Entries associated with the tag "Chicago Sun-Times":

Rick Telander has posted a "four-part" response to Jay Mariotti that he says will be his last word on his former Sun-Times colleague -- Telander has a life to lead.

Here it is in toto:

One: If PeeWee Herman hates you, is that bad thing?
Two: Remember these names: Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Jack Kelley, Janet Cooke. Does anybody care about Mariotti’s fake date lines, stolen quotes, false scenes, etc.? Anybody?
Three: ask Rick Reilly what he thinks about this hair-dyed and eyebrow-plucked creature.
Four: Put this bitter old man in a room with the yapping fraud, close the door for five minutes, and bring a broom.

Love, Rick Telander

Telander put this up at biglead.com, a self-described "independent sports blog." He was reacting to remarks from Mariotti posted on my blog that were dismissive of him. Mariotti, in turn, had been vexed by earlier comments made here and here by Telander. The roots of their mutual antipathy run long and deep.

Telander's post has generated a lot of response at biglead.com, some of it attempting to unpack Telander's meaning. It seems clear enough to me, especially if you know that "bitter old man" is what Mariotti called Telander in this space and that it was Mariotti who originally brought up Rick Reilly.

The Tribune may have dodged a mullet. Jay Mariotti says he's not going there after all.

With rumors flying hot and heavy, the Tribune posted a headline on its home page Tuesday night that said, "Former Sun-Times columnist Mariotti not joining Tribune."  The reason given by Mariotti in the single-sourced story was that for legal reasons he and the Tribune "both decided that we can't do what we wanted to do.'' His contract with the Sun-Times, the paper that let him quit last month, contained a noncompete clause, and "the Sun-Times' lawyer threatened me with a lawsuit in 64-point type" if he crossed the street. Mariotti said that before talks broke off, he and the Tribune Company "talked about television, about the Internet, about the newspaper.'' 

A Tribune writer told me, "Many of us are absolutely thrilled, as you can imagine."

The online article, written by Jim Kirk, made no mention of the deep dismay that washed through the Tribune when word spread that Mariotti might be coming aboard, nor of the role internal lobbying might have played in nixing the deal. Readers also had reason to wonder how reliable a source Mariotti is about his own affairs. When Mariott left the Sun-Times he told Kirk that he was big and it was the papers that got small. "I'm a competitor and I get the sense this marketplace doesn't compete," Mariotti said then. "Everyone is hanging on for dear life at both papers. I think probably the days of high-stakes competition in Chicago are over. To see what has happened in this business. … I don't want to go down with it."

From Michael Cooke, editor in chief of the Sun-Times, and sports columnist Rick Telander, I heard a somewhat different story about Mariotti's departure. 

So some wary Tribune staffers were uncertain how much faith to put in Mariotti's account of events this time around. They also understood that the noncompete clause will expire next August.

"It's a good night," said the writer quoted above, "but I'll be happier when he takes a job in Serbia."

The editorial staff of the Tribune is waiting for something dreadful to happen. This will be the announcement that, in a capacity not yet defined, Jay Mariotti is joining the family. "Only six groups would be offended by Jay being hired," says Tribune sports columnist Mike Downey. "The Cubs. The White Sox. The Bears. The Bulls. The Tribune staff. And our readers. Everybody else is going to say, 'What a great hire!'"

"Everybody else" may be a majority of two -- Tribune Company COO Randy Michaels and innovation chief Lee Abrams. From what I hear, no mere editors are involved in the project to lure Mariotti into the Tower. Michaels and Abrams, with no prior newspaper experience between them, are Sam Zell's guys, and I'm sure these two men of the world will have no trouble shrugging off Mariotti's history of surly Zell-bashing back when Mariotti did his writing for the Sun-Times. "Can you believe the Cubs are stuck with this loon?" wrote Mariotti of Zell last February, when Zell was talking about selling naming rights to Wrigley Field. "Maybe a front can be mounted against The Evil Zell if enough fans raise hell."

That's all so yesterday. Mariotti abruptly left the Sun-Times last month when, in another of his familiar rages, he threatened to quit and this time the paper let him go. And even before that, from what Downey's heard, Michaels and Abrams were eyeing Mariotti for the Tribune franchise. "No one I know wants to work with him," says Downey, who knows everyone in the Tribune sports department, "but I don't believe Jay cares if they do or don't. Jay's a very independent guy. It won't matter to him if he's accepted. He won't care."

Reports of mass resignations in the sports department are overblown, according to Downey, because people need their jobs too much to give them up on principle. "But a couple of people probably would leave" -- Downey wouldn't name them -- "and several more would begin looking for something new."

Including you? 

"It's not impossible." Naturally, Downey wonders if the addition of Mariotti as a sports columnist would make his own column expendable. On the one hand, the redesigned Tribune gets rolled out on September 29, and he's been asked to go out into the marketplace and do meet-and-greets. The paper's also taken a new picture of him for his column. On the other hand, the Tribune Company is crying poverty and Downey is well paid, though not nearly as well paid as Mariotti would be.

"They would be costing me a considerable amount of money if they were to let me go," Downey says, "so I'd at the very least have to explore what my legal position would be." But as he describes it, hiring Mariotti wouldn't put the Tribune so much in legal as in ethical jeopardy. Facing massive debt, the Tribune Company is slashing costs. "If we weren't having serious cutbacks I'd say, 'OK, they want to add him to the stafff,'" Downey says. "But to lay off hundreds of people and then go pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars -- I'd find that hard to understand. I'm not sure how they'd justify it -- but they may not care whether they can justify it."

