Entries associated with the tag "Alison True":

The new leaner, meaner, more melancholy Reader has come in for a little sympathy from New York Times media writer David Carr. A former editor of the Reader's sister paper in Washington, D.C., the Washington City Paper, Carr's Monday column tells the story of the Reader's devastating layoffs last week (City Paper took the same kind of beating) by focusing on John Conroy, one of the four writers dismissed here. Last week, after the city of Chicago reached settlement agreements with four men who had accused its police officers of torturing them, Conroy received a note that may have given him some consolation. It said:

“My son, Aaron Patterson, tortured by the Chicago Police Department, would not be alive today, I believe, without your articles about police torture in the City of Chicago. You documented and wrote the realization of police torture, of which we will never forget. You help save my son’s life for which I thank you.”

Letters like that don't pay the doctor's bills, but they make it easier for an out-of-work investigative reporter to manage a decent night's sleep. Under journalism's new business model, Carr broods, "the newsroom is no longer the core purpose of media, it’s just overhead," and he observes, "Thousands of bloggers could type for a millennium and not come up with the kind of deeply reported story that freed innocent men."

The other three writers that the Reader let go last week are Tori Marlan, Steve Bogira, and Harold Henderson, whom the Reader billed as "the world's first blogger" and who will continue blogging offsite. Given the circumstances, Harold has done something remarkably gracious: on his new blog he's posted a link to the Web site of Reader contributor Lee Sandlin, and urged his readers to go there and read Sandlin's tribute to this paper's "currently embattled editor." That's Alison True, who under a cost-slashing mandate from the new owners, Creative Loafing of Tampa, Florida, executed last week's massacre. She's taking a beating for that -- but read what Sandlin has to say.

I found myself sharing a table with Dawn Clark Netsch at a dinner last week and she said she'd noticed changes in the Reader. Was the paper OK? "We've got a story on page one by John Conroy," I said, and that was answer enough. A week later I'd have had to say no. John -- and Tori Marlan, Harold Henderson, and Steve Bogira -- were no longer with the Reader.

Laying off these staff writers, which editor Alison True did at the beginning of this week, was surely one of the hardest acts of her life and certainly a low point in the history of this newspaper. "Over the years," True said Thursday in a message to the staff, " John, Harold, Tori, and Steve have produced some of our most important and exciting stories. Their achievements have included brilliant investigative work, prestigious awards, and possibly most important, spurring social change in a city that always needs it. . . . I can't emphasize enough that this action in no way reflects a judgment on the value of the work of these particular writers, and in fact it's my fervent hope that they'll continue to work with us on a contractual basis."

They're gone because the Reader couldn't afford to go on paying them their salaries -- "As you might guess, this move represents a shift in the financial structure of our relationship with contributors," True wrote.

They're gone because a few years ago Craigslist moved in on our classifieds section -- and classifieds represented a huge portion of our income. They're gone because the old Section One -- the editorial section -- was for decades the tail that wagged the dog here, and when revenues fell it became impossible to continue to allocate the same funds to it.

I called the boss, Ben Eason, in Tampa and reminded him that the last time we'd talked he was saying John Conroy deserved a Pulitzer Prize. (That's a popular idea around here. He's been writing about police torture since 1990, but there's no Pulitzer for persistence, no matter how important the subject.) The first time Eason and I talked, just after Eason had bought the paper this summer, I said that Conroy was, in effect, the canary in the coal mine -- as long as he was OK readers would know the Reader was OK. 

"I know, I know," said Eason, who was informed of True's intentions before she made her move. "All I've done is, I've said this is what the budget number is. This is what we’ve got to have. And it’s the same number that’s been out there since August."

Eason and Creative Loafing have some interesting, and let's hope brilliant, ideas about the future of the Reader and the CL chain of six newspapers. "It's ultimately to me a navigation problem," Eason told me. "How do you keep putting out a newspaper at a quality people expect and how do you migrate this stuff to the Web, which is ultimately the future? We’re in a fight over who can tell you more about the street corner in Chicago. You've got a mobile phone and you're hungry or you want to rent an apartment and you're consulting your cell phone, and its going to be Google or Yahoo and they’re getting their information from somebody. Those guys" -- Yahoo, Google -- "they’re not even pretending to be journalists," said Eason.  But "we're the journalism right behind them, the stories and information that's still the most comprehensive and best stuff out there. But the challenge is make that turn. I guess I felt that if I was doing fundamental damage to the Reader I wouldn't have bought the Reader."

While writing for the Reader, Conroy's published acclaimed books on Northern Ireland and torture. Bogira, who's been on leave working on a book, published a terrific book on Chicago's criminal courts, Courtroom 302, that HBO is planning to turn into a miniseries. Our last cover story by Marlan, who recently completed a Patterson Fellowship, concerned a Yemeni student who's still being held prisoner in Guantanamo two years after he was recommended for release. Henderson blogged for us, tossed off features on just about anything, and had the most eclectic mind at the paper. Does their departure do fundamental damage to the Reader? 

I want to say no, because the remaining staff is top drawer. But I expect readers to mourn the departed. Newspapers haven't come to the point where no one will notice.

The staffs of the Chicago Reader and its sister Washington City Paper just found out the papers have been sold to a southern chain, Creative Loafing Inc., which publishes alternative weeklies in Atlanta, Tampa, Sarasota, and Charlotte. The news is shocking but oddly unsurprising--these are hard times for newspapers everywhere, and in consolidation lie the theoretical advantages of scale and fresh energy.

"We never thought it would come to pass. We’ve received so many overtures over the years and they’ve never come to pass,” Bob Roth, a founder of the Reader in 1971 and president of Chicago Reader, Inc., told me. But when Creative Loafing made its overture in March, “we got a better offer than I expected. And I guess it was time. We’ve been here for 36 years.” Roth, who turned 60 this spring, said all ten people with an ownership stake in the company supported a sale. “I’m looking forward to a younger, energetic management,” he said. “Maybe it’ll be an improvement over us guys.”

If times were better, I asked him, and the Reader were still making money hand over fist, do you think you'd all be so ready to call it quits. Roth thought about that awhile. “Yes, I do. But I think that’s because we’re ready to retire,” he said at last.

“We have built our Creative Loafing brand by offering valuable content to people who influence public opinion and public tastes in culturally vibrant markets,” says Creative Loafing’s CEO, Ben Eason, in a prepared statement heavier on jargon than I wish it were. “The addition of two top-ten markets--and two of the industry’s most respected alternative news products--offers us a pivotal gateway of connectivity with the young adult audience.” He went on, “While others may be looking at publishing companies through the lens of old print media, we are pioneering the opportunities offered by convergent print, web, and new media applications.”

Mike Crystal will stay on as publisher of the Reader, and Alison True as editor--that’s good news. I’m told Creative Loafing, which began in 1972 as an Atlanta paper founded by Eason's parents, doesn’t meddle particularly in the local operations of its papers, which publish the kind of serious journalism the Reader is known for--though not as much of it. How the Reader will change, and how much it will change, are questions that preoccupy everyone concerned at the moment.

Addendum: Read the press releases from the Reader and Creative Loafing.