The bad news: On Thursday the Sun-Times Media Group announced an operating loss of $24 million for the second quarter of 2008, ended June 30. The good news: Last year's loss for the same quarter was $80 million.

The bad news: "It's no secret that the newspaper industry is in rough shape," the Media Group told shareholders. "Our industry's advertising revenues are being depressed by the significant declines in the industries that are most important to us -- housing, real estate, employment, autos and, increasingly, retail. Some of the issues affecting our advertising revenue are economic, while others are secular. The entire newspaper industry is in a deep recession, possibly the deepest in 70 years. And it may well worsen."

The good news: "As you will recall, on December 14, 2007, we announced our goal of reducing operating costs by $50 million a year. We expect to meet that goal in 2008."

The bad news: "However, double-digit declines in advertising revenue -- 13 percent in the first quarter and 14 percent in the second quarter -- coupled with rising newsprint and energy costs, wiped away the benefits of those cost reductions. With no end in sight to the industry malaise, newspaper companies including yours find themselves looking for additional ways to manage costs and ultimately survive."

So there will be more cuts. (The managerial ranks of the Media Group's Pioneer Press were cut back just this week.) But if there is no good news for shareholders, they expect feisty news, and the Media Group did not disappoint: "We are transforming ourselves from a print company with an online presence to a fully integrated, 24/7 news operation that gives our readers and advertisers the products and service levels they demand. Despite the falling market, we believe we continue to have important new business opportunities."

To find out more about what they are, read the full report to shareholders from CEO Cyrus Freidheim Jr. (One idea's to take the company private, which would mean no more shareholders to report to)." In short," said Freidheim, "the Sun-Times News Group will do everything in its power to emerge as a market leader in this tumultuous but extraordinary industry."

Barack Obama has made a campaign issue of his good judgment on the Middle East, and I'm beginning to wonder if that good judgment now has him exactly where John McCain wants him.

From the get-go Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq as the wrong war for the wrong reasons. McCain lined up behind his president. Now Obama wants to redeploy our Middle East forces. He wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times on July 14: "Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Irag is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won't have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq. As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan."

Famous last words -- "finish the job in Afghanistan." American and allied armies invaded soon after 9/11 and overthrew the Taliban in a few weeks, but it turned out the job wasn't finished. The Taliban leaked back in. Was the problem simply that we were two combat brigades short?

"The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan," Thomas Friedman wrote in the Times on July 30, "is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want." He approvingly quoted from a July Time cover story by Harvard professor and Kabul resident Rory Stewart: "A troop increase is likely to inflame Afghan nationalism because Afghans are more anti-foreign than we acknowledge, and the support for our presence in the insurgency areas is declining."

Friedman supported the Iraqi invasion in the beginning, though not for the reasons President Bush gave to the nation. Friedman sees the whole, vast Arab-Muslim world as a dysfunctional realm that has failed at modernity. Far more important than the assassination of Osama bin Laden, Friedman believes, is the creation of "islands of decent and consensual government" that offer young people an alternative to clerical nihilism. He thought Iraq could become such an island. He seems to think that again. "The reason the surge helped in Iraq," he said in his July 30 column, "is because Iraqis took the lead in confronting their own extremists -- the Shiites in their areas, the Sunnis in theirs. That is very good news."

So McCain, if he has his wits about him, can say this: "Thanks to the surge, whose effectiveness my opponent refuses to admit, the Iraqis now see a way forward to peace and democracy. If they are correct, Iraq will set an example for the entire Muslim world of a nation prosperous, pious, progressive, and free. This is an outcome my opponent was unable to imagine and cannot imagine yet. For some reason, he'd rather fight in Afghanistan, a primitive collection of clans and warlords on the fringes of Arabia that for centuries has defied every attempt to civilize and reform it, chewing up and spitting out every invading army that tried. Osama bin Laden is nowhere to be found in Afghanistan, and neither is the future of the Arab-Muslim world. My opponent is young and naive and doesn't understand any of this."

Maybe Obama does and maybe he doesn't, but as violence increases in Afghanistan the idea that it's the "good war" is being called into question even in precincts that might considered Obama's base. The leftist listserve Portside has just forwarded me a couple of articles that warn Obama to watch out. Conn Hallinan, a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus, commented, "The initial invasion in 2001 was easy because the Taliban had alienated itself from the vast majority of Afghans. But the weight of occupation, and the rising number of civilian deaths, is shifting the resistance toward a war of national liberation. No foreign power has ever won that battle in Afghanistan."

