Entries associated with the tag "Chicago Tribune":

I recently wondered whether the Tribune would endorse Barack Obama or yet another Republican for president, and what either endorsement would signify, given all the changes at the top. It matters little if a newspaper hews to or departs from its traditions when those traditions no longer matter. And I was worried that the Tribune's no longer did.

But I didn't imagine what the Tribune has decided to do. It's polling its readers: "As we think about that choice, we want to hear from you," it says. "Do you support Barack Obama? Do you support John McCain? If you were writing an endorsement, what would you say?"

The Tribune doesn't promise to endorse the candidate its readers favor -- but why would it bother to ask if it's going to ignore what they say? It this is a stunt, it's stupid. If it's earnest, it's a disgrace. Bruce Dold, editor of the editorial page, tells me it's a "great idea" and explains, "We're considering our choice. We asked readers which candidate they would choose. We got a lot of interesting responses."

I'm sure they did. After all, the Tribune is teasing readers with the idea it will say what they want it to say, be what they want it to be. Their wildest fantasy.

 The locally owned Chicago Tribune and the colonized Los Angeles Times are equally troubled Tribune Company newspapers, but Los Angeles seems to care and Chicago doesn't. I've written about this.

Here's the latest evidence that in LA the state of the Times has become a civic issue -- the mayors' bet over who wins the Cubs-Dodgers playoff series. 

Chicagoland  woke up to a new Tribune Monday, and the creators of that retooled daily opened their office e-mail to an ecstatic outburst from Lee Abrams, the Tribune Company's innovation chief and irrepressible memomeister. He said the "bold, and sometimes painful steps" taken by the Tribune, and a sister paper, the Hartford Courant, which unveiled its redesign Sunday, would "create a renaissance for these important news brands."

His eruption continued:

Being based here in Chicago, I was closer to the re-invention activity than most of our other newspapers, as the action was an elevator ride away. What is remarkable about the Chicago Tribune is that few thought they could evolve. Comments like these symbolized the perception:"Chicago Tribune . . . they'll never change . . . good luck"--A company veteran in a T-6 market April 2008

"The staid Chicago Tribune is attempting to modernize, though it is unlikely they'll be able to because of their conservative change resistant infrastructure"--A Blogger on a UK website, July 2008

"This place is toast . . . we'll never change . . ."--A Chicago Tribune employee April 2008

Well, there were roadblocks. But those were removed, and the New Chicago Tribune is more than a new version of the timeless Tribune, but it represents a completely new attitude in the newsroom, marketing floor . . . everywhere. A coming together and focus of some real smart and passionate people to create a high quality newspaper that is aggressively tackling the problems with actions. Key to the reinvention process is that we'll never have to do it again, because it will happen every day. There's a new flexibility and freedom to have so much belief on the brand, the city and the people that we can take chances . . . try things . . . have the attitude of re-invention locked into our genes so we can compete . . . and prevail without the shackles of sacred and tired old line thinking that is weighty enough top sink us all into the land of the obsolete. It's a whole new day . . . and attitude. . . . and take a look at the Orlando Sentinel's front page yesterday on newseum.org. Brilliant. Another example of the reinvention simply being the first step in a new attitude that opens the doors for daily reinvention that's going to set the tome to grow this business.

Along the lines of continual evolution, I had the pleasure of visiting Allentown and Baltimore last week. Both newspapers relaunched . . . but that was just a plunge. Now, they are re-inventing themselves DAILY. I was afraid of pushing back to old habits. Hardly, as these guys have used the reinvent date as a starting point and now they are more inventive than ever. I thought Allentown did an good job with their re-invent . . . it wasn't really that WOW though, but it is clear that they are a model of daily re-invent as they are on fire with new ideas and angles. They're continually launching new features, upgrading existing ones and THINKING about the newspaper . . . an a 24/7 basis. This is SO important because a redesign is just a first step in a whole new attitude.The Baltimore Sun is equally alive with evolution. And notable is that their recruitment classifieds called "Find It" (a complete and dramatic rethink) has GROWN in revenue by 9%. Key word there: GROW.

This gibberish about "daily re-invent" as something to get "locked into our genes" is probably no more harmful than your average halftime pep talk in a high school locker room. But then Abrams made a suggestion sure to make old-school journalists squirm.

A few ideas popped up in our discussions. One is that in our quest for local takes on Global stories, why not offer election polls based on neighborhoods? We have National State and regional, but imagine if you could see results for your neighborhood? Then there's a very controversial item: "Special Advertising Sections".

