Archive for June, 2008

Deanna Isaacs reports:

Chicago Public Radio has announced its plans for its fiscal year beginning July 1, and they involve some cuts. Hello Beautiful, the Sunday morning arts program launched by former staffer Edward Lifson, is to be "suspended," and  Right Now, a new afternoon talk show hosted by Richard Steele, has been shelved. Daniel Ash, executive vice president of strategic communications, said today that personnel associated with those programs will be reassigned and in addition that programming vice president Ron Jones announced this week that he's leaving the station "to look for a new adventure." Jones will be replaced by former Eight Forty-Eight host Steve Edwards, returning from a ten-month leave of absence. Edwards will have the lesser title of acting program director. Ash added that an essentially flat budget will be presented for the approval of the board of directors when it meets tomorrow; this year's budget was just over $20 million. He maintains that fundraising, including the current pledge drive, is coming along "as expected," but the station is looking to "manage risk" and has to "be conservative moving forward." He says Chicago Public Radio remains committed to vocalo.org, its experimental service now broadcasting to Northern Indiana. Vocalo has a new tower under construction and is expected to extend its broadcast reach to Chicago around Labor Day.

A nastily contrariwise way of remembering Tim Russert was published Friday in Canada's most important newspaper, the Globe and Mail, by one of its best-known columnists, Rick Salutin. Russert was a familiar face on the TV screens of millions of Canadians, but even so he was a foreigner, and Salutin examined him phenomenologically, as Canadian intellectuals like to examine Americans. Russert "had a gotcha style based on confronting his guests with things they had said, but I don't recall him ever challenging them on basic political issues or values," Salutin told Canada. But to the "superstars of the news media . . . he was their substitute real person," their street cred, "a link to the real world, now lost so far below their aerie of vast wealth, limos, blow-dried haircuts. . . . He looked like a news hound [though Salutin said he wasn't], and acted as if that was his metier, like a fish in water." 

In short, Salutin described Russert as just marginally less fraudulent than his mourners, passengers sailing first class on a ship of fools. "There was nostalgia," he wrote. "Someone called Tim Russert 'an Irish cop on a corner in a neighbourhood called America.' In the impending era of Obama, it sounded like a longing for an all-white America that never was. The U.S. of Going My Way, with Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald as Irish priests."

Only a foreign correspondent trafficking in iconoclasm and cliche for the audience back home can sound so smart and so stupid at the same time. "Insiders" mourned Russert by "preening happily together," Salutin told Canada, but outsiders are past being taken in by that crowd -- the Huffington Post's Jason Linkins, in particular, shows "the proper lack of respect." To Salutin, Linkins is a man of the future, those media superstars an elite of empty suits vanishing before our eyes. "With [their] nostalgia goes a sense of menace, from the Internet, and bloggers like Jason Linkins, who ridicule the media luminaries to bits," said Salutin of this anxious elite. "They may still have the perks, but they've lost forever the deference."

It's Salutin's notion of the Internet that made me think twice -- his idea of the 'Net as a sort of frontier where plain truths are spoken, grit is capital, and fancy pants are hooted out of town. Maybe for the moment that's so, but frontiers get settled, order gets imposed, and pecking orders establish themselves. In a world of blogging equals Ariana Huffington, for one, clearly regards herself already as more equal than others. And she's  announced that she intends to expand the Huffington Post into local news, beginning with a site dedicated to Chicago. She's on her way to becoming the William Randolph Hearst of the blogosphere.

The 'Net will produce its own superstars, and deference will be paid. And in time someone else will wonder what these prima donnas at their terminals know about the real world, and won't mind being rude about it.

While Mike's away we'll check in with some links to help fill the painful void.

Porfolio's got Howell Raines musing on Jim Romenesko's alleged impact on journalism, and Andy DeLong, calling Raines's piece "perhaps the strangest article I have ever read," digests some of the nastier passages.

