In my column in this week's print edition, I mistakenly said the Tribune was paying Chicago Now bloggers $5 per 10,000 hits. I called that the equivalent of carfare.

I stand corrected: the Tribune's paying $5 per 1,000 local hits, the equivalent of -- well, carfare. Bill Adee, the paper's innovation chief, tells me Chicago Now has some 65 bloggers and last month recorded 700,000 pageviews. That works out to $3,500 split 65 ways, or about $54 a blogger for the month.

Of course, all bloggers aren't created equal. Deadspin reports that Jay Mariotti may join the Chicago Now ranks in August, when he finally emerges from local-media exile. Mariotti quit the Sun-Times 11 months ago (for reminders of the emotional reaction to his departure, click here and here) but was forbidden by his contract to cross the street to the Tribune until a year had gone by. He's been writing a column for AOL, and if he jumps to the Tribune it won't be for $54 a month.

Adee, who once upon a time was Mariotti's editor at the Sun-Times, refused to comment on the possibility Mariotti will sign on and told me how much he's enjoyed not talking about him. But how long can that last? I wondered. "It can last a while," he said inscrutably.

If rhetoric is a necessary precondition to action, the investigative journalists of American can now move to step two.

The Pocantico Declaration: Creating a Nonprofit Investigative News Network was issued Wednesday afternoon at the conclusion of a three-day conference of not-for-profit news organizations at the Pocantico Conference Center in New York. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a participant, says the declaration "marks a vital step in harnessing the energy of new journalism initiatives across the country to give Americans the watchdog reporting that is essential if our democracy is to thrive."

The declaration recognizes the times are dire and the need great, and therefore "preparations should be immediately made to form a collaboration, the Investigative News Network (working title). Its mission is very simple: to aid and abet, in every conceivable way, individually and collectively, the work and public reach of its member news organizations, including, to the fullest extent possible, their administrative, editorial and financial wellbeing. And, more broadly, to foster the highest quality investigative journalism, and to hold those in power accountable, at the local, national and international levels."

The emphasis is that of the declaration.

A large steering committee has been formed. It consists of leaders of these organizations: the Center for Public Integrity, the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University, the Pacific News Service, the Alicia Patterson Journalism Foundation, the Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the local online news sites St. Louis Beacon, MinnPost, and voiceofsandiego.org. Brant Houston, professor of investigative reporting at the University of Illinois, is a steering committee member.

Its first order of business is to "seek and obtain sufficient grant funding to develop a plan for sustaining and strengthening nonprofit investigative journalism."

There is not yet a plan, nor money to create a plan, but there is an expression of intent and a framework. The to-do list includes creation of an Investigative News Network Web site.

Last March, when the Wednesday Journal chain of community weeklies stopped publishing two of its Chicago titles -- the Booster and the News-Star -- the chain mailed those papers' 4,000 subscribers a letter offering them a choice: they could request a refund for the undelivered issues, or they could show their support for community journalism by letting the company donate the money to the Community Media Workshop.

The results, according to Wednesday Journal vice president Andy Johnston: about 1,400 refunds and 658 donations. Half the subscribers didn't answer the letter.

Is 658 donations a lot? It is if you think it is, and that's how Johnston chooses to think. "I was surprised by how many people took up our offer," he says. "I thought it would be people with three or four dollars coming back, but there were some with $15 or $20 balances left on their subscriptions."

CMW is getting a check for about $6,500. President Thom Clark emailed me,  "Quite a wonderfully unexpected fiscal year-end contribution to our coffers. With the recession and strained nonprofit budgets, we've seen a marked increase in requests for scholarships to our conference and training workshops."

A little money goes a long way at CMW. "They can do a few seminars or something else useful with that," says Johnston.  " "

The Tribune's investigation of admissions at the University of Illinois, "State of Corruption: Clout Goes to College," reminds me of an old-fashioned hybrid car -- the gas in the tank goes only so far, and to go the rest of the way you get out and push.

Consider Tuesday's installment in the month-long series, typically positioned on page one. The pushy headline, "How U. of I. scheme began," promises an origins story that reveals how and why the corruption took root. But the story falls short. It's simply an account of the unverified testimony of Abel Montoya, a former admissions director, to the commission investigating the university's admissions practices. Motoya's story implicates former governor Jim Thompson and the former director of undergraduate admissions, Martha Moore, but both these officials tell the paper they don't know what Montoya's talking about.

The Tribune investigation, though interesting and entertaining, has been tainted by a disingenuousness that would have embarrassed the old Tribune. We are asked to be shocked and appalled that admissions procedures at Illinois' top state university aren't always on the square, that clout and money sometimes play an ugly hand.

Well, yes. But we aren't naive and the Tribune isn't either. On June 25 it carried a short article on tuition increases at the Urbana-Champaign campus. There was this passage:

"Lawmakers have not approved next year's state budget, a draft of which includes $756 million for the U. of I.... The university's total budget is $4.1 billion."

In other words, about 18 percent of the money in the university's budget will come from the state. For the other $3.3 billion it'll have to wheel and deal and make Faustian bargains with potentially deep-pocketed benefactors just like every private school does.

And on the other hand, that $756 million is nothing to sneeze at and it's not guaranteed. So the school has to play ball with Springfield too.

But this is a story on which the Tribune has decided it's better to look splenetic than worldly. On Sunday the Tribune treated its readers to some robust spleen-venting in the form of a front-page editorial. The headline: "U. of I.'s cynical breach of public trust."

The language: "specter of public corruption...increasingly infuriating scandal...betrayal of the public trust...identify the schemers...lost whatever last shred of credibility...cynical game...officials who swam in this sewer..."

Dogs that foam at the mouth this way are put to sleep. 

Kirk MacDonald, chief operating officer of Creative Loafing Inc. and publisher of the Chicago Reader, is leaving the company. He's going back to the Denver Newspaper Agency, which controls the business operations of the Denver Post, as executive vice president for sales, marketing, and digital sales -- "which as you well know is where the game is, going into the future," he tells me.

The agency was created to oversee the business operations of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain New under a joint operating agreement launched in January 2001. It continues although the News folded this past February. The Post is owned by the MediaNews Group chain; but despite the appearance of some organizational redundancy in having the agency layered between MediaNews and the Post, Kirk insists there's no managerial redundancy. MacDonald was the agency's first CEO, holding the job until he resigned in 2006. In the 90s he'd been an executive at the Post, leaving in '97 as vice president and general manager.

While working for Creative Loafing MacDonald continued to live in Denver. But he'd been a frequent visitor to Chicago since Creative Loafing bought the Reader in 2007, and last September he became this paper's publisher. 

Creative Loafing's CEO, Ben Eason, will temporarily assume the COO's duties, MacDonald tells me, and will name a new publisher for the Reader. The obvious candidate is associate publisher, Steve Timble, who "has brought a fantastic energy to the sales organization," says MacDonald.

Assume for the sake of argument that if a paper like the New York Times has a future, it's online. Can it migrate online and keep up not only its standards but also the scope of its journalism? No, says Judge Richard Posner of Chicago's Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, because of what I'll call the leeches -- aggregating Web sites that suck off the Time's journalism and offer it themselves.

Posner raises the problem on the blog he maintains with University of Chicago economist Gary Becker. Thinking outside not merely the MSM box but also the box on which "the news wants to be free" visionaries stand so they can see tomorrow, Posner offers a solution.

Outlaw links. Or as he puts it, "Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion."

Read the comments that follow Posner's blog post. You'll see that his readers aren't crazy about his idea.

UPDATE: Listen to a conversation on Posner's idea of changing copyright law by Mark Fitzgerald and Jennifer Saba of Editor & Publisher.

No fuss, no tears, no memories.

The University of Chicago announced Friday it's killing off the University of Chicago Chronicle. 

The university said its news office "launched the Chronicle 28 years ago as a way to speak directly to the University community, at a time when newspapers were a firmly established habit and print provided one of the most economical ways to reach a large number of people."

Today they aren't and it doesn't. So na na na na, hey hey, goodbye!

"Intended for an audience of more than 27,000 faculty and staff members, students and friends," said the university, as heedless of good grammar as cheap sentiment, "fewer than 4,000 copies of the Chronicle were picked up from the free drop boxes around campus and the neighborhood during each of three different samplings this spring."

A new Web product will be rolled out in the fall.

He framed the discussion.

The last time I saw John Callaway live was at the Chicago Journalism Town Hall in February. Moderator Ken Davis was puzzling over the swift decline of the printed press and the rise of aggregating sights like Huffington Post.

"What I'm trying to get at," said Davis, addressing the panel's Ben Goldberger, who runs HuffPo Chicago, "is, what is it about online-only sites that seems to be gaining this kind of -- these large numbers?"

Goldberger was about to respond. His lips were already beginning to move.

"Theft!" declared panelist Callaway, a few seats away.

Callaway said no more. The word hung there. The Old Lion had spoken. A part of the audience laughed and applauded, putting the generational divide right out there for all to see.

Now Goldberger had to rejigger his reply, couching it in terms of well, it's not that simple.

And then Callaway elaborated.

"You can steal from anybody, and the world is so media-oriented nobody will ever know," he said, demonstrating the chronic nature of the problem by citing a plot point in his own unpublished novel about Chicago journalism 30 years ago. If the pertinence of this reference wasn't clear, his Churchillian glower guaranteed no one would say so.

Davis said he definitely wanted to talk about business models going forward. Callaway expressed a little impatience with that agenda. He said:

"I thought we were coming here today -- I thought the headline would  be... We could wake up two days from now and have one newspaper left, six months from now and have no newspapers left. Isn't that the lead sentence to why we're here? And what will happen if that occurs?"

Here's a video of this portion of the Town Hall.

On Tuesday Callaway died suddenly in Wisconsin at the age of 72 after nearly a half century in electronic journalism, most of it in Chicago. I strain to imagine WTTW without him. The station's Chicago Tonight at 7 PM Wednesday will be dedicated to his life and career, as will Friday's The Week in Review With Joel Weisman and the Friday Night Show.

The station has posted special content commemorating Callaway on its Web site.

In a recent Hot Type column I discussed the privilege Web hosts now enjoy to run a bawdy house. Thanks to the way the courts have interpreted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- ironically named under the circumstances -- Web hosts that passively allow the public to post any comments they please, even ones that are libelous and defamatory, bear no legal responsibility for them.

Web hosts, enjoy it while you got it. Seventh Circuit appellate judge Frank Easterbrook has already gone off on tangents in a couple of opinions to argue that Section 230 has been wrongly interpreted. If Easterbrook gets his way, blanket legal immunity will disappear, and states will become free to coerce Web hosts into cleaning up their sites by stringently regulating them.

And if the goal's to bring those sites to heel, it appears a legal reinterpretation of Section 230 isn't the only way to skin the cat.

On May 26 the Las Vegas Review-Journal carried an article on an ongoing tax-evasion trial in the local federal courts. The paper described the accused as "a self-made entrepreneur [who] paid his workers in gold and silver coin, and said they could go by the coins' face value -- rather than the much higher market value of their precious metal content -- for federal tax purposes."

This scheme -- if scheme is the right word -- struck some readers as plenty cool, kind of Robin Hood-ish. Making their feelings known on the paper's Web site, one reader called the prosecutor "evil incarnate and everything that is against the American justice system." Another said that if the jurors found the defendant guilty they "should be hung." A third was willing to bet "quatloos" -- that's what money was called on the planet of Triskelion in a second-season episode of Star Trek -- that a certain prosecutor wouldn't live to see his next birthday.

According to a June 7 column by Thomas Mitchell, editor of the Review-Journal, the U.S. attorney reacted to the outburst by serving the paper with a grand jury subpoena. There'd been 100-some postings, and the grand jury demanded every piece of information the newspaper had about all of them -- such as "full name, date of birth, physical address, gender, ZIP code, password prompts, security questions, telephone numbers and other identifiers," including IP addresses.

Mitchell commented, "There was no indication what they were looking for or what crime, if any, was being investigated, just a blank subpoena for voluminous and detailed records on every private citizen who dared to speak about a federal tax case."

Mitchell conceded that "a grand jury can subpoena just about anyone for any reason. . . . But what time, effort and tax-funded expenses are being expended by the U.S. attorney's office to track down a bunch of posturing blowhards squandering their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination? My first instinct is to fight the subpoena tooth and nail. . . . On the other hand, if someone were to confess to a real and specific crime on our Web site, I'd give him up at the drop of a hat.

"Bottom line: We could fight the federal subpoena, at considerable expense, and lose. Our attorneys are now trying to see if we can limit the scope of the information sought."

Most of what the government was asking for the paper didn't even have, Mitchell observed. "We don't require registration. A person could use a fictitious name and e-mail address, and most do. We have no addresses or phone numbers." Mitchell seemed to think the prosecutors didn't realize that.

But isn't it just as likely that the prosecutors did? Perhaps a message was being sent: Section 230 notwithstanding, we have ways of making your life miserable.

Ten days later the Review-Journal published a progress report. A revised subpoena had arrived. Now the grand jury wanted information on only two of the commenters -- the one who said the jurors should be hanged and the one predicting a prosecutor wouldn't live to his next birthday. And the paper intended to comply.

After all, Mitchell was quoted as saying, "I'd hate to be the guy who refused to tell the feds Timothy McVeigh was buying fertilizer." 

Message sent; message received. And the Nevada ACLU, distressed by the Review-Journal's new mood of acquiescence, was filing a motion of its own to quash the second subpoena.

Word is Platinum Equity has been doing some serious tire kicking at  the bankrupt Sun-Times Media Group, which is not only ready but eager to deal. Platinum Equity is a Beverly Hills-based private-equity company that, in its own words, finds itself "typically working with 'strategic sellers' that seek to shed a non-core asset in order to refocus their business operations." The STMG is willing to shed everything -- in one swoop or in bits and pieces.

This March Platinum Equity bought the formerly prosperous, influential San Diego Union-Tribune -- for what online newspaper analyst Ken Doctor said was reportedly a "song" -- and brought in Canadian publisher David Black (no relation to Conrad) as strategic adviser. Two years earlier Black had bought the Akron Beacon-Journal, and Doctor looked to Akron for clues as to what Black intended for San Diego. Doctor said the Union-Tribune's staff and readers should find no encouragement in the Beacon-Journal example. "Mainly, the Beacon-Journal, like most of its brethren, has gotten smaller. At least three rounds of layoffs have reduced the staff by more than a third." Moreover, "the Beacon-Journal has not distinguished itself in pushing its newsroom to embrace web-first, web-only, blog-friendly reporting. The online sales side is a work in progress."

So from Platinum Equity and Black, Doctor predicted this for San Diego: "Less headcount and a concentration on lower-paid, less-experienced reporting staff. Morale—never a newspaper strong suit—will take another hit." Furthermore -- "The Union-Tribune will get smaller and much more locally focused."

Is it possible for anyone to move the Sun-Times and the other STMG titles even further in that direction?

In fact, Jeremy Halbreich, the interim CEO of the STMG, thinks it is. "Any newspaper can always be more locally focused," he told me Friday. "There's always room for improvement."

Doctor believed the real attraction in San Diego was the paper's real estate holdings. He observed, "Commercial real estate has seized up in the recession and the credit crunch. But that’s cyclical. It will come back—and far faster than metro-newspaper values." There's now a Trump Tower on what was once the STMG's choicest piece of property, but many of the group's other titles are located on STMG-owned real estate.

Halbreich wouldn't comment on Platinum Equity's interest in his business, but he said, "I guarantee you, [Platinum Equity] did not buy San Diego because of the real estate." Halbreich said the old days of 30 percent profit margins are over, but he thinks that as normal businesses, making a 5 percent, sometimes 10 percent annual profit, newspapers have a future.

As for the notorious executive bonuses he's asked bankruptcy court for permission to pay his top people when the STMG assets are sold, Halbreich repeated what he said in a staff memo -- that they're necessary. But he wants no one to think that in a time of crisis senior management is getting a cushy deal. "When we have asked our employees, union and nonunion, to sacrifice, the only way I'll do it as CEO is to have senior management lead the process," Halbreich said. He estimated that in the last six months total executive compensation at the STMG has been cut by 30 to 35 percent -- primarily by eliminating jobs and making survivors double up.