The Baltimore Sun did some very nice special sections . . . BUT--they were plastered with the line "SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION"OUCH! Why not just say "Don't read this because it's a bunch of ads and no credible content"I understand the importance of seperating these from the traditional news, that's fine, but how about another name??SPECIAL FEATUREA PUBLICATION OF (PUT PAPER HERE)etc. . . . The idea being "Special Advertising Section" is worded as a turn off. . . . A bunch of ads. We can reword this and the readers, advertisers and pretty much everyone will have a better experience, AND clearly keep it separated from traditional news reporting. The things I saw the Sun do were really well done. . . . but that "Special Advertising Section" thing seemed to cheapen the content. There's GOTTA be a better way to present these sections.

What  Abrams seems to be saying here is that in addition to "traditional news" and traditional advertising there's some two-headed new beast that, if it's news, isn't traditional, and, if it's advertising, is so untraditional it deserves the protection of subterfuges and euphemisms. It's hard to describe, but it's said to look like the future.

The hard work's been done. Now it's all in the hands of the marketers.

If you can't wait for Monday, the first day you can actually buy the redesigned Tribune at newsstands, here's the Tower's official preview. It's a "much bolder" and "more colorful" Tribune updated "for a 21st century audience" at the cost -- not mentioned here -- of a smaller news hole and dozens of editorial jobs.

The Tribune's so-called complete redesign in 2001  -- not driven by the same financial exigencies -- produced a new paper almost perversely similar to the old. "They didn't want to change who they were," a design consultant who'd been brimming with unused ideas told me then. "They didn't want to look like any other paper but themselves."

What a lucky break! Today's Tribune needs to quietly trim the steak while loudly selling the sizzle, and its drab 2001 redo left all the room in the world to add sizzle. If the Tribune had changed as radically then as it's changing now, the new owners might have found it a lot harder to disguise retrenchment as rebirth.

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."

The case of the expurgated Tribune death notice is heading for a happy ending.  The widow of stand-up comic Ken Swanborn posted a comment below announcing that the Tribune has relented and will republish Swanborn's death notice, this time including the line it originally refused to print: ""In lieu of flowers, vote Democratic."

"Only Swanny could have his obit rejected," said Carol O'Neill, a buddy of Swanborn's from their days growing up together in Dolton. Now she can add that only Swanny, in a sense, gets to die twice. The episode would have made for a great stand-up routine.

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 Tribune -- even the new "if we all think outside the- box maybe this-sorry ship-won't sink" Tribune -- doesn't like to offend. So when stand-up comic Ken Swanborn died the other day, the paper turned up its nose at the paid death notice his family submitted.

The Tribune refused to publish the notice's final line, a nod to Swanborn's sense of humor and political convictions: "In lieu of flowers, please vote Democratic."

Says a woman on the paper's paid-death-notice desk, "If it's considered discriminatory or offensive, they take the line out."

Offensive?

"What if I'm a Republican and I'm offended?"

But instead you offended the family.

"Well, it was not intentional, but we do have protocols and we do have rules we have to follow."

But the family was paying to say this!

"We have guidelines."

The Sun-Times published the death notice as the family wrote it. And Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper quoted the last line in his tribute to Swanborn, a buddy from the days when they were growing up in Dolton.

Says Carol O'Neill, another Dolton buddy, "Only Swanny could have his obit rejected. He’s been a huge political activist for years. His parents started the movement years ago. When black families started moving into Dolton in the early 60s they were involved in meeting with the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King. So at an early age Swanny was involved in standing up for social justice. In his mind you were a Democrat or get out of here."

Tribune innovation czar Lee Abrams might want to innovate some common sense.

(H/t Eileen Favorite.)

John McCain had just released his payload and he was coming out of a dive when his A-4, a light, carrier-based bomber, was hit by a SAM missile. This was September 30, 1967, and it was his 23rd bombing run of the Vietnam war.

He explains in his memoir Faith of My Fathers that his squadron’s target was a thermal power plant in the heart of Hanoi that had been off-limits for most of the war to avoid civilian casualties -- until new "smart bombs" made it possible for American pilots to bomb with more precision. He doesn't claim in his book that there were no civilian casualties, simply that American pilots and commanders took "great care" to keep them "to a minimum."