The topic was “Will Newspapers Survive?” and the panelists were Chicago journalists who had for the most part passed through the first three stages of dying -- shock, grasping, and grief -- and could lucidly consider the fourth stage, letting go.

Their collective answer -- no they won’t survive, not as we know them now.

The Chicago Headline Club and the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association sponsored the well-attended discussion, which was held a few days ago in the auditorium of the law firm Mayer Brown. We’d all come to hear from working stiffs, rather than the “media consultants” who dine out on the trade’s miseries. These panelists understand that as journalism tries to reinvent itself, their own careers are on the line.

"We’re here because the business model is broken,” said Bill Adee, who’s in charge of innovations at the Tribune, where Sam Zell has brought in a crew from Clear Channel Communications to think the biggest thoughts. “Hopefully they won’t ask journalists to fix it.”

Eileen Brown, who has the innovations job at the Daily Herald, took exception. She gets her best ideas from journalists, she said, as well as some that are “cockamamie.”  She has “to beg and plead the business side” to try new things, but the newsroom is “passionate. They won’t want the Titanic to sink.”

Moderator Dirk Johnson, an NIU journalism professor who used to cover Chicago for the New York Times, wondered at the outset, “How do we keep the fabled romance that gave us The Front Page from turning to the last page,” and the discussion that followed was tinged with an odd sort of forward-looking nostalgia. In the Front Page era, every social and economic class was served by its own daily, which cost pennies. Today isn’t that different, with an infinite array of Web sites, all free and all sure to flatter somebody's notion of the world and how it works. The most sentimental of the panelists, Monroe Anderson of EbonyJet, recalled how much fun the newspaper business still was when he broke in at the Tribune in 1974, but when he complained that everything became “very corporate, very structured’ and “they’re looking to the bottom line,” he was describing a middle period now ending, when metro dailies resembled the local gas and water works and other utilities, except that they were unregulated and made a lot more money.

Anderson fondly remembered a colorful Tribune editor with an eighth-grade education, the sort of person who would soon become unthinkable in metro newsrooms. When someone in the audience asked the most pointed question of the evening -- young people understand the Internet “intuitively,” so why don’t the papers give them the wheel -- Anderson replied at once, “Because the baby boomers won’t give it up.”

But when Adee patted himself on the back for hiring Luis Arroyave, a marginally qualified kid who’s become a hit as a blogger and soccer writer, Anderson marveled, “That’s how papers used to be, before the suits took over.”

Beyond letting go are healing and serenity, and Tom McNamee, editorial page editor of the Sun-Times, a paper on the brink, seemed OK with all of it. If the papers die, he said, they die. Journalism will survive. He compared the news to popular music: “Even bands like Wilco, nobody's buying the records, they get them free online. So what's going to happen, music is not going to die, people still love music, there will still be bands out there making fantastic music, but they won’t make megafortunes. There's nothing wrong with that. That’s a wonderful thing -- the only people it’s bad for is Wilco. Same thing here. We may not all be making fortunes. Our 30 percent profit days are over. We may not survive. But you know what --  that’s our problem. Not to say that the world’s in crisis because newspapers may not survive in the form that we recognize now.”

The next form is digital, but there are considerations. Jim Slonoff, publisher of The Hinsdalean, brought up one of them, which is that his hyperlocal weekly, which he and a partner started a few years ago, is making money. “The old way still does work,” he said. And Brown put in a good word for the enduring pleasure of passing a Sunday afternoon curled up with the New York Times.

The problem is what she called the “middle ground,” that considerable realm of quotidian national and international stories that can be read just as easily on a computer as in a newspaper -- maybe a lot more easily. Zell’s people had already warned that Tribune Company papers were cutting back their news holes, and McNamee predicted “the most local Tribune since Colonel McCormick.” I sat there thinking what a loss that will be, for just that morning almost every story in the Tribune's front section had been an engaging house-written report on an off-beat but important topic, and if I hadn’t read them in the Tribune I wouldn’t have read them at all because (a) it would never have occurred to me to look for them online, and (b) if a paper hadn’t commissioned them they’d never have been written.

