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The hard work's been done. Now it's all in the hands of the marketers.
If you can't wait for Monday, the first day you can actually buy the redesigned Tribune at newsstands, here's the Tower's official preview. It's a "much bolder" and "more colorful" Tribune updated "for a 21st century audience" at the cost -- not mentioned here -- of a smaller news hole and dozens of editorial jobs.
The Tribune's so-called complete redesign in 2001 -- not driven by the same financial exigencies -- produced a new paper almost perversely similar to the old. "They didn't want to change who they were," a design consultant who'd been brimming with unused ideas told me then. "They didn't want to look like any other paper but themselves."
What a lucky break! Today's Tribune needs to quietly trim the steak while loudly selling the sizzle, and its drab 2001 redo left all the room in the world to add sizzle. If the Tribune had changed as radically then as it's changing now, the new owners might have found it a lot harder to disguise retrenchment as rebirth.
God, I hope that Sam is reading this. They need to start thinking way-way farther out of the catbox to get my depreciating dollar.
I need my new-news the-way it's-going-to-be tomorrow--now!
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The Tribune is going down the tubes fast, no question. This doesn't mean the previous Tribune was great. Like so many papers, it had become a kind of vanity publication for reporters, where they and former-reporters-become-editors indulged in lengthy journalistic digressions on marginal subjects just because they're fun or glamorous to cover. Hence all the numbing anecdotal ledes and the endless and pointless cocktail-circuit, he-said-she-said political reporting out of Washington and long files from exotic locales that have diddly-squat to do with much of anything.
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These are fun things to cover. One can rub elbows, wax literary, see remote sights on an expense account. But there's no editing to speak of, no one sitting the saddle and demanding relevance.
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If I had a foreign staff, I'd have reporters swarming over India and China. You wonder where your jobs have gone, Middle America? Here they are. Let's take a close look at why they're here (see James Fallows work in The Atlantic). I'd have reporters swarming all over Western Europe, telling us how countries with a lot less in the way of wealth and resources nonetheless manage to make their education systems, social insurance and democracies all work better than anything we have here.
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If I had a Washington bureau, I'd never send another reporter to a press conference with 150 other reporters. And I'd get them the hell out of the National Press Club and it's fatuous dinners. Instead I'd have them covering legislation, lobbying and money and trying to get into the closed committee hearings where the real business is transacted. You wonder where your democracy has gone, Middle America? Here's the answer.
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Reporters don't want to do these stories. They'd have to dig and think and maybe offend some (worthless) sources. That's where editing comes in. And reporters and ex-reporters who love the reigning model of lavish but faux journalism hardly fit the bill. Better to recruit from the ranks of mid- and low-level editors who've had to suffer through reading this drivel and have sharp ideas about how to fix it.
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Unfortunately, Zell's Tribune is charting another course, one obsessed with design, clip art and factoids, utterly indifferent to journalism as heretofore understood. These are Kern's and Hirt's specialties.
I'm sure a reporter would love to write those stories you noted above and they've probably already tried to delve into those areas... But back in Chicago, Foreign Editor Kerry Luft is the one shaping that coverage and he is little more than a big momma's boy looking for Kern to tell him what's important. He's never written anything meaningful in his career, either. So what's left? A McPaper that in 5 years will be 10 pages, and given away in those stupid red boxes. Meanwhile, Zell and his fellow corporate raiders will be fat with money that was once pumped into a decent product.