Archive for August, 2008

The Tribune put Rick Popely's story on page one last Friday morning, then called him in and fired him later in the day. Which means, he reflects at tellzell.com, "I'll have another memorable story about life at the Tribune." Tell Zell is an LA-based site that invites posters to tell the Tribune Company boss "what you really think." Look for the petition telling Zell that since he's laying them off by the hundreds, his employees (Zells likes to call them his "partners") deserve a representative on the board of directors (with another to represent the LA community).  The goal is 1,000 names and the petition's a long way from getting them.

In a slightly different category from Popely's last story are what a Tribune friend calls "voices from beyond the grave," stories by people no longer there. Look for the telltale signs. For instance, the byline to this dance article in the Sunday paper, "By Sid Smith, Special to the Chicago Tribune." If you're "special to . . ." you're freelancing. Smith took a buyout. And this big story by Mary Ann Fergus in Tuesday's Metro section ends without the usual e-mail address so you can contact the reporter. Fergus was laid off Friday.

Another way to know they're gone: The Tribune phone system asks callers to say the name of the person they want to be connected to. That system no longer recognizes the name of anyone who just left the paper.

I got an anonymous call Monday from someone who wanted me to know the Tribune layoffs disproportionately victimized minority journalists. The caller had no numbers to back up that knock on the Tribune, but here it is again, made publicly in a column by Richard Prince on the Maynard Institute Web site. "It's sad because if you look at the list, it's heavily minority. It looks bad," reporter Ray Quintanilla told Prince. 

Prince alludes to an encounter in the newsroom the day before Quintanilla was fired but doesn't name the columnist Quintanilla says he encountered -- John Kass. Quintanilla heard that Kass had just hired another white legman so he e-mailed him to let him know there were minority reporters at the Tribune who could do the job too. Next thing he knew, Quintanilla tells me, "Kass is standing right on top of me. I can see all of the wrinkles in his shirt, kind of a tan shirt, he was that close to me. His shirt was practically touching me. He said, 'You're calling me a racist' -- something to that effect, I said, 'No, I'm not.' I said I admire his work. And he was screaming again, I had to hang up the phone and at that point I had to stand up. He was physically intimidating." Quintanilla says Kass challenged him to step outside. Kass hasn't gotten back to me with his side of the story.

Quintanilla says he couldn't sleep that night. The next day he was fired and he couldn't sleep that night either.

I believe that all of the following took buyouts: Vanessa Bauza, Joe Sjostrom,Jack Pointer, Therese Kwiatkowski, Barbara Rose, Richard Phillips, Kirsten Scharnberg, David Mendell, Dan Gibbard, Ernie Torriero, Wendy White, Hung Vu, Marsha Peters, Brenda Kilianski, Barry Temkin, Alan Sutton, Mark Sharpiro Shapiro, Heather Stone, John Schmeltzer, and Glenn Jeffers. Another considerable loss was that of Nannette Smith, longtime secretary in the features department.

"The Seeker," the blog of Tribune religion writer Manya Brachear, offers the additional name of Nancy Stuermer. Brachear reflects on the layoffs, and she's asked prominent Chicago clergy to speak to "the victims and the vulnerable and the insecure" (Martin Marty's phrase) about the "rupture in self-definition" -- as Rabbi Ellen Dreyfus puts it -- they have just experienced. Having gone through the experience once myself at the Sun-Times, I salute the rabbi on her language.

Of the above former Tribune journalists I'm going to single out Kirsten Scharnberg. A friend who admires her sent me a link to this story about her written a few years ago for her alma mater. As you'll see, she was embedded with the 101st Airborne during the 2003 invasion of Iraq."Wouldn't even trade a hot shower for it," she said during the assignment.

I was told flatly this morning by foreign editor Kerry Luft that Paul Salopek has not resigned from the Tribune, as I  reported below. I'm both embarrassed and pleased to make the correction. 

Two names to add to the list of those who have left voluntarily are Maria Mooshil, an editor of On the Town, and arts critic Sid Smith. 

Here's an unofficial but more or less complete list of editorial employees the Tribune is leaving behind:

Resigned: Ann Marie Lipinski, Michael Tackett, Ron Silverman, Tim McNulty, Paul Salopek, Maury Possley, Hanke Gratteau, Skip Myslenski, Ed Sherman, Tom Heinz, Steve Franklin, Chuck Osgood, Stephen Ravenscraft, Evan Osnos (he's leaving soon to join the New Yorker).

Laid off:  Mark Hinojosa, Rick PopleyPopely, Mary Ann Fergus, Susan Chan, Emeri O'Brien, Ray Quintanilla, Jeff Williams, Jeff Meitrodt, Gail Mitchell, Donna Pierce, Elaine Melko, Dwayne Pallanti, Kelly Haramis, Robert Manor, Terry Harris, Robert Reinalda, Bill Fletcher, Stephen Ravenscraft, Lana Gwinn, Gentry Sleets, Charlie Dickinson, Norm Unger, Paul Iwanaga, Lew Freedman, Luke Mundo, Chris Brown, Linda Young, Stan Ziemba, Steven Morris, Wally Tokarz, Marcia Borucki, Pat Kampert, Robin Jenkins, Anna Seeto, Julie Hudson, Mike Martinez, Eric Freehling, Jason Goodrich, Peter Fuller, Gail Glaser.

Some of these names I don't know. The departures of some I've already reported (here, here, and here). And some I've had the pleasure of writing about before in admiring contexts -- such as Salopek, Franklin and Dickinson. The Tribune is diminished. 