“Our perceptions now are all driven by what’s coming up in online hits,” mused Mark Brown of the Sun-Times, who’s certain his online audience and the audience for his printed columns are not the same. Elaine Eileen Brown said, “You still make more money in print than you do online. And so the money -- it’s not a dollar for a dollar, it’s ten cents for a dollar. So it’s this weird transitional phase where you’d love to say ‘OK we’ll move everybody over here,’ but you can’t because you still have to feed the mother ship.”

Tossing sand in the gears of progress, she said, are advertisers who aren’t comfortable advertising online and ad salesmen who “are in the ice age” and much happier selling ads for the paper. Adee pointed out that the “big successes” on the Internet, Web sites such as YouTube, have content that’s 95 percent generated by the public. Content on the Tribune’s site is 97 percent house generated, just 3 percent public -- the comment boards and photos. So his paper isn’t anywhere close to the prominent models of online success, and given that the point of the Tribune is to provide professional journalism, never will be. On the other hand, Adee told the crowd that RedEye is the fastest growing paper in the country, tailored for and given away to an audience that can’t imagine paying for news. He also said, “People want what journalists do more than ever. They want it in different forms. They can accept it in amateur form, semipro form, or professional journalism."

There wasn’t much said to hearten the young professionals in the audience. One of them asked about freelance opportunities and Anderson said to talk to Slonoff. “He’s expanding and the Tribune’s shrinking.”

For video highlights of the panel discussion, click here.

Verbal self-defense is an art of calibration. If they see you sweat when you're settling scores, you lose. If you sound like you're feeling sorry for yourself, you lose big time. 

Tracy Baim, publisher of Windy City Times, used her column last week to stand up for herself. What bugged her was a review in the Sun-Times of Out & Proud in Chicago, a new documentary airing on WTTW. The author, Misha Davenport, whom Baim had never met, regretted the absence of certain notables from this history, the "glaring omission" being Albert Williams, best known today as a Reader theater critic and a Columbia College instructor but also a central figure in the development of the gay press.

There's no love lost between Williams and Baim, frequent journalistic rivals over the years, but she could abide a friendly word on his behalf. What ticked her off was what came next. "Instead," Davenport went on, "the documentary features Tracy Baim . . . as both a subject and a contributing resource. [Coproducer Dan Andries] insists that Baim didn't control access to the information and had no editorial input, but it's hard to believe she had no influence over the documentary, given that producers used her own interviews for research and relied heavily on her newspaper archives. It would be an understatement to say that, as a journalist, Williams is far more respected by members of the community than Baim is. But Baim is here. Williams is not. Andries doesn't see this as a problem. I'm sure many will beg to differ." 

Baim read this with astonishment and anger. "It's one thing to say someone's missing," she says. "It's something else to say someone else took their place and didn’t deserve it." 

Baim was righteously upset. But that's when you need to keep your cool.

She didn't. "First, let me say that I warned WTTW that if I were to help them in any way with the documentary, the same people who have attacked me in the past would very likely do so again with this project, and in fact this has happened," she wrote. "I don't mean to sound paranoid, but for more than 20 years the same few people have been saying the same negative and untrue things about me."

With that Baim had passed the point of no return. When you catch yourself sounding paranoid, don't explain that it's not how you mean to sound. Delete and start over. Since the 80s Baim has been a major figure in local gay publishing, whose history of schisms and scandals guarantees anyone involved in it a healthy crop of enemies. Having decided to publicly nurse her grudge, Baim, whose column was very long and nominally a  survey of LGBT history, could not let it go. "I hesitated, because I did not want critics of me personally to taint the WTTW project. But in the end I decided . . . that I would not let those same few critics harass me yet again. . . . I congratulate WTTW on this first step. I hope they do not take the critics to heart. . . . Let's see who is the real enemy here? WTTW, which made tough decisions on this first film, or those who would bomb us?"