Warriors who are not insane understand that war presents them with a choice between greater and lesser evils. The greater evil is defeat. But the lesser evil, killing -- killing civilians, among others -- is bad enough. McCain endorses the viewpoint of his father, who as a submarine commander during World War II "executed his country's policy of total war, a policy that attacked the sources of the enemy’s material support just as vigorously as it attacked the enemy's armed forces. He had sunk a great many merchant ships on his patrols in the Pacific." Either Washington should have waged total war in Vietnam, McCain writes, or it should never have entered the war at all.

Sarah Palin is a prolife absolutist who makes no exception for rape or incest; yet, as I wrote earlier, the circumstances of her daughter Bristol's pregnancy will remind other women why they're prochoice. John McCain presents himself to voters as prolife, but his career contradicts him. I'd like to hear him explain why a combat pilot may choose death as the lesser evil yet a pregnant woman must not.

Faith of My Fathers, published 26 years after McCain was freed but just in time for his first run for president in 2000, is McCain's carefully considered version of himself, and it’s a remarkably secular book. Some POWs came home and wrote memoirs for religious publishing houses about sharing a cell with Christ, but McCain’s book is very different. According to an Amazon word search I did, "God" is mentioned on just 15 of the book’s 349 pages and not at all in the preface or acknowledgments. Most of the mentions are inconsequential: "The young sailor said, 'Thank God,' and died." "I cried out, 'My God, my leg.'"

God appears with some frequency in the chapter "Lanterns of Faith," which discusses how the POWs persevered. The book’s most pious passage appears here:

"Once I was thrown into another cell after a long and difficult interrogation. I discovered scratched into one of the cell's walls the creed 'I believe in God, the Father Almighty.' There, standing witness to God's presence in a remote, concealed place, recalled to my faith by a stronger, better man, I felt God's love and care more vividly than I would have felt it had I been safe among a pious congregation in the most magnificent cathedral."

But McCain promptly subordinates this god to a more powerful force. He writes, “We were told to have faith in God, country, and one another. Most of us did. But the last of these, faith in one another, was our final defense, the ramparts our enemy could not cross.” And he goes on, “A few men lost their religion in prison or had never been very devout. A few men were not moved by appeals to patriotism or to written codes of conduct. Almost all of us were committed to one another.”

It's been written that McCain is a man with religious beliefs that he, like many military types, is simply reluctant to discuss. Perhaps. But whatever his faith is, his memoir strongly suggests his life's not centered on it. He writes. "I thought glory was the object of war, and all glory was self-glory." But no, "Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself, to a cause, to your principles, to the people on whom you rely, and who rely on you in return." McCain thinks long and hard about glory, and the commonplace idea that it flows to and from God doesn’t seem to have occurred to him at all.  

And what of Palin’s spiritual life? She wears her faith on her sleeve -- the Wall Street Journal reported last Friday that she asked a youth group in her hometown of Wasilla to pray for the natural gas pipeline she wants to lay in Alaska. The Journal said that congregants at the Wasilla church where she worshipped "speak in tongues and are part of a faith that believes humanity is in its 'end times' – the days preceding a world-ending cataclysm bringing Christian redemption and the second coming of Jesus." Manya Brachear’s front-page article in the Tribune Saturday placed her among the dispensationalists, Pentecostals who believe Armageddon will soon be upon us, but not before Christ returns -- the Rapture -- to lead the faithful to heaven. A professor of religion at Clemson University tells Brachear that Palin seems nonchalant about exhausting Alaska’s nonrenewable resources, possibly because she thinks "all her brand of Christians may be gone before those things run out."

Christian conservatives who distrust McCain are onto something -- he embodies contradictions he doesn't seem to recognize himself. Perhaps McCain figures that he and Palin together average out to Christian orthodoxy; but I'd say that as a pair united in faith as well as politics the less scrutiny they come under the better off they'll be in November.

Ann Marie Lipinski, editor of the Tribune before she quit two months ago, has been hired by the University of Chicago as "vice president for civic engagement." She starts October 1.

University president Robert Zimmer announced Monday that Lipinski will be "charged with advancing, coordinating, and articulating the University's ambitious efforts in pre-K-12 education, community health, local economic growth, business and job creation, business diversity, real estate development, social services, programs for children at risk, student volunteer activities, safety and security, and research efforts connected to the City and its communities. She will oversee the University's multi-faceted relationships with South Side communities, elected officials, and community leaders, and will develop our relationship with the State of Illinois. In January 2009, she will become chair of the board of the University of Chicago Charter School, which opened its fourth campus earlier this month."