There's apparently a wrinkle that's kept the Tribune from announcing Mariotti's arrival already. Mariotti's Sun-Times contract had a clause keeping him from quitting to join the competition. Various scenarios have circulated around the Tower as possible resolutions to this impasse. One would set Mariotti up as a sort of independent contractor writing for his own Web site -- which would be accessed through the Tribune home page. Another would throw some dollars at the Sun-Times to buy his freedom. A third would simply defy the Sun-Times and begin printing Mariotti's columns anyway -- this strategy banks on the Sun-Times being too poor to fight back in court.

"I've been alerted that the announcement could happen any day now," says Downey. "I have colleagues who are appalled by this and would like to protest in some way if it happened" How? "A petition to the editor, or a formal letter of protest." 

But isn't the time for that now,  before he's hired?

"Yes, but the company hasn't admitted they're trying to hire Jay." And he reflects that Lee Abrams could reply that it's his very toxicity "that makes Jay so controversial and marketable."

When Mariotti left the Sun-Times, that paper went crazy with joy. The celebration in its pages was absurd -- if the paper hadn't kept throwing money at him he wouldn't have stayed there 17 years -- but the sense of deliverance was genuine. "This is a chance for rebirth. This is joy," said sports columnist Rick Telander, who despises Mariotti. "A whole shitload of guys called me last night joyous! Ding dong, the witch is dead!"

But not dead, apparently, just moving east.

"The two Ricks -- Telander and Morrissey -- hate Jay Mariotti more than anyone I know," says Downey. "Telander describes himself as reborn since Jay left. He's almost giddy. And my friend [and colleague] Rick Morrissey is livid about this, if it turns out to be true. He can't imagine a worse case scenario."

"We think communication is knowledge, but it's not -- it's hollow," says Telander, trying to explain Mariotti's appeal in our media-battered age, "and we're all caught up in the techniques of screeching and texting. The original thing was Bughouse Square, where the people were on soapboxes. You had to be heard -- it didn't matter what your message was. But if your veins were bulging and your eyes were popping out of your sockets, then people would watch. Like the fat lady and the three-headed boy at the Illinois fair, it was a quick shot of goof."

It's been a whole week, I know. But in that week why hasn't Barack Obama turned on his heel and chased his enemies under a rock?

"He worked as a community organizer," said Rudolph Giuliani at the GOP convention last week, then grinned to make it clear the comment was meant to be risible. The crowd tittered. Giuliani chuckled. "He worked -- What!" Hooting. Chanting. Waving of cowboy hats. "I said – I said – 'OK. OK. Maybe this is the first problem on the resume.'"

Later in the evening Sarah Palin spoke.  "Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska I was mayor of my hometown," she said. "And, since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves." Pause. Laughter. People standing and waving. Celebrating the zinger before they'd even heard it. "I guess – I guess a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer except that you have actual responsibilities."

Good times at the Xcel Center. (Here's an early reaction from my colleague Whet Moser to the GOP hijinks.)

The Sun-Times got to the point in an editorial: "Republicans insist that people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Communities should take care of their own and not depend on big government to do the job. And the folks who do make it should give back. We agree wholeheartedly. But on what is the job of community organizer premised, if not those very principles?"

And blogger Robert Reed, who used to be editor of Crain's Chicago Business, kicked butt: "Yeah, that Jane Addams was a funny gal. Who wouldn't laugh at a community organizer who spent her adult life feeding hungry, homeless children and fighting for social reform? Founder of Hull House? Nobel Peace Prize winner? Please, enough with the jokes."

But I'm beginning to wonder if Obama himself is so fearful of sounding arch he's forgotten how to do contempt. I mean, the GOP has left itself wide open for ridicule from any Democrat with the chops to bring it on. As the bumper sticker says, Jesus Christ was a community organizer. And if you don't want the Lord's name exploited for partisan purposes, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a community organizer too. Another Nobel winner, in fact. Not that the GOP wouldn't pounce if Obama's name got put in their company.

If Republicans don't know what community organizers are they must not know what communities are. Is there a bumper sticker yet that says "Even gated communities need organizing."? 

Admittedly, Obama has a lot on his plate. Here am I telling him to snort disdainfully, while from another precinct comes a demand for an entirely different demeanor. John Neffinger at the Huffington Post is making it known that "if Obama wants Americans to respect him, they must be allowed to see him react with the kind of anger - controlled, but still palpable - that they would feel if somebody did that to them." 

What McCain did to Obama, in Neffinger's view, was release an ad Tuesday "that basically paints Obama as a pedophile." Here's the ad. It's rancid and dishonest -- as Neffinger explains -- and Obama most definitely has to take it on before he concerns himself with the TP'd public image of community organizers. So I guess I have to stand in line. Neffinger notes that "in the last few days, it seems about a dozen communications experts have written pieces on HuffPo calling on the Obama campaign to get tougher with their messages." Nobody thinks he's campaigning right.

But even if the community organizing assault is so buried under more recent libels that the Democrats never get around to digging it out, I won't forget. This is Chicago. Community organizing is what we do. Our Saul Alinsky was probably the most influential urban community organizer in American history. The history of the Catholic Church in Chicago is a history of community organizing -- City Hall didn't build those churches. There's no way to write about the chronic unrest between central Chicago and its unruly neighborhoods without an understanding of how communities organize to take on City Hall. I was hoping one of the wry wits on the Tribune editorial page would dress down the paper's favorite party for its contempt of history. But, no, the Tribune must be thinking it's the wrong time for that.