Baim changed subjects, or so I thought, and began a discussion of her own Chicago Gay History Project. But she circled back. "Our differences often keep us apart, and are often used to try to keep others down," she reflected. "I sometimes feel upset by how personal the attacks can be on me, and how those attacks could create collateral damage to others (in this case WTTW). . . . No one is perfect, but I believe that even more imperfect are those who never 'do' except to criticize those who try to make a positive contribution."

Out & Proud in Chicago debuted during a pledge drive and made WTTW a lot of  money; what's more, it got a glowing review on WFMT by Andrew Patner. Baim needn't worry about WTTW suffering collateral damage. The damage was done to Baim alone, and most of it was self-inflicted.

The age of denial is pretty much in the past at American newspapers. With Rupert Murdoch, who's 77, now predicting he'll outlive the print press has another 20 years or so and Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft, giving it maybe ten, the  scriveners who populate the nation's despondent newsrooms are willing to concede that -- in the words of industry analyst Ken Doctor -- "It's the end of the world as we know it."

All those scriveners -- the ones who know they don't know enough to negotiate a path from this world to the next on their own -- ask at this point is that they be led forward by people who do. Which is why it's so troubling to the hundreds of journalists at the Tribune Company when their new leader sounds like a nincompoop.

COO Randy Michaels, whose background's in radio, and not radio of any distinction, held a conference call with investors and media reporters on June 5 and made two striking statements. The first was that the company intended to shrink the news hole at its papers to bring the news-content-to-ads ratio to 50-50 (industry-wide it's usually closer to 60-40). The second was that output as measured in column inches would weigh heavily in the decisions about which staff to boot. Michaels said the average journalist produces about 51 pages a year at the Tribune Company's LA Times, about 300 pages a year at its Hartford Courant. "If you work hard and produce a lot for us, everything is great," said Michaels.

The following observations about the news-ad ratio owe a big debt to Doctor, who's just addressed the subject on an Editor & Publisher podcast and in his own blog. A lot of newspaper advertisers already have one foot out the door, and here's Michaels proposing to cheapen the environment in which their ads run. Big advertisers like the visual dignity of ads that stand alone on a page surrounded by important news. Reduce the news and you wind up with the cheesy sight of ads surrounded by other ads. And although newspapers have trained their big advertisers over the decades to think of Section A as the place to be  -- the section with tony national and international news -- that's the news hole in greatest danger of being shrunk. It's news produced by high-paid, underproductive (by Michaels's way of thinking) veterans who can be cleared out for an AP digest. 

In short, manipulating the news-ad ratio is a much trickier business than Michaels probably thinks it is. Has he asked the Tribune's advertisers if they want to be in a paper with less news?

As for staff productivity, measuring it by column inches per journalist is inane, but I'm guessing the Tribune Company survey amounts to Michaels pulling numbers out of his ass. (I made a call to the Tribune asking how Michaels got them and was told the info was proprietary. Why should it be? -- pollsters are obliged to reveal how they conduct their polls.) There are more than 200 journalists in the Courant newsroom. If each produced 300 pages a year, the average size of a daily Courant would be something like 164 pages. (If Michaels means full pages of edit, then the advertising pages would make the paper far bigger.) The Courant doesn't average 164 pages or anything close to it. It's probably more like 70.

Since last December, when Sam Zell took it over, the Tribune Company has faced almost $13 billion in debt and a business environment worse than Zell apparently ever imagined. He's already had to sell off Newsday, one of the company's healthiest properties, just to service the debt. But while Zell, who personally put up just $315 million, runs the show, the stock is held by an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). The employees Zell enjoys addressing as his "partners" have a huge equity interest in the fate of the company. So one way to think of Michaels's initiatives is that a hired hand showed up one day talking big about getting rid of the people he works for, people with no say in the matter.