She'll also be a "senior lecturer" teaching policy and journalism. Not only that, "Ann Marie will work to share our innovative activities of civic engagement with peer institutions around the nation, and in turn learn from those universities' efforts. In addition, she will develop the connection between the University's evolving international efforts and the City of Chicago's emerging status as a global city." Which I think means she gets to take some nice trips.

In the past, former Tribune editors were kicked upstairs at the Tower to pursue strategies and synergies across the corporate domain. Language can lie, but what Lipinski will be doing sounds more interesting.

I'm a fan. Your advice is always so sound and sensible that I've sometimes wished my life were more of a mess so I could avail myself of it. We have even talked a time or two by telephone and you were a delight -- even a little kooky. I was sure hoping we'd talk again this week.

As you know, I like to write about the funny things that go on in the newspaper biz. You were recently in a situation at the Tribune and to me it sounded like kind of a hoot. If I misread the situation, I apologize. None of the editors I tried to reach returned my calls either, so perhaps nobody but me thought it was a hoot.   

Anyway, this is about the story on the front page of the Tribune September 3. The headline said, "Ask Amy's very own 'fairy tale' wedding." A subhead said, "Columnist shares her story, her way," and then the story -- your story -- began.

It began as a letter to you from "Afraid of Abandonment." AOA confided that "I have just learned that my favorite advice columnist has married a lovely man from her hometown many states away from her newspaper office." AOA was worried that her FAC would be too busy with new family duties to keep the advice coming. "I fear her life might change, and I could be left out. Please advise."

You set AOA's mind at ease. Don't worry, you said. "I will continue to write the 'Ask Amy' column" (for yes, AOA's FAC was none other than yourself, Amy Dickinson). And furthermore, you said, "I will continue to keep my connection to Chicago." And you told AOA a little about how you happened to find love the second time around.

Why did I think this story was so funny? I think I began to smile when when I read, "Columnist shares her story, her way." because your first way of sharing your story was to tell it to the New York Times. Yes, three days earlier the Times carried a long, intimate, heartwarming feature in the Weddings/Celebrations pages of the Sunday Style section about your romance with Bruno Schickel, the hometown guy from Freeville, New York, you married in a tiny chapel there on August 16. My smile turned into a chuckle when AOA began, "I have just learned . . ." So AOA reads the Times!

(Between us, I have a hunch AOA was what we scriveners call a "literary device.")

Well, here's the question I'm still hoping you'll answer -- and please understand I'm asking in the friendliest possible way. What in God's name were you thinking? When Ann Landers lost a husband she told her readers. When you found one, you told the New York Times. 

This is a funny story, isn't it? Please advise.

Here, thanks to Editor & Publisher, is a glimpse of what the Chicago Tribune might look like once it's redesigned. My guess is that whoever leaked this page-one prototype was hoping to head off disaster, and I pray he or she succeeds. Like everyone else, I make breezy allusions to the Trib. But when you get down to it, it's not the Trib I read and it's not the Trib I respect. It's a grown-up paper that calls itself the Tribune.

This front page is pathetic. You know those old guys who let what's left of their hair grow long and pull it into a ponytail, thinking that'll make it easier to score? That's how it's pathetic.

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.

RedEye editor Jane Hirt has been named the new managing editor of its sister the Chicago Tribune, and my colleague Whet Moser explains why this might be not such a bad thing. Moser believes RedEye does what it does brilliantly, though whether what it does can be called journalism is another matter. Hirt replaces both Hanke Gratteau, who'd already resigned as ME/news, and James Warren, whose decision to quit as ME/features was announced along with Hirt's appointment.

Warren had an impressive career at the Tribune -- media writer, Tempo editor, Washington editor, features editor, to name the highlights -- and if the fates hadn't started looking cross-eyed at the Tribune he might have wound up running it all. Gerould Kern, the new editor, and Warren were never close, lost a face-off with Warren for head of features a few years ago, and when Kern returned to the paper and other top editors started bailing out, the question over Warren's head shifted from what will happen to him now to why hasn't he already quit. I'll miss the daily weather report on Warren's voicemail and I'll miss Warren, a talented eccentric whose staff, in the best of times, swore by him.

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. 

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.

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 other day Phil Rosenthal imagined that Chicago had a journalism hall of fame, and he stoked the fires by offering dozens of names of past and present greats that he thinks belong in it. I had two immediate reactions. One was to be touched by his column's poignancy. Rosenthal has done a hell of a job as a media writer covering the ongoing downsizing of his own paper, the Tribune, and his proposal struck an elegaic note: let's all declare each other gods while we can and maybe the world won't forget about us quite so quickly. 