Last Thursday evening a young, troubled bicyclist from Glenview was hit and killed by a small pickup in the southbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive north of Belmont. The  Sun-Times and Tribune posted tentative and frequently revised first reports online, though those are now lost to us, and their ultimate news stories took up only a few lines. But the process by which an online community critiqued those first reports while inundating itself with rumors, conjecture, and first impressions was prodigious and awesome. I thank reader Patty Cronin for pointing me to it.

"To me," said Cronin in an e-mail Monday, "this was the Chicago journalism story of the last couple of days -- of big outlets moving fast, citizen journalists getting it wrong and right, the piecing together of the news of the bike rider who was killed on Lake Shore Drive on Thursday -- it was fascinating to watch the Trib and other outlets morph from one story to the final version, and to read the hundreds of comments from people who 'heard' what happened and weighed in. Ultimately, a couple of guys who were right behind the truck who hit the young man set everybody straight."

Here's a link to the first batch of responses at the Tribune's comments boards, and here's a link to the second -- hundreds in all. You'll see the original collective understanding of what happened -- the bicyclist was struck so hard by a hit-and-run cab on the Inner Drive that he flew over a barrier onto the Outer Drive, where he was hit by the truck -- suddenly give way to an account even more improbable, yet apparently true. According to a couple of self-identified eye witnesses who'd been driving right behind the truck, the victim had actually been trying to walk his bike across the drive (despite the extistence of a nearby underpass).

Beyond the hivelike energy devoted to getting at the truth, I was struck by a number of things, such as by how wildly inaccurate first reports can be and how unwilling most people with views to assert are to let shaky facts stop them, by how scornful people (granted, at a Tribune site) were of early Sun-Times reports that turned out be be about as accurate as anything else, by how determined so many people were to get to the bottom of what happened, and by how heartless and loutish some people will be when they can be heartless and loutish anonymously.

Is this how news will get put together in a world without reporters -- with relentless inefficiency?

Since May, Los Angeles has had its own Web site dedicated to savaging Sam Zell and the crew that now runs the Tribune Company. According to this observer in LA, tellzell is maintained anonymously by an LA Times reporter fighting the despairing notion that "nothing that we can do can stop Zell, or job cuts, or the dumbing down of the Los Angeles Times."

A friend asked if we have anything like it in Chicago. Nothing so focused and relentless, but I don't hold that against Chicago. Zell's one of our own. Out in LA he's seen not merely as a Hun but as an invading Hun. At the Tribune they hope against hope that the Zell team knows what it's doing. In LA they pray he sells the paper to somebody local.

As headlines often do, the one on the front page of the latest Chicago Jewish News puts the matter a little too simply: "FEDERAL CASE, The U.S. Court of Appeals Says a Chicago Woman Has No Right to Put a Mezuzah on Her Front Door." 

That would be no right under federal law -- as distinct from state law and Chicago ordinance, which, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals observes, do defend plaintiff Lynne Bloch's mezuzah. And as do the rejiggered rules of the Shoreline Towers Condominium Association, which for a time kept removing Ms. Bloch's mezuzah from her front door. 

If you have no interest in examining legal disputes, stop reading now. I think they can be fascinating, and I think the Jewish News account by managing editor Pauline Dubkin Yearwood does a good job of threading its way through this one, the grabber headline notwithstanding. The central facts are these: Bloch went to federal court in 2006 seeking damages from the Shoreline Towers Condominium Association for the way it treated her mezuzah, and the Seventh Circuit just tossed out her suit. 

These facts are not in dispute: Bloch herself led the committee that in 2001 promulgated what was called the Hallway Rule. The pivotal rule one said this: "Mats, boots, shoes, carts or objects of any sort are prohibited outside Unit entrance doors." Following a 2004 renovation at Shoreline Towers, 6301 N. Sheridan Road, rule one was reinterpreted by the condo board to include things on the door. Which, among other things, meant all mezuzahs.

Because both the state of Illinois and Chicago subsequently acted, and the condo board, under fire, relaxed its rules, the Bloch mezuzah is back on her doorjamb. But Bloch has been after damages, and unless the three-judge Seventh Circuit panel is overruled by the full circuit or the Supreme Court, no jury will ever get to decide if she deserves them.