Here's a link to a Democracy Now! interview between Amy Goodman and John Raskin, a community organizer in New York City with steel in his back. His response was to launch the website OrganizersFightBack.wordpress.com. "It's frustrating," said Raskin, after watching videos of the Giuliani and Palin speeches, "that, on the one hand, they would extol the virtues of national service and say this is—you know, in America we want people to be involved in their communities, we want people to do something productive. And then, when a bunch of folks, I mean, you know, my colleagues and people around the country, go out and do that and actually work as community organizers, they mock it."

Raskin is a product of Chicago (he went through school with my daughter Joanna) who's true to its traditions. Raskin may be too young and courtly to be properly derisive, but someone needs to stick his tongue out. Another reason why Obama hasn't could be that he's less committed to the principles of community organizing than Raskin is. Creation Myth, a long piece in the latest New Republic by John Judis, argues that Obama got disenchanted during his three years of community organizing in Chicago, in particular with the fundamental Alinsky tenet that organizers should steer clear of politicians. This eventually made no sense to Obama, and he went to law school.

The following e-mail was forwarded to the Sun-Times editorial staff by editor in chief Michael Cooke:

Dear Jay,

What an ugly way to leave the Sun-Times. It does not speak well for you. Your timing was exquisite. You signed a new contract, waited until days after the newspaper had paid for your trip to Beijing at great cost, and then resigned with a two-word e-mail: "I quit." You saved your explanation for a local television station.

As someone who was working here for 24 years before you arrived, I think you owed us more than that. You owed us decency. The fact that you saved your attack for TV only completes our portrait of you as a rat.

Newspapers are not dead, Jay, and this paper will not die because you have left. Times are hard in the newspaper business, and for the economy as a whole. Did you only sign on for the luxury cruise?

There's an old saying that you might have come across once or twice on the sports beat: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."

Newspapers are not dead, Jay, because there are still readers who want the whole story, not a sound bite. If you go to work for television, viewers may get a little weary of you shouting at them. You were a great shouter in print, that's for sure, stomping your feet when owners, coaches and players didn't agree with you. It was an entertaining show. Good luck getting one of your 1,000-word rants on the air.

The rest of us are still at work, still putting out the best paper we can. We believe in our profession, and in the future. And we believe in our internet site, which you also whacked as you slithered out the door. I don't know how your column was doing, but we have the most popular sports section in Chicago. The reports and blog entries by our Washington editor Lynn Sweet have become a must-stop for millions of Americans in this election year. After a recent blog entry I wrote about the Beijing Olympics, I woke up at 5 a.m. one morning, when North America was asleep, and found that 40 percent of my 100 most recent visitors had been from China. I don't have any complaints about our web site. So far this month my web page has been visited from almost every country on earth, including one visit from the Vatican City. The Pope, no doubt. Hope you were doing as well.

You have left us, Jay, at a time when the newspaper is once again in the hands of people who love newspapers and love producing them. You managed to stay here through the dark days of the thieves Conrad Black and David Radler. The paper lost millions. Incredibly, we are still paying Black's legal fees.

I started here when Marshall Field and Jim Hoge were running the paper. I stayed through the Rupert Murdoch regime. I was asked, "How can you work for a Murdoch paper?"

My reply was: "It's not his paper. It's my paper. He only owns it."

That's the way I've always felt about the Sun-Times, and I still do.

On your way out, don't let the door bang you on the ass.

Your former colleague,

Roger Ebert

What just happened at the Sun-Times? Did Stalin finally die, or something?

The plucky tabloid put on quite a show of speaking truth to power Thursday, once power had left the building. The only thing missing from its bye-bye Mariotti package is a picture of the pistol Jay Mariotti must have held to the head of the publisher two months ago, the last time the paper sweetened his contract. 

Headline: "The self-proclaimed tough-guy columnist never faced his targets, and that's the main reason he was considered a coward in clubhouses." 

Headline: "Welcome Back, Pete! Sports fan Pete Gaines had enough of Jay Mariotti and quit the reading the paper. When he heard Mariotti was gone, he quickly came back. You can, too."

Jocks despised him. Readers despised him. His colleagues despised him. But whenever he said "Pay me more or I quit" the paper whipped out its wallet. Go figure.

The way to say good riddance is with a shrug. The Sun-Times's celebration makes it look silly.

A story circulated today that Jay Mariotti quit the Sun-Times Tuesday because he didn't get to a write a certain column. But it rings true.

The column Mariotti wanted to write was written instead by his arch rival Rick Telander for Wednesday's paper. It's about Barack Obama dissing Cubs fans. ''The Cubs . . . they're nice. You go to Wrigley Field, you have a beer . . . there are beautiful people out there, people aren't watching the game." On the other hand, said Obama, ''White Sox, that's baseball . . . south side.''

Mariotti, I hear, originally wanted to do his Obama column for the Tuesday paper, but then he decided to put it off a day and wrote about the Bears instead. One problem: there's an understanding in Sun-Times sports that Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are Telander's days. Mariotti can write on those days if he wants to, but Telander gets first choice of subject. Telander says he called sports editor Stu Courtney Tuesday morning to let him know he'd be writing about Obama. Courtney sounded uncomfortable, suggested another topic, and Telander figured it out. Mariotti wants to do it, doesn't he? Telander asked. Well, said Courtney, he will if you won't.