If you're interested in the audio, Charles Madigan and I discussed all this this morning on WBEZ.

FOOTNOTE: When I calculated above that the Hartford Courant would average some 164 pages an issue if what Randy Michaels said about its staff's productivity was true,  I was supposing that all the news in the paper was staff generated. Of course, that's ridiculous. Add wire copy and copy from other Tribune Company papers, plus comics and other syndicated features, and we're surely looking at another 20-30 pages.

On WTTW's Chicago Tonight last Friday, Joel Weisman asked his panel of reporters for their thoughts on the Democrats' "Teflon candidate," the "media darling" to whom "nothing sticks" -- Barack Obama. I waited for someone to point out that the same language pretty aptly describes John McCain.

Nobody did. Political campaigns are about pinning an unflattering label on the opposition, and Obama's already been stuck with a pretty good one -- the candidate to whom nothing sticks. No matter how much he's hammered, he's presumably getting away with murder.

To the extent that Obama's gotten a pass from the media, it's because he's a political phenomenon. McCain's appeal is a lot more personal and durable. He served and suffered in war and his courage can't be questioned -- his bio is catnip to middle-aged, male political writers. Aside from that, he enjoys a glass, tells a good story, blows up when he's angry, swears like a man -- or like a journalist -- and he likes our company. Dammit, he's one of us! And those political writers remember that back in 2000, when everyone was younger and McCain's original Straight Talk Express was hauling the most enthusiastic, idealistic candidate in the field, Bush stopped him with lies. So he's owed.

Michael Tomasky gives a lot of space to McCain's relationship with the media in his review of three new books on McCain in the June 12 New York Review of Books. The books aren't particularly friendly -- Tomasky says they argue that "while there has been much to respect in McCain in the past, there remain today only shards and vestiges of that man." If that's true -- and I find myself not wanting to believe it because I've admired McCain enormously myself -- Tomasky doesn't expect the media to notice.

He writes, "The McCain we see publicly now is determined to do anything he has to do to win. It's probably unlikely that the larger national press will arrive at this interpretation by November. The image of the straight-talking maverick who bled in a cell [in Hanoi] while Baby Boomers indulged themselves is just too hard-wired into their systems. In addition, McCain, still adept at the seduction of journalists and the self-deprecating witticism, hides his rank ambition better than, say, Hillary Clinton does."

When two media darlings run against each other for president, the coverage is hard to predict. I wrote a few weeks ago that it could turn into a media civil war -- Kool-Aid against Kool-Aid. But journalists being such skeptics, when it comes down to a choice between admiring promise and admiring achievement, achievement will win every time -- even if promise has a lot more to offer the future. The press could make McCain pay for being too old and too Republican, but it'll find him a lot easier to forgive than Obama for wrapping the press around its finger. 

The comments on the Reader's Clout City blog can get pretty rambunctious. Two months ago, James Sachay, former assistant commissioner of Chicago's Department of Aviation, named the Reader as codefendant in a defamation suit because of one of them. The comment, dated January 31 and "signed" by Sachay, said in part:

"I am voting for Frank Coconate. I am sorry I challenged his petitions under false pretenses. I am sorry I stole money from Roman Pucinski. I am sorry I got illegal contracts for my son and acted criminally at O'Hare."

Coconate was fired by the city two years ago from his job as a sewer safety worker. This past winter he donned the mantle of gadfly reformer taking on the machine and ran a failed race for Democratic committeeman in the 41st Ward. Sachay alleged in his suit that Coconate was the actual author of the blog post, though Coconate denies it; the Reader's supposed offense was allowing it to appear. 

But the Reader argued in its motion to dismiss that it enjoys immunity under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which draws a distinction between a publisher that selects what to publish and the proprietor of a public Web forum. This distinction holds even if the Web site provider makes some effort to police the site. (Someone here took down the offending comment sometime after it appeared.)