Judges don't always disagree with each other for fancy philosophical reasons. The Bloch suit strikes me as a case in which judges disagree because one thinks harder about a matter than the other. Here's the Seventh Circuit opinion of July 10, written by Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook, with Senior Judge William Bauer concurring. It's a brisk six pages long and leans heavily on a Seventh Circuit ruling four years ago in a similar case, Halprin v. Prairie Single Family Homes of Dearborn Park Association. Halprin, Easterbrook explains, held that the federal Fair Housing Act "forbids discrimination in the 'terms, conditions, or privileges of sale or rental of a dwelling' but does not address discrimination after ownership has changed hands." And although the act might come into play if religious discrimination were so intolerable it amounted to "constructive eviction," [Bloch contended she was bound by Jewish law to display a mezuzah, and if she could not she would have to move] in this case that was not a consideration. 

Because -- "The hallway rule, as adopted in 2001 and as enforced in 2004, is neutral with respect to religion . . ." says Easterbrook. "The association removed secular photos and posters as well as Christmas ornaments, crucifixes, and mezuzot. Generally applicable rules that do not refer to religion differ from discrimination."

Judge Diane Wood's dissent is 17 pages long. She takes the idea of constructive eviction a lot more seriously than Easterbrook does. She disagrees with him about what can be found, or at least teased out of federal law, and about what the Seventh Circuit actually said in Halprin. She keeps in mind that the court isn't being called on to decide whether Bloch should win or lose her suit, but simply whether a jury should be allowed to hear it. And she pauses to examine and regret, in a case in which anti-Semitism is at issue, the assertion in a defense brief that "throughout this matter, Plaintiffs have been trying to get their 'pound of flesh' from Defendants." 

A second Shoreline Towers resident to sue the condo association over the mezuzah ban is Debra Gassman, who's since moved to Israel. Here's a May 15 Hot Type in which I touch on her suit.

Apparently justice took a U-turn in New York City. A video anonymously posted on YouTube catches a New York City police officer body-checking a biker into the curb as last Friday's Critical Mass rally passed through Times Square. According to Newsday, the guy on the bike, Christopher Long, was accused of pedaling into the cop. He was arrested and charged with attempted assault, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. That's not the story the video tells -- and after it surfaced, says Newsday, rookie officer Patrick Pogan was put on modified duty.

Mary Mitchell wrote a puzzling column for the Sunday Sun-Times. Her subject was the appearance of the president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, at the UNITY conference of minority journalists in McCormick Place. Mitchell wondered what he was doing there, given that Wade was the first foreign head of state UNITY had ever invited to speak, since he's "been accused of unfairly suppressing journalists by locking them up and threatening them." 

And sure enough, during an interview Thursday with a group of journalists he "showed shocking disdain for journalists in his own country," asserting that the "Senegalese press is infiltrated by politics. I am telling you if you do not give them information, they are going to invent it. They insult people. They accuse people when they don't even have any proof."

But what troubled Mitchell more -- she found it "appalling" -- is that Wade's speech Friday was disrupted. Someone shouted, "I want to speak in the name of my people," and was then pummeled.

"Frankly, it was embarrassing that an African head of state was subjected to the chaotic situation," wrote Mitchell, as if the matter came down just to Wade's feelings. She faulted "the security personnel -- including the Chicago Police Department -- [who] should have anticipated trouble," and she pressed on to the extravagant conclusion that the matter "doesn't bode well for the city's Olympic bid."

Did Mitchell, whose knowledge of the incident was sketchy and secondhand, think no visiting head of state had ever before faced a hostile crowd? Here's an account of what happened, posted by the Community Media Workshop, that makes it harder to sympathize with Wade. It identifies the protester as Souleymane Jules Diop, "an exiled Senegalese journalist," and says he "was beaten for several minutes by at least four men who were reportedly bodyguards of President Wade." And here's a video. It's hard to follow, but it does show the presumed bodyguards roaming the room. On the other hand, it makes it clear that "several minutes" is a wild exaggeration. Diop was led out of the room, shirtless, by Chicago police in under a minute.

The problem with Mitchell's column is where it lands. Conceding that Wade's safety "apparently was never threatened," she nevertheless fashions it into a treatise on "the city's ability to guard a foreign head of state" rather than what strikes me as the matter at hand -- the anguish of Senegalese journalists.

I'd had the same reaction a few days earlier reading a column by Mitchell's sportswriting colleague Carol Slezak. Like Mitchell, Slezak didn't appear to understand her own material.  