But Telander would and did, so Mariotti didn't. Instead, I hear, he stormed and raved at Courtney, then e-mailed editor in chief Michael Cooke a two-word message, "I quit."

Did he actually quit just because someone said no to him about one column? Actually Mariotti has a history of threatening to quit and really quitting over trivial slights. Time and again the Sun-Times played the part of enabler -- backing down, making up, adding perks, renegotiating salaries. But as said below, this time, the paper was facing a financial crisis and it reacted differently.

"Finally, hopefully forever, they called this person's bluff," said Telander. "You can only hold your breath and lie on the floor and pound your fist and kick your feet so many times. Why it took the paper so many years to do this is really just a tragedy." The antipathy between Telander and Mariotti was mutual, but other sportswriters around town didn't like Mariotti either. "I've got a lot of reporters jealous of me. To hell with them," Mariotti told me a couple of years ago, when Ozzie Guillen called him a "fucking fag" and the press corps didn't exactly rally round.

A tragedy? I asked Telander.

"Because the damage a 'humorless loner,' as you described him [I did], can do to an overstressed sports department is incalculable." He said the sports department lost its cohesion and  became "sinister and secretive and fuck your buddy. It was the worst possible teamwork conditions."

Telander wondered, "Why, if you have somebody like this, do you wait for him to quit? Why don't you just cut him? I will never know. The good thing is that this is a chance for rebirth. This is joy. A whole shitload of guys called me last night joyous! Ding dong, the witch is dead! I want to get everybody together. I want to have a team meeting. I want to give a fiery pregame prep talk and I want us to come charging out of the locker room with our guns blazing, not slinking out like a  bunch of dirty little rodents." He said, "Even on a sinking ship, if we're going down let's go down standing up and not on our knees."

Is Stu Courtney the man to lead you? I asked.

"He's been so undermined that I think this is his moment to shine too. He sounded like a new man today. He did, he sounded like a new man. He's been made to eat shit for years because of this guy.

"I don't even know to feel," Telander went on. "I just don't know. But if he's gone forever, praise the lord."

Jay Mariotti tells the editor in chief of the Sun-Times, Michael Cooke, Tuesday evening that he's quitting. As of immediately. But on Wednesday he shows up back at the paper to tape his ESPN show, Around the Horn, in what Cooke calls "the nice little TV studio we built for him."

"It's for the last time," Cooke tells me.

But why didn't you throw him out? I wondered.

"This may escape Jay, but it's the question of dignity," says Cooke.

Cooke doesn't want  to get into the details, but he notes that Mariotti, in his 17-year career at the Sun-Times, threatened to quit many times before. The paper always found a way to change his mind, and Cooke supposes it might have been able to find a way once again." He gave us an opportunity to pull the trigger, which we’ve never done in the past," says Cooke. "This time we pulled the trigger."

A couple months ago, the Sun-Times spilled a lot of its own ink publicizing Mariotti's latest contract, which was supposed to keep him at the paper through May 2011. "It's interesting that a guy walks out on a contract after spending a lifetime criticizing other people for not observing their their contracts," says Cooke. "I'm sure that irony won't escape our readers."

Cooke adds, "We’re not hearing from grief-stricken fans. The truth is quite the opposite. Quite the opposite. We've gotten hundreds of e-mails, including ones that say 'Now we’ll buy the paper.' By all indications our circulation will go up."

Anyway, he's got other things to worry about. Bad times have been followed by worse times at the Sun-Times, and Cooke had to meet Tuesday afternoon with leaders of the Chicago Newspaper Guild, giving them the bad news that the paper needed to cut salaries to the tune of three columnists, a reporter, a photographer, and five editorial assistants. Going by guild scale, the combined yearly salaries of those positions comes to about $580,000.

So when Cooke received Mariotti's memo that afternoon that said "I quit," he had every reason to think, well, that's convenient. With more on his mind than Mariotti, Cook wrote and emailed the following staff memo:

Says CNG's executive director, Gerald Minkkinen, after the guild-management meeting "things happened that could change the picture."

What?

"Jay Mariotti resigned."

Mariotti's salary is between him and the paper, but it undoubtedly represents a huge chunk of that $580,000. And so it was that Mariotti, instead of hearing back from Cooke, heard instead from a Sun-Times lawyer that his resignation had been accepted.

The Sun-Times took a stand Thursday. Said the editorial page, "It is often said -- but it really is true -- that if a young man or young woman is old enough to fight and possibly die for their country, they're old enough to have a drink." It really is true, is it? Well, then, I guess I'd be wasting my time rounding up facts that argue the opposite. Instead, let's run with the idea. An 18-year-old in America should be allowed to drink -- if he or she enlists in the army. Perhaps we can advance this fine idea another step and make it public policy that any 18-year-old caught drinking face a choice: prison or enlistment.

But there are other things some of us do for our country. It seems to me that if a young man or young woman is old enough to win a gold medal for their country, they're old enough to drink. That would bring the drinking age down to 16. In China it would be 13.

Throwing a wrinkle into its own logic, the Sun-Times editorial said that even though teenagers are old enough to drink at 18 the legal drinking age should be 19. It seems a lot of 18-year-olds are in high school, "which creates another set of issues."  I can't say from reading the Sun-Times what those issues are, but Steve Chapman went into them Thursday in his Tribune column. Chapman rounded up some facts and figures, did some thinking instead of postulating, and concluded the drinking age should stay where it is. Chapman's libertarian rule of thumb is the fewer laws the better, so when he examines a law and says it's OK, it's hard to disagree.