On June 3 the Reader was dismissed as a defendant in response to a new motion filed by Sachay. His amended suit against only Coconate will continue.

For more on Web forums and the law, check out my column on the tempest that followed a Tribune profile of violinist Rarchel Barton Pine.

Barack Obama's finally clinched the Democratic nomination, but he'll probably look back on this stage of his campaign as the easy part. Among the issues he can expect to be pounded on in the months ahead is the one about who he knew and how he knew them.

Obama's already resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ to get out from under his associations with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger -- which didn't help at all with such hostiles as the National Review. Tony Rezko made national news as an Obama associate when he was convicted Wednesday, and the GOP jumped in immediately with this video. And here's Michael Kinsley on "Obama's radical friends" Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. The former Weathermen "remain spectacularly unrepentant, self-indulgent, unreflective--still bloated with a sense of entitlement, still smug with certainty," in Kinsley's view, but he points out that if Obama has shown bad judgment in associating with them, so has  a "comically respectable list of Chicagoans and others -- including Republicans and conservatives." As Kinsley sees it, when Ayers, whose dad ran Commonwealth Edison and was on a lot of important boards, decided the revolution wasn't going to happen he simply went home and the establishment took him back into the fold.

Moral: Be careful who you meet on the way up. You'll meet them again on the way further up.

Sun-Times music critic Jim DeRogatis didn't simply take the Fifth Amendment 15 times when he was questioned by the defense Wednesday in the R. Kelly trial. He also took the First. And by the stress he put on the words the First each time he said them, he made it clear which amendment was closer to his heart. After all, the Fifth Amendment is favored by mobsters trying to stay out of the slammer. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and the press.

Judge Vincent Gaughan was interested only in the Fifth. And from the headlines, so were the dailies. The Sun-Times said, "Sun-Times music critic takes the 5th." The Tribune said, "Sun-Times music critic cites 5th amendment to avoid testimony."

The Sun-Times at least went into the details of what DeRogatis said in court (and wrote a new head for the story online that says, "DeRogatis takes the 1st in R. Kelly trial."). The Tribune didn't do that to DeRogatis's satisfaction, so he e-mailed them Thursday to protest. He wrote:

"While the Tribune blog correctly reports my reluctant appearance at the R. Kelly trial yesterday, today's print edition does not.

"According to the subhed, 'Sun-Times music critic cites 5th Amendment to avoid testimony,' while reporters Stacy St. Clair and Kayce T. Ataiyero write, 'DeRogatis invoked his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.'

"Taking the stand only on the threat of imprisonment, 15 times I invoked all of my protections, clearly emphasizing the ones that most matter to me and all journalists in this state: 'I respectfully decline to answer the question on the advice of counsel, on the grounds that to do so would contravene the reporter's privilege, the special witness doctrine, my rights under the Illinois Constitution, and the First and Fifth Amendments of the United States Constitution.'

"Judge Gaughan may have chosen to ignore every other protection but the Fifth, but I invoked them all and would never have separated them. [Attorney Damon] Dunn, who recently represented the Tribune before this judge on a First Amendment matter, eloquently and passionately argued that I was only taking the Fifth because this judge made it necessary by ignoring the First. And that assault on our most sacred of journalistic protections is on appeal. A legal attack on any journalist's rights is an attack on all of us. I would have expected better of the Tribune in reporting the Sun-Times' attempt to stand strong against this unjust and deeply troubling assault." 

The defense wanted to hear from DeRogatis because back in 2002 he received the videotape that's at the heart of the trial -- the one alleged to show Kelly having sex with a girl in her early teens. DeRogatis turned the tape over to police the same day he got it. But the laws against child pornography -- which the tape arguably is -- are so draconian that Damon Dunn, representing the Sun-Times, was able to tell the court that DeRogatis might leave himself open to federal charges if he said anything at all about what he did with the tape while he had it.

Here's a fuller appreciation of DeRogatis's performance in court from Josh Levin at Slate. 

An editorial in the new issue of the National Review scolds Barack Obama for maintaining ties that were too close for too long with Trinity United Church of Christ and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. And it wonders, why did Obama join Trinity in the first place? No friend of Obama's, the National Review thinks some answers can be found in a story from the Reader's archives. The profile of Obama by Hank De Zutter "that appears to shed some light" ran on December 8, 1995, soon after Obama decided to run for the Illinois Senate. It's pretty much the one and only portrait of the candidate as a young man. 

The National Review editorial leans heavily on reporting on Obama by Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. According to the National Review, De Zutter "tells us that the young politician did not accept 'the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation -- which helps a few upwardly mobile blacks to "move up, get rich, and move out.'

The NR goes on, "Obama didn't embrace black nationalism to the extent that Wright did -- but, according to the profile and to Obama's first book [Dreams From My Father], that was only because Obama regarded that approach as an impractical way to organize constituencies for his own brand of change."

And what brand was that? The editorial continues: "For Obama and Wright, integration encouraged blacks to buy into the notion that they can overcome obstacles like racism and poverty on their own, without relying on the government. That kind of self-reliance makes it harder to build coalitions for liberal policies, and such coalition-building is what community organizing -- Obama's post-college vocation -- is all about."

In other words (I think), Obama believed integration promoted self-reliance. But self-reliance made Obama's job of community organizing harder. Which means . . . that Obama opposed integration? Does the National Review intend to position Obama this fall as someone whose history of community organizing and church membership prove he's actually a segregationist?

Maybe. Here's Kurtz had to say in the article the National Review was drawing on: "Obama's repudiation of integrationist upward mobility is fully consistent with his career as a community organizer, his general sympathy for leftist critics of the American 'system,' and of course his membership at Trinity. Obama, we are told [by De Zutter], 'quickly learned that integration was a one-way street, with blacks expected to assimilate into a white world that never gave ground.'" It's presumably a short jump from critiquing integration to repudiating it. Kurtz continues, "De Zutter gives us a clear glimpse of Obama's radicalism. . . . [He] shows us that the full story of Obama's ties to [the Reverend Michael] Pfleger and Wright is both more disturbing and more politically relevant than we've realized up to now."

Back to the National Review editorial. It says that according to De Zutter, "Obama said he was 'tired of seeing the moral fervor of black folks whipped up -- at the speaker's rostrum and from the pulpit -- and then allowed to dissipate because there's no agenda, no concrete program for change.' The formula Obama devised was simple: He would supply the agenda, and people like Wright would supply the rage."

In other words (I think), Obama and Wright -- make that "people like Wright" -- were in cahoots.

My reading of De Zutter's profile is very different. Obama had observed that the rage was in endless supply, and he wanted some good to finally come of it. But he did not intend to "supply the agenda." In a passage of the Reader article that the National Review ignores, De Zutter explains: "What makes Obama different from other progressive politicians is that he doesn't just want to create and support progressive programs; he wants to mobilize the people to create their own. He wants to stand politics on its head, empowering citizens by bringing together the churches and businesses and banks, scornful grandmothers and angry young."

De Zutter's article, by the way, does not make a single mention of either the Reverend Jeremiah Wright or Trinity United Church of Christ. But so it goes with fundamental texts. Stanley Kurtz and the National Review found in it what they wanted to find in it -- not one word less, not one word more.

Some articles lose us almost before they begin:

"On the day before the night he made history, Barack Obama shot hoops at the Back Bay Club in Chicago, and called the odd superdelegate or two . . . " from the front page of Wednesday's New York Times.

I once had an idea for the ultimate Chicago movie. Well, at least I knew how it should end: with a wild car chase through the narrow streets of Lakeview, every vehicle -- those of the desperadoes as well as the good guys -- tuned to the Cubs' big game that afternoon. As Harry Caray bellows in the background, the lead car careers south on Kenmore, tears across Waveland, and smashes through Wrigley Field's left field wall.