The other reaction was to marvel that Rosenthal didn't know Chicago already has a journalism hall of fame. It was founded in 1985 by Jerry Davis and Jerry Field, retiring and incoming presidents of the Chicago Press Club, and though the press club collapsed two years later, the hall of fame survived, being reconstituted eventually under the aegis of the International Press Club of Chicago. The IPCC was founded in 1992 by Field, a longtime publicist, and Arnie Matanky, publisher of the Near North News. Field is a friend; Matanky, who died in 2004, was the most boorish journalist I've ever met.

Rosenthal's column drew a heavy response from readers with their own ideas of media immortality. Unless I missed a reference, none of these readers had any more idea than Rosenthal that they were conjecturing about something that already exists. They should be forgiven. The International Press Club of Chicago seems to consist of whoever shows up for lunch on Wednesdays on the second floor of the Loop's Beef and Brandy Restaurant -- visitors welcome. The IPCC's chief, perhaps only, reason for being is the annual dinner at which the ranks of the hall of fame are swelled by five "living legends" and three dead ones.

You might be thinking, no wonder Rosenthal demands a new hall of fame -- this one won't do. Actually, this one will do fine. Having no other purpose, the IPCC can focus on the question of who the worthiest worthies are, and I will personally vouch for Jerry Field's gravitas whenever he bends to that task. Compare Rosenthal's nominees with the IPCC's inductees -- each list exposes some of the other's egregious oversights, and if the IPCC has been too often swayed by cronyism, so was Rosenthal, I'd say, by sentiment and courtesy. To add my own two cents' worth, any hall of fame that excludes --as both Rosenthal and the IPCC do -- the founders of the Reader, who invented a new business model for urban print journalism that swept the country, and Reader reporter John Conroy cannot possibly be taken seriously.

Of course, I wouldn't take the hall of fame idea seriously regardless. It's a lark, a parlor game, a shuffleboard round robin to bide the time as the Titanic sinks. But calling it what it is, I'm happy to play the game. Anne Keegan has a place in my hall of fame. So does at least one of the founders of the old, trailblazing Chicago Journalism Review, Ron Dorfman. I'll stop now because otherwise I'd be just getting started.

And Phil Rosenthal -- for exceptional coverage of the hardest beat of all, his own house, plus a little balm for the soul. Now I'll stop.

Who's in your Valhalla? 

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. 

Tuesday night a reception was held in the LA Times building for Jim Newton, the departing editor of that paper's editorial page. Told to slash his staff, Newton decided to quit instead. Attending the reception, according to laobserved.com, were the present mayor of Los Angeles,  Antonio Villaraigosa, former mayor Richard Riordan, Sheriff Lee Baca, and local billionaire Eli Broad, who'd hoped to buy the Times before the entire Tribune Company was taken over last year by Sam Zell.

Do you think Mayor Daley would show up to say good-bye to Bruce Dold, who runs the Tribune's editorial page? More to the point, what dignitaries would attend a farewell party for reporter Maury Possley, who deserves thanks from a grateful city?

As lists are being drawn up of the dozens of Tribune editorial employees who will soon be tossed over the side to lighten the payroll, Possley has decided to leave voluntarily. This costs the city a terrific investigative reporter who has specialized in prosecutorial misconduct. In a note to his colleagues Monday, Possley wrote that he'll "never forget those moments standing outside a prison and watching inmates go free, knowing that our reporting played some role in exposing their wrongful convictions and securing their freedom. For the past decade, I have had the privilege to work with the since-departed Ken Armstrong and my seemingly constant companion, Steve Mills, on some of the most important journalism in our country."

Possley went on, "It just doesn't seem possible that less than two months ago, some of us gathered at Columbia University for the Pulitzer luncheon with [editor Ann Marie Lipinski] to celebrate our prize for investigative reporting. I understand that there are no guarantees in life -- that God laughs when we say we have plans -- nevertheless, how stunning it is to see the dismantling of our newspaper in such a short time."

(The entire note and other Tribune memos are posted here on Jim Romenesko's forum.)

Dismantled? Some would say "differently mantled." 

The new editor, Gerould Kern, seems fluent in both languages. In a staff memo of his own (it's embedded in the Lee Abrams blog post that follows Possley's farewell note at the above link), Kern declares:

"Courageous public service, credibility, integrity, fairness and accuracy form the foundation of this newspaper. We will stand watch over our country, our city and our communities because this is our special duty and because they demand it of us. You have made this our hallmark."