Now that Spain has disgraced itself in Beijing over that slap-happy picture of the basketball team, it doesn't look as if anybody's going to be awarded the 2016 Olympics. Up until now I believed Madrid had the inside track-- because the '92 games in Barcelona were such a success and because every other entry is so flawed. But who would want to give the games to such a PC-deficient people! What is Spain anyway -- a nation of Ben Stillers? Their cagers weren't even smart enough to claim they were trying to make a statement about Tibet. 

If only Franco were alive! The International Olympic Committee cuts authoritarian regimes slack because it knows the venues will be built on time and because it can tell itself the experience of hosting the world will hasten the democratizing process. Look at how untroubled everyone is by China's shameless deceptions -- the opening ceremony was faked, the TV coverage was faked, gymnasts' ages were faked, even Beijing itself was faked. But what of it? The Chinese are only a generation removed from one of history's bloodiest tyrannies. They're finding their way.

But Spain's already been democratized, and when democracies misbehave the people take the rap.

If not Madrid, who gets the Olympics? Tokyo: been there, done that (1964). And their heart's not in it. Rio: Brazil has to host the 2014 World Cup -- how much can they bite off? And let us not overlook Rio's colorful but vicious criminal element.

So is it Chicago by default? Hardly. Chicago's possibly fatal flaw, I'm coming to realize, isn't our crumbling rapid transit. It's our government. The IOC, which has just watched Mayor Daley scurry around Beijing asking a million curious questions, will ask itself this: If Daley's no longer mayor in 2016, then what? It's a reasonable question, and there's no good answer. When the first Mayor Daley died in 1976, chaos followed. Three years later Mayor Jane Byrne was elected, and on her watch Chicago bid for and won the right to hold a world's fair in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage to the new world. It would have been huge! But the alliance between City Hall and the city's business elite didn't survive a change of mayors. Byrne was defeated in 1983 by Harold Washington, again chaos followed, and Chicago's world's fair project collapsed.

What Mayor Daley should have found out from the Chinese was how to run a stable autocracy. 

Daywatch, the Tribune's daily news briefing, isn't sticking to news originated by the Tribune. Charlie Meyerson, who compiles Daywatch each morning and e-mails it to about 60,000 subscribers, has taken to sweetening the package with stories that catch his eye no matter where he finds them--and that includes in the Sun-Times. 

"Most of Daywatch's links still will point to the Tribune," Meyerson's boss, innovations editor Bill Adee, explained in a note to the Trib editorial staff in early July, "but we think we can increase its value to the audience by providing one-stop 'News for Chicagoans.'" He went on: "I long have wanted to experiment with aggregating news. That means linking off to other sites. It seems to work well for Google News, yes?" Not to mention, he went on, for Romenesko and Huffington Post.

It's been startling to get Daywatch in recent days and spot links to Neil Steinberg and Mark Brown. But on second thought, why not knock down all the fences?  Internet grazers are accustomed to roaming free. "I myself think it's kind of cool and I read it more than I ever did," says Adee of the new Daywatch. The competition, he realized, isn't the Sun-Times; it's every other Web site a browser might prefer as a primary source of news. "It's a big world out there and we need to get a lot of traffic from other sites," Adee tells me. "It's OK if we do likewise." That's not chivalry--it's common sense.

But if readers think of it as chivalrous, that's OK too. "Some people get it more than others," says Meyerson, who's posting public reaction. "When does the merger get announced?" wondered a reader who'd spotted a link to the Sun-Times's Carol Marin. "If you're going to fill Daywatch with Sun-Times material," someone else said, "I guess I can just read the Sun-Times and disconnect totally from the Trib." But to Meyerson's delight a third reader responded, "I love the fact that you refer to other publications . . . very classy . . . reminds me of 'Miracle on 42nd Street'!"

Wasn't that the show where the ingenue from Allentown wanders into Macy's and tap-dances up a storm?  

So they send her to Gimbel's.

What's to lose by being a sport? "The Sun-Times ain't exactly getting bigger these days," Adee said. "We can do a lot more. We can be a news service, we can provide video, we can provide a roundup of all the best links in Chicago. We're looking at all of them anyway--why wouldn’t we want to share that?"

It's not just the Sun-Times. It's also the Daily Herald, the Wall Street Journal, Beachwood Reporter, the Reader. . . . When I spotted a link to my own column, any reservations I had melted away.

There's plenty of room at the top of the Tribune. Gerould Kern, who replaced Ann Marie Lipinski when she resigned last month as editor, announced Friday that this was the last day for, among others, managing editor/news Hanke Gratteau, public editor Timothy McNulty, and Washington bureau chief Michael Tackett, all of whom had "expressed a desire to leave as part of the newsroom's reduction in force."

Ahead, said Kern in a memo to his staff, "we still must make some additional involuntary reductions. We now are in the process of evaluating the scope of these reductions. Nothing about this is easy, but it is necessary."

What may have been McNulty's last column ran in the Friday Tribune under the headline "From the past to the future." McNulty reminisced about covering China when it first opened a crack to the West about 30 years ago. "Not to minimize current problems of human rights, restricted Internet access and press freedom," McNulty writes, "the openness of China today is almost impossible to comprehend." Back then, "the 'news' that people really trusted was word on the street. Unofficial rumors had much more currency than anything the government-run media claimed." 

It's not just China that's changed almost incomprehensibly. The Tribune of that day was a great, rich, confident newspaper.

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.