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.

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?

The screaming headlines in Wednesday's Sun-Times were misleading at best.

Page one: "DREW'S PALS WORE WIRE." On page eight, where the story began, "DREW'S CHILLING 'I SHOULD HAVE HAD THAT B---- CREMATED.'"

The front page was nothing but headlines. "Two of Drew Peterson's closest friends," said the drop head, "recorded months of intimate conversations with him for the State Police."

Smaller headlines at the bottom of the front page announced: "On His Murdered Wife Kathleen: 'I should have had the bitch cremated.'" 

And,

"On the Investigation of Kathleen's Drowning: 'It was in a dry bathtub, what a bunch of idiots.'"

Wow! What else is on the tape? 

Apparently, not even the above.  Read the story. The dry bathtub line is something Peterson's pal Paula Stark says Peterson told her in 2004, when Kathleen Savio, his third wife, was found dead. The should-have-had-her-cremated line is something pal Len Wawczak says he remembers Peterson telling him when authorities decided early last November -- after Peterson's fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, disappeared -- to exhume Savio's body. The story indicates that Wawczak and Stark (who are married) started wearing wires later in November.

As far as a reader can tell, reporter Joe Hosey didn't hear the tapes, didn't read a transcript of the tapes, and didn't even confirm there are tapes, those spurious quotations notwithstanding. A token of the Sun-Times's meretriciousness is that despite the paper's ostentatious claims that the story was a "Sun-Times Exclusive," Hosey's a reporter for Joliet's Herald News, a Sun-Times News Group daily that also carried the story. 

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.

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. 

Common ownership has never been any guarantee that the Tribune would break the big stories about the Cubs and Wrigley Field. On Tuesday the Tribune got scooped on the Tribune Company's decision to blow off the deal former governor James Thompson had come up with for the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority to buy Wrigley and make lots of improvements there without charging taxpayers a dime. The magic wand was going to be a brand-new financial instrument called "equity seat rights."

"This plan violates so many rules that the parties have to live under, it doesn't even get to first base." an unnamed source said in Fran Spielman and David Roeder's story, whose headline, "ZELL NO," took over the front page of the Sun-Times. Sam Zell might be wondering why his flagship newspaper wasn't first with the news about the company ball park, but he probably isn't -- Spielman and Roeder relied entirely on unnamed sources, and Zell surely knows perfectly well which of his people did their talking to the Sun-Times and why. (If he doesn't, Cubs chairman Crane Kenney might be able to edify him.)

At any rate, the Tribune got in the game later in the day on its Web site, posting a piece by financial writer Jim Kirk. Catch-up is never fun, and the way the Tribune backhandedly acknowledged being scooped was to pretend the competition got it wrong. Said the Tribune: "Thompson, throwing cold water on a report in the Sun-Times this morning that a deal with the state was dead, said that ISFA is still negotiating with Tribune Co." Thompson was quoted as saying he'd get back to Zell and talk some more.

Whatever. Thompson put together an offer and Zell turned it down. And now -- the Sun-Times flatly reports and the Tribune strongly suggests -- the Tribune Company intends to try to sell the Cubs and Wrigley Field privately as a package.

The Sun-Times, the Tribune, and the Associated Press filed an emergency motion Monday asking the Illlinois Supreme Court for access to "sealed filings, transcripts and hearings" in the R. Kelly case. The R & B singer's trial on child pornography charges is scheduled to begin on May 9. "Records and proceedings in the Kelly Case have not only been sealed but also sealed without any judicial findings with respect to the reasons for secrecy."

Presiding judge Vincent Gaughan would hardly disagree. Gaughan's made information about the case almost impossible for reporters to come by, and when the media plaintiffs made an emergency motion to him on April 24, the judge replied, "I can understand your position. . . . If these things were held without any type of record, then you'd lose all chance of access [to] what has been taking place. [But] if I articulated and made a factual basis out of why the hearings were sealed, then I would be telling you everything." Gaughan then took all the emergency out of the motion by scheduling a hearing on it for May 8, the day before jury selection starts.

Here's the emergency motion, and here's a document submitted at the same time expanding on the plaintiffs' argument. 

Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown, discussing differences Sunday between Illinois and Indiana, remarked parenthetically:

"Not me, of course, I love Northwest Indiana, where the Sun-Times still has many loyal readers, if I don't manage to run them off with this column."

Still? 

The Sun-Times and Tribune have both carried recent stories describing the tight lid Circuit Judge Vincent Gaughan has kept on the interminable R. Kelly case. Gaughan's conducted important business with attorneys behind closed doors, he's silenced attorneys with a gag order, and he's put court documents under seal -- the number is itself a court secret.

On Tuesday the two papers jointly moved to intervene in the case. They want Gaughan to unseal the documents, end the private hearings, and give the media transcripts of those hearings they couldn't attend. Kelly was charged in 2002 with child pornography -- he's accused of videotaping himself having sex with an underage girl.

As someone said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." So there isn't much time to get this right. The legend of Katie Hamilton is closing fast.