Kern then segues effortlessly into a tongue that few old-fashioned journalists have begun to master. He continues: "But the economics that have supported our newspaper for decades are in disarray. I do not have to tell you how significantly this affects the newsroom. Still, amid the dislocation and uncertainty lies an opportunity we can seize. We can transform into a news organization that is ideally suited for a new century defined by breathtaking technological innovation and a voracious appetite for specialized information delivered over multiple digital and print channels."

No matter how voracious the new Tribune's appetite for "specialized information delivered over multiple digital and print channels" turns out to be, I doubt the state's attorney's office will find the new Tribune more of a load than having Possley around.

Here's a brief Reuters interview with Gerould Kern, the new editor of the diminishing Chicago Tribune. Addressing the upcoming round of job cuts, Kern allows that the Trib will have to do more (it sounds like a lot more) with less, but if it's on its toes should be able to do a "fabulous job."

And he protests the rap he's gotten for promoting the byline count as a measure of productivity among Tribune Company reporters. "Just one data point," he says, "and, frankly, probably not the most valuable."

Ann Marie Lipinski picked an odd time to quit her job as editor of the Chicago Tribune. Wheels were in motion -- she'd just launched a crash project to redesign and shrink the physical paper and also shrink its staff. Committees were meeting for hours a day about the first and editors were working out guidelines for the second. Now what? Has all that work been wasted? Gerould Kern, who takes over Friday, surely has his own ideas about how to cut, and onlookers who applaud Lipinski's news values must fear that Kern's ideas won't be as good. (He was, apparently, the guy in corporate who came up with the daffy idea of counting bylines to judge the value of staff.)

I've just been listening to someone inside the Tribune who's trying to think it through. (This person's years and experience add up to a perspective I've learned to respect and trust.) Lipinski had been editor seven years already, and Sam Zell and his cowboys were obviously not her style; if she thought of herself as a short-timer why put herself through the agony of deciding who stays and who goes? Yes, but who knows better than she does who's dispensable and who isn't, and who better to defend the Tribune's highest values than someone who's spent a career serving them?

Lipinski came back from a week's vacation in Korea with her husband and daughter with her head clear and her mind made up. It was time. She told her bosses last week, her top editors Sunday night, and her staff Monday. She works through Thursday and the farewell party's that evening at the Billy Goat.

But why did she take a vacation in the first place, while everyone around her was working overtime trying to reinvent the paper? This strikes my interlocutor as oddly insensitive. Lipinski had her friends at the Tribune, the celebrated Friends of Ann Marie -- or FOAMs -- but otherwise, this person says, she was not an impassioning leader. In recent months she'd been no Henry V -- or John Carroll or Dean Baquet, fallen leaders at the LA Times remembered for rallying the troops against the barbarians.

Of course, she's entitled to her own style. And those paladins in Los Angeles could make a strong case that they were right and the bean-counting bosses back in the Tribune Tower were wrong. But now Sam Zell and his crowd have swept those bean counters aside, and it's a lot easier to say the new crowd's arrogant and boorish than to say it's wrong. Plenty of staffers in the Tribune newsroom who'd lay down their lives for the traditional news values Lipinski represents think of Zell, nevertheless, as the paper's only hope of staying afloat.

So what was Lipinski supposed to rally the troops against? Well, against their deepening foreboding, the fear that things can only get worse. And inspiration wasn't her style. Which may be why the newsroom seemed oddly unemotional, I was told, after Lipinski made her announcement, even if the staff universally felt regret. Fearing the Goths in the hearth, it appears they'll miss what she stood for more than they'll miss her. 

As for Kern, he lost a battle for managing editor to Jim O'Shea after Lipinski moved up to editor, and thereafter moved out of the newsroom and up to corporate. There are surely editorial staffers hired in the past five years or so who have never heard of him. But out of editorial's eyes, he was in Zell's. It's curious the bosses could settle on  him so quickly -- they didn't even make him acting editor while they conducted a more careful search. Maybe Lipinski's resignation wasn't such a surprise.

I called William Gaines this morning and asked for his thoughts. A longtime Tribune investigative reporter, Gaines later taught journalism at the University of Illinois before retiring a year ago and moving back to Munster, Indiana. The Tribune's months-long investigation of City Council corruption in 1987 earