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by Michael Miner on August 1st 2008 - 5:16 p.m.

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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.


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Anonymous
August 1st - 8:03 p.m.
Might want to check out Tribune Two-Step (http://tribunetwostep.blogspot.com/) ... plenty of wholesome, homegrown Zell-hating goodness there. And I would daresay that we think less of Zell as "one of our own" as someone who's using high-ranking minions who don't know what the hell they're doing.
Nancy
August 2nd - 8:32 a.m.
Because the Chicago Tribune is hardly worth reading anymore -- it's been so thoroughly eviscerated by Zell and his boys that there is almost no news left in it -- I tried this week to cancel my home subscription. I called the paper's phone number, 312-222-3232 and went through all the prompts. I repeatedly got a busy signal. There is no way to stop getting the Trib -- at least by phone! Try it!
CaliforniaGuy
August 2nd - 2:29 p.m.
While in Edinburgh, I stayed at the Scotsman hotel, the former HQ of the local paper turned into a boutique inn by developers. I look forward to my stay at the W Tribune Tower hotel after Zell gets through laying off anyone involved in the news business.
ryerson
August 4th - 11:30 p.m.
Reminds me of one of my favorites...

exreaders.com
um
August 5th - 1:16 p.m.
may not be a Chicagoan, but: http://loloafing.wordpress.com/



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Harold, Daily by Harold Henderson

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Branzburg v. Hayes, the split U.S. Supreme Court decision (1972) generally construed by journalists and judges alike as affirming some sort of reporter's privilege in federal courts.

U.S. Appellate Judge Richard Posner's influential opinion in McKevitt v. Pallasch (2003) telling those journalists and judges they were wrong -- there is no such privilege.

John Milton's Areopagitica (1643), one of the earliest and most eloquent arguments for a free press. Said Milton: "As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye."

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