Hamilton is the Tribune intern who starred in the take-that-Sam-Zell video that recently won a Sun-Times contest. After the Sun-Times ran a big story singing her praises, the Tribune gleefully revealed what was up. I posted an item on this blog trying to give credit to the actual schemers behind the caper, John Kass did the same thing and went into more detail in his Tribune column, and there were other efforts here and there to tell the tale and get the facts right. But on Sunday America's paper of record, the New York Times, ran a short piece in its baseball preview section (but not posted online, apparently) that said:

"With Sam Zell flirting with a new name for Wrigley Field, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a contest encouraging fans to produce music videos in protest. The winner was Katie Hamilton, a student at the University of Illinois and a Chicago Tribune intern, who rewrote the lyrics to the 1984 Twisted Sister anthem, 'We're Not Gonna Take It.'" 

I guess this is what we all want to believe, and in the long run it may be what we all will. Says Hamilton, "That's definitely how it's come across -- that I concocted it and I ran with it. I wish I had." By her own admission, Hamilton didn't write a word -- "and I feel kind of bad because it's my face on the thing and it's Kevin who put together the gang." That's feature writer Kevin Pang, who by Hamilton's account got together with reporter James Janega and some other Tribune musical talent "and jammed and came up with the lyrics."

Hamilton was chosen to front the stunt because nobody at the Sun-Times would know who she was, and when you watch the video you'll see her happily strutting her stuff in front of the camera. "It was awesome," she says. No legend's necessary.

Today was a great day to be young and a journalist in Chicago. (When's the last time anyone said that?)

The Sun-Times carried a big story announcing the winner of its "Zell No" video contest: 22-year-old Katie Hamilton of Glen Ellyn with "We're Not Gonna Change It," a rip on Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It." Then the Tribune gleefully revealed that Hamilton is a Tribune editorial board intern and the $1,000 prize is going to Chicago Tribune Charities. And then the Sun-Times conceded it had been "punk'd" in an updated story under the headline "The Tribune has a sense of humor: Who knew?"

The upshot: Zell's scheme to sell naming rights at Wrigley Field gets him booted around not just by the competition but by the Tribune staff too. The winning video shows up on the Web sites of both papers. Highlights: some guy in a Zell mask prancing around, the real Zell getting bleeped.  

The Sun-Times site now gallantly offers not just the Tribune's champion "Zell No" video but another that the paper concocted to revel in its coup, plus two runners-up and 20 other entries. Elaborate production values put the winner head and shoulders above the others, but all the ones I took time to look at have their moments. 

Excellent lyric from the winners:

It's where we do our boozin'
Where our team does its losin'
Now some rich dude, he wants a change. 
He'll name it after Old Style       
Or drugs for ills erectile     
Viagra Field sounds pretty strange.   

Even better lyric, from runner-up Joe Conick, 71, of Chicago. . . 

I see in you the epitome of selfish,
That face gives a hint of week-old shellfish.

Hamilton was fronting for some major Tribune talent. Bill Adee, the Trib's associate managing editor for innovation, says he, Tempo editor Tim Bannon, and feature writer Kevin Pang had already been kicking around the idea of doing "viral video projects--and kind of humorous ones." The last time they talked, there on the table was a copy of the Sun-Times calling for "Zell No" entries. A light bulb went on. Pang headed up the project, lyrics were a group effort. Because the Sun-Times was putting up videos as they came in, the Tribune forces had a good idea where the bar was set. Would you have kept the secret if you'd lost? I asked Adee. "Probably," he said.

"We're fortunate to still be in a two-newspaper town," Adee told me. "It's old-time newspaper fun, in kind of a new-media age."

A couple of inaccurate headlines in Saturday's papers stand as tributes to the power of weasel wording. The stories reported on the findings of an ad hoc committee created to look into allegations that Dean John Lavine of Medill fabricated a quote that appeared a year ago in his "Letter from the Dean" in the alumni magazine.

The Tribune story was headlined in print "NU panel exonerates Medill dean" and on-line, "Northwestern panel says there was 'no evidence' that Medill dean fabricated column." The Sun-Times story was headlined "Panel clears Medill dean / Finds no evidence he made up quotes." The story by Eric Herman, quoting Northwestern Provost Daniel Linzer, reported that "a committee of three prominent Medill graduates found 'no evidence to point to any likelihood that the quotes were fabricated.'"

Herman wrote the sharper story, quoting Linzer more fully. "No evidence to point to any likelihood" sounds like a cute way of saying there's evidence, but not enough of it to drag this matter on. Of the quotes in question, the money quote had Lavine claiming that an unnamed junior had said about a marketing class, "I sure felt good about this class. It is one of the best I've taken." David Spett, a suspicious Daily Northwestern columnist, said he talked to every student in the class, including all five juniors, and all denied making that statement. Northwestern professor David Protess and Tribune columnist Eric Zorn later said that they'd reinterviewed the five juniors, with the same results. That's evidence. 

The Tribune story didn't even identify the members of the panel. Herman's did. They were Jack Fuller, former editor and publisher of the Tribune, and Northwestern trustees Teresa Norton and Paul Sagan, who is also cochair of the Medill Board of Advisors. A  Boston businessman, Sagan is the son of Chicago publisher Bruce Sagan,  a close friend of Lavine's.

Here's the key graph from Linzer's letter "to the Medill Community" Friday trying to put the Lavine matter to rest: "The committee unanimously concluded that although a record of the student statements that were quoted cannot be found, sufficient material does exist about the relevant storefront reporting experience and marketing course to demonstrate that sentiments similar to the quotes had been expressed by students. Thus, the committee found that there is ample evidence that the quotes were consistent with sentiment students expressed about the course in course evaluations and no evidence to point to any likelihood that the quotes were fabricated. The committee further stated that the author of a piece like the 'Letter from the Dean' could not reasonably be expected to have retained for a year the notes or e-mails documenting the sources of quotations used in the letter; nonetheless, the committee advised that in the future such meticulous archiving might be desirable given the heightened awareness of the problems that can result."