Slezak was considering the failure of Oscar Pistorius, who runs the 400 meters on artificial legs, to make South Africa's Olympics team. "Talk about ruining what should have been a heartwarming story," she wrote. Pistorius hadn't quite met the Olympics qualifying standard in his event, and South Africa hadn't named him an alternate on its 1,600-meter relay team. So Pistorius doesn't get "to pursue his Olympic dream." And "that's a shame," wrote Slezak, "because this young man has done nothing wrong."

The world's full of athletes who have done nothing wrong who don't get to go to the Olympics. Pistorius runs on carbon-fiber blades, which the International Association of Athletics Federations thinks might give him a competitive advantage -- greater stride, less wind resistance, no aching leg muscles. The IAAF said Pistorius couldn't compete but was overruled by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. "Doesn't the IAAF have some drug users to go after?" Slezak wondered. "Track and field should be celebrating Pistorius, not trying to ban him from competition."

Slezak refused to consider the IAAF's point of view, but she got so close to it her nose must have twitched. Observing that Pistorius can now aim for the 2012 Olympics in London, she thought to ask "But what if a newer version of the blades comes out before then? Will the IAAF become more determined than ever to prove they give him a competitive advantage? When the IAAF was considering banning him, it indicated that advancing technology was a concern."

Why shouldn't it be a concern? Especially if it's technology that's available to only one competitor. Let's say Pistorius switches to new blades and immediately becomes the fastest 400-meter runner in the world. Would that development support the IAAF's position, or would it make the IAAF more unforgivable than ever for trying to keep Pistorius from competing? Slezak brushed past the question. "Of course, the technology will continue to evolve," she concluded. "More to the point: Will society keep pace?"

As if a healthy society is one that lets nothing get between it and the next heartwarming story.

The other day Phil Rosenthal imagined that Chicago had a journalism hall of fame, and he stoked the fires by offering dozens of names of past and present greats that he thinks belong in it. I had two immediate reactions. One was to be touched by his column's poignancy. Rosenthal has done a hell of a job as a media writer covering the ongoing downsizing of his own paper, the Tribune, and his proposal struck an elegaic note: let's all declare each other gods while we can and maybe the world won't forget about us quite so quickly. 

The other reaction was to marvel that Rosenthal didn't know Chicago already has a journalism hall of fame. It was founded in 1985 by Jerry Davis and Jerry Field, retiring and incoming presidents of the Chicago Press Club, and though the press club collapsed two years later, the hall of fame survived, being reconstituted eventually under the aegis of the International Press Club of Chicago. The IPCC was founded in 1992 by Field, a longtime publicist, and Arnie Matanky, publisher of the Near North News. Field is a friend; Matanky, who died in 2004, was the most boorish journalist I've ever met.

Rosenthal's column drew a heavy response from readers with their own ideas of media immortality. Unless I missed a reference, none of these readers had any more idea than Rosenthal that they were conjecturing about something that already exists. They should be forgiven. The International Press Club of Chicago seems to consist of whoever shows up for lunch on Wednesdays on the second floor of the Loop's Beef and Brandy Restaurant -- visitors welcome. The IPCC's chief, perhaps only, reason for being is the annual dinner at which the ranks of the hall of fame are swelled by five "living legends" and three dead ones.

You might be thinking, no wonder Rosenthal demands a new hall of fame -- this one won't do. Actually, this one will do fine. Having no other purpose, the IPCC can focus on the question of who the worthiest worthies are, and I will personally vouch for Jerry Field's gravitas whenever he bends to that task. Compare Rosenthal's nominees with the IPCC's inductees -- each list exposes some of the other's egregious oversights, and if the IPCC has been too often swayed by cronyism, so was Rosenthal, I'd say, by sentiment and courtesy. To add my own two cents' worth, any hall of fame that excludes --as both Rosenthal and the IPCC do -- the founders of the Reader, who invented a new business model for urban print journalism that swept the country, and Reader reporter John Conroy cannot possibly be taken seriously.

Of course, I wouldn't take the hall of fame idea seriously regardless. It's a lark, a parlor game, a shuffleboard round robin to bide the time as the Titanic sinks. But calling it what it is, I'm happy to play the game. Anne Keegan has a place in my hall of fame. So does at least one of the founders of the old, trailblazing Chicago Journalism Review, Ron Dorfman. I'll stop now because otherwise I'd be just getting started.

