicago maintain itself if it doesn’t really know what is happening — for better or worse — where its nearly nine million residents live?

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What if the Bears, Bulls, Cubs, White Sox, Black Hawks et al Left Town?

Jim O’Shea held senior editorial positions in Chicago and later in Los Angeles, when the Times was owned by the Tribune Company, before leading the Chicago News Cooperative for as long as it lasted.

“In Los Angeles, the community had a strong commitment to a newspaper that reflected its image as a major metropolitan area…at local events, readers would harshly criticize the company and me for diminishing the Times.

“I never felt anything remotely like that in all my years in Chicago…the community just didn’t seem to care. In fact, most didn’t like the Trib for one reason or another…Ann Marie Lipinski (the executive editor of the paper at its peak strength) said that a business leader told her as the paper deteriorated, ‘We didn’t know what we had.’”

That is an major understatement.

In my most recent anecdotal reporting among Chicago area friends — the kind of people considered the mainstay of news consumers — I found that they are almost entirely digital readers, the New York Times leading the way, scrolling the internet, a podcast and a magazine or two, then a quick look at Chicago headlines. Block Club is usually mentioned.

“Well, don’t you want to know more about where you live, work, school your children, and walk the streets?” I ask.

The discouraging consensus is: Not really.