It's the bottom of the ninth when this happens and two men are out. The Cubs trail but the bags are full. And it's a hit, a long one, the ball soaring high above the wall. It's the miracle long hoped for and never truly expected, a home run that will turn defeat into victory and send the Cubs to their first World Series since 1945. But the retreating Cardinals outfielder jumps onto the hood of the getaway car that  just breached the ivy, reaches the car's roof in another bound, and with his third leap hauls in the vanishing pellet.

"Holy cow!" moans Harry Caray. "What a lousy break. Boy, the Cubbies find more ways to lose . . . "

And then the camera pans the grandstand, from the left field line to the right field line, following a row of seats. And each seat is occupied by a famous actor who's come out of Chicago -- Cusack, Mahoney, Petersen, Malkovich, Murray, Allen, Metcalf, Arkin, Sinise, Frantz, Mantegna . . .  All looking more morose than surprised, for they know their Cubs. And at the far end of this procession, looking particularly unsurprised and disgusted, we see Paul Sills, and beyond Sills an empty seat. And those who understand Chicago theater will know at once that this seat represents Sills's mother, Viola Spolin, the teacher and theoretician who wrote the basic text, Improvisation for the Theater, and was, in a sense, the mother of them all.

When Harry Caray died I put the idea aside. Today there'd be even more faces to fill the seats -- Piven, Colbert, Carell, Fey -- but at the end of the row there'd be two empty seats. Paul Sills died Monday at the age of 80 at the family place in Wisconsin. The Tribune promptly posted an obit by theater critic Chris Jones, who understood that Sills was a giant. He wasn't merely present at the creation of the improvisational theater movement in Chicago -- he was the Oppenheimer who made it happen. At the University of Chicago in the late 40s, he and Mike Nichols and others created the improvisatory Compass Players -- and the vision was Sills's. A decade later he and Bernie Sahlins founded Second City. After losing interest in Second City's scripted productions, he developed "story theater," which Jones calls "the technique wherein a character could also step out of the story and serve as a third-person narrator" -- a technique that showed how "non-dramatic forms such as novels and prose could be produced effectively as drama."

I knew Sills in the early 80s when he and his family moved into a big, dilapidated house two doors up from ours on Paulina Street. The house was so astonishingly run down that Ed Zotti, the Reader contributor who lives there now, will soon publish a book on his family's epic struggle to rehab it. Ed says Paul and Carol Sills compiled a nine-page, single-spaced list of repairs they'd made -- such as jury-rigging a railing at the top of the stairs to replace the missing balustrade -- to keep the house from becoming a death trap for themselves and their four daughters. Despite all their efforts, the Sillses barely made a dent. I enjoyed the house because it spoke so well of its occupants. Only geniuses and free spirits, I felt, could live in such a place and think, "So, what of it?"

But I'd never call Paul Sills blithe. His wife Carol was very friendly. Neva, their youngest daughter, joined a play group our oldest daughter was in. She was lively and full of mischief. But Paul was moody. He'd moved back to Chicago to teach and create a new company, but the work didn't go that well and a couple of years later the family moved on. Paul was friendly enough, but he didn't say much and he wasn't warm. I have a lingering impression of a man in a red plaid shirt moving at a fast clip up the sidewalk, impatiently thinking complicated thoughts. As a brooding young man at the University of Chicago plotting the future of theater he probably cut the same sort of figure as the nuclear physicists who'd been around campus a few years before splitting the atom -- someone with little regard for appearances but a high regard for his own worth, preoccupied by theoretical concerns the rest of the world couldn't be expected to understand, and fiercely determined to get to the core of things, to Truth.

UPDATE: For more on Paul Sills, including links to commemorations by Second City, WBEZ, and the Chicago Improv Festival, please visit the Reader's new theater blog, Onstage .