And Phil Rosenthal -- for exceptional coverage of the hardest beat of all, his own house, plus a little balm for the soul. Now I'll stop.

Who's in your Valhalla? 

The screaming headlines in Wednesday's Sun-Times were misleading at best.

Page one: "DREW'S PALS WORE WIRE." On page eight, where the story began, "DREW'S CHILLING 'I SHOULD HAVE HAD THAT B---- CREMATED.'"

The front page was nothing but headlines. "Two of Drew Peterson's closest friends," said the drop head, "recorded months of intimate conversations with him for the State Police."

Smaller headlines at the bottom of the front page announced: "On His Murdered Wife Kathleen: 'I should have had the bitch cremated.'" 

And,

"On the Investigation of Kathleen's Drowning: 'It was in a dry bathtub, what a bunch of idiots.'"

Wow! What else is on the tape? 

Apparently, not even the above.  Read the story. The dry bathtub line is something Peterson's pal Paula Stark says Peterson told her in 2004, when Kathleen Savio, his third wife, was found dead. The should-have-had-her-cremated line is something pal Len Wawczak says he remembers Peterson telling him when authorities decided early last November -- after Peterson's fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, disappeared -- to exhume Savio's body. The story indicates that Wawczak and Stark (who are married) started wearing wires later in November.

As far as a reader can tell, reporter Joe Hosey didn't hear the tapes, didn't read a transcript of the tapes, and didn't even confirm there are tapes, those spurious quotations notwithstanding. A token of the Sun-Times's meretriciousness is that despite the paper's ostentatious claims that the story was a "Sun-Times Exclusive," Hosey's a reporter for Joliet's Herald News, a Sun-Times News Group daily that also carried the story. 

Tuesday night a reception was held in the LA Times building for Jim Newton, the departing editor of that paper's editorial page. Told to slash his staff, Newton decided to quit instead. Attending the reception, according to laobserved.com, were the present mayor of Los Angeles,  Antonio Villaraigosa, former mayor Richard Riordan, Sheriff Lee Baca, and local billionaire Eli Broad, who'd hoped to buy the Times before the entire Tribune Company was taken over last year by Sam Zell.

Do you think Mayor Daley would show up to say good-bye to Bruce Dold, who runs the Tribune's editorial page? More to the point, what dignitaries would attend a farewell party for reporter Maury Possley, who deserves thanks from a grateful city?

As lists are being drawn up of the dozens of Tribune editorial employees who will soon be tossed over the side to lighten the payroll, Possley has decided to leave voluntarily. This costs the city a terrific investigative reporter who has specialized in prosecutorial misconduct. In a note to his colleagues Monday, Possley wrote that he'll "never forget those moments standing outside a prison and watching inmates go free, knowing that our reporting played some role in exposing their wrongful convictions and securing their freedom. For the past decade, I have had the privilege to work with the since-departed Ken Armstrong and my seemingly constant companion, Steve Mills, on some of the most important journalism in our country."

Possley went on, "It just doesn't seem possible that less than two months ago, some of us gathered at Columbia University for the Pulitzer luncheon with [editor Ann Marie Lipinski] to celebrate our prize for investigative reporting. I understand that there are no guarantees in life -- that God laughs when we say we have plans -- nevertheless, how stunning it is to see the dismantling of our newspaper in such a short time."

(The entire note and other Tribune memos are posted here on Jim Romenesko's forum.)

Dismantled? Some would say "differently mantled." 

The new editor, Gerould Kern, seems fluent in both languages. In a staff memo of his own (it's embedded in the Lee Abrams blog post that follows Possley's farewell note at the above link), Kern declares:

"Courageous public service, credibility, integrity, fairness and accuracy form the foundation of this newspaper. We will stand watch over our country, our city and our communities because this is our special duty and because they demand it of us. You have made this our hallmark."

Kern then segues effortlessly into a tongue that few old-fashioned journalists have begun to master. He continues: "But the economics that have supported our newspaper for decades are in disarray. I do not have to tell you how significantly this affects the newsroom. Still, amid the dislocation and uncertainty lies an opportunity we can seize. We can transform into a news organization that is ideally suited for a new century defined by breathtaking technological innovation and a voracious appetite for specialized information delivered over multiple digital and print channels."

No matter how voracious the new Tribune's appetite for "specialized information delivered over multiple digital and print channels" turns out to be, I doubt the state's attorney's office will find the new Tribune more of a load than having Possley around.