This passage is a travesty. Lavine's sin was to publish a quote that he did not attribute and later could not support. Linzer's sin is the opposite. His letter is all unsupported attribution and no quotation. He does not produce the report whose conclusions he's announcing. He tells us the committee concluded that the quotes in question were true to the spirit of student sentiment -- but that's never been the issue. He writes "no evidence" when there is. He speaks of "heightened awareness" as if to reduce an angry confrontation to a golden teaching moment. Until they speak for themselves and say differently, I will not believe that Fuller, Norton, and Sagan fully approve of the way Linzer construed their work. And until Linzer produces it, I will not believe they even submitted a formal report. Linzer's letter has the ring of something spun out of -- well, not whole cloth, but conceivably a telephone call from Sagan saying Lavine has egg on his face but let's get past this.

Northwestern isn't past this. Despite what headlines said, Lavine wasn't "cleared" or "exonerated," not even in Linzer's account. Lavine's aggression in changing Medill has made him a lot of enemies among the faculty, alumni, and student body They won't let this drop.

UPDATE: Paul Sagan responded Sunday morning to my e-mail asking him to comment on Linzer's letter.  "I respect that you have a job to do, but I'm afraid I can't help you," he wrote back. "I am a trustee of the university and my obligation is to serve the shared interests of the students, faculty and administration.  I believe I've done that in this case by offering my views to the provost, and I don't think I would be helping any more by giving an interview.  I can refer you to the provost's office for additional comment."

On the left, that's "a spandrel on the southern facade of the Palazzo Ducale, Venice,"  to  quote the February 14 issue of The New York Review of Books, which ran this picture the other day, curiously enough illustrating an essay on the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould. It turns out Gould had a thing or two to say about spandrels.

And on the right, a head shot of Chicago's own Picasso that ran in the February 4 Sun-Times. The caption noted that "some have guessed the sculpture . . . is a horse, an Afghan hound or a Viking Ship." Or had Picasso been thinking about Venice?

The Sun-Times gets to dump another salary -- Cheryl Reed, the editorial page editor, has quit, and quite spectacularly.

A couple of weeks ago I heard that she'd turned in her resignation -- she couldn't have been a happy camper after layoffs cost her about half her staff. But she was talked out of it (by publisher Cyrus Freidheim himself), and  editor in chief Michael Cooke issued a memo telling the staff to ignore the rumors: "She's with us for the battle."

She's not. She quit again Friday, and today wrote her staff a memo that must have made Freidheim and Cooke wish they had just let her walk the first time. The memo:

"I am deeply troubled that the editorial board members were not allowed to address concerns raised about the Obama [February 1] and McCain [February 3] editorials, even though the endorsements were turned in more than two days before they were published. Instead, wholesale rewrites were done by people who aren't even on the board, including one person who is no longer employed by the paper. 

"I was not even told that a McCain rewrite had been commissioned nor was involved in the process. Yet, the former editorial board editor and another former board member were deemed appropriate for that task. Not only does this undermine my position but it devalues and patronizes the editorial board writers who wrote the original endorsements: an African-American, a Latino and two white women. (As you know, both endorsements were rewritten by white men.)

"The irony is that for the first time in history a woman and a black man are running for President, yet, at the Sun-Times our diversity is disregarded. This is absolutely antithetical to the vision and purpose of my hiring. It also severely damages the integrity of the board and makes a mockery of the editorial process. No other major newspaper that I know of condones editorials -- and certainly not endorsements -- to be written by anyone other than the editorial board members. There is a reason a curtain exists between editorial boards and the newsroom -- to preserve the ethics of the decisions made.

"These actions violate the agreements laid out last Monday that the editorial board would write the presidential endorsements. That is what Cyrus and Michael agreed to do if I stayed. I'm appalled that in a matter of days,  promises to value and support the editorial board were discarded. I know you are angry and demoralized, and I am embarrassed that I believed their assurances to be genuine.

"No matter how much Cyrus or Michael like the endorsements the end does not justify the means.

"I resigned on Friday. I believe today will be my last day. It's been a pleasure working with all of you."

Reed was right. Monday was her last day. She showed up, issued her memo, and was promptly told to go home. She's been replaced by columnist Tom McNamee.

Who wrote the editorials? The editorial board consisted of Reed and Kate Grossman, both white women; Deborah Douglas, who's black; Teresa Puente, a Latino, and Mike Danahey, a white man who's filling in temporarily on loan from the Sun-Times Media Group paper in Elgin. Who rewrote them? I'm not sure Reed actually knows. The former editorial board editor she cited could only be Steve Huntley, whom she replaced, and the former board member would be columnist Neil Steinberg. But I reached Steinberg and he said, "It wasn't me." I was also told by someone at the paper she was mistaken in her reference to someone "no longer employed by the paper."

A year ago Reed, then books editor, told Cooke and publisher John Cruickshank that if given the chance she wanted to blow up the editorial section. In July they told her to. "We are returning to our liberal, working-class roots," she said in a letter to readers, and though "liberal" was promptly amended to the safer "progressive," the Sun-Times continues to bill itself on the editorial page as the "progressive, independent conscience of the city." 

It's a wonderful role for a strong, vibrant daily without a care in the world other than setting the world straight. The layoffs throughout the Media Group have taken a palpable toll on its papers, though apparently they did what they were intended to do. On Monday Freidheim, who's the company's CEO, announced it had slashed costs by $50 million a year and was putting itself up for sale. Freidheim spoke of a "solid portfolio of publications and websites." The Sun-Times, however, looks like it's eight weeks into a hunger strike and has begun to hallucinate -- a regular new feature boasts the paper's been "on Chicago's side for 60 years" and wanders through time, reliving old campaigns.

UPDATE: Here's Cyrus Freidheim's staff memo responding to Cheryl Reed, as posted on Romenesko:

"Today, Cheryl Reed announced her resignation as Editorial Page Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. We are sorry to see Cheryl leave us and we wish her well in her future endeavors.

"In light of concerns that Cheryl expressed to some of you (and, apparently, to others outside our company), we feel the need to set the record straight. The decisions by the Chicago Sun-Times editorial page to endorse Barack Obama and John McCain were made by the full editorial board. Parts of those endorsements were re-written by others. The effect of this editing was to strengthen the editorials, not to change the positions taken. No change was made to either editorial that changed the message of the endorsements. The changes made, in our judgment, deepened and strengthened the messages.

"In every newspaper in America (and elsewhere), the publisher and editor-in-chief have the responsibility to ensure that the editorial product that goes out in their names is of the highest quality and clarity. We will continue to be mindful of this responsibility.

"Unfortunately, Cheryl's assertions about agreements or representations made to her are just not accurate.

"Both Michael and I are deeply committed to diversity in the newsroom and elsewhere in our company. Our recent actions with respect to the reductions in force were driven in large measure by our desire to maintain a staff that represents all of Chicago."

The hammer has come down at the Sun-Times, where more layoffs were just announced. (Read here about earlier layoffs.) Names you'll recognize are about to disappear, and the strange thing is the palpable degree of relief, even satisfaction, among the staff -- it could have been a lot worse.

Editorial columnist Steve Huntley asked for and received a buyout, though he'll continue his column as a freelancer. TV critic Doug Elfman has been laid off. Special Barack Obama correspondent Jennifer Hunter, wife of former publisher John Cruickshank, took a buyout. Columnist Esther Cepeda was laid off, though there's a possibility she'll continue to freelance her column. Religion reporter Susan Hogan/Albach (known as "Slash" around the office) was laid off. Reporter Kara Spak, who's married to star investigative reporter Steve Warmbir, was laid off, a loss people seem to be mourning in particular. Editor in chief Michael Cooke's old pal Garry Steckles -- Cooke summoned him from Saint Kitts to help out and then gave him management status to protect his job -- was returned to Newspaper Guild status when the guild protested and then lost his job. Deputy metro editor Phyllis Gilchrist resigned because she knew that eliminating her management salary might save a couple of guild jobs. Assistant city editors Nancy Moffett and Robert Herguth took buyouts, as did veteran writer Jim Ritter and business copy editors Chris Whitehead and Bob Mutter. Business editor Dan Miller had resigned earlier.

In all, 14 full-time and 3 part-time guild employees were laid off (on the basis of seniority) and 12 others took buyouts, says Gerald Minkkinen, executive director of the Chicago Newspaper Guild. "In the long run," he says, "the company worked with us and did as much as they could to lessen the pain. I really have to give them credit." So does Elfman, with a cat to feed and a new job to find. "It's not a situation where they're laying off people unjustly," he says, well aware of the fact the company's bleeding money, "and I'm in favor of seniority in theory. It just happened to bite me in the ass." I've caught Elfman on his way out of the office to get a drink. "The Sun-Times has really been great about the way they've handled a lot of this," he says. "But there's a but. I was recruited here, I was asked to come here," he muses. "I guess my message to the newspaper editors of America is if you recruit someone don’t lay them off."

That's the temperate end of the spectrum of reactions to getting canned. So it was a little surprising to be told that Bob Mazzoni, the sports copy editor who's cochair of the Sun-Times's guild unit, seemed to be in a "a pretty good mood" Wednesday night, which is when calls were made to the staffers losing their jobs. It's all relative of course, but Mazzoni allows that in a sense he was. "To get down from [management's] original request of 35 jobs to 17 who are leaving involuntarily made us feel like we had really accomplished something," he told me, explaining that when the guild proposed buyouts management agreed to them at once and -- as was not true with a round of buyouts a couple of years ago -- accepted everybody who applied.

Managing editor Don Hayner is being hailed as a hero around the office. Mazzoni said, "We were told that whenever they had a meeting of any kind with stockholders or the board, Don would be there to plead the newsroom's case. Had it not been for his efforts the original number of 35 would have been higher and therefore the ensuing number of layoffs greater. He looks at the newsroom as his baby and he really felt an obligation to save as many of these jobs as he could, especially a lot of the less tenured people he was instrumental in bringing in."

Layoffs usually poison the atmosphere between management and labor. Not this time, said Mazzoni -- "I actually think this process as we went through it strengthened the trust both sides feel with each other."

Friday is the last day for Nancy Moffett, a buddy from my own Sun-Times days, a happy warrior who joined the paper in 1970 and has been there through Marshall Field, through Rupert Murdoch, through Conrad Black. Moffett told me she feels like a "basket case" knowing it's all about to end, even though she's leaving on her own terms. "It's a circus," she said. "It's a lot of smart people being funny all the time." Working at a newspaper, she's discovered, is something she can only explain to people who already know. It's addictive. "It's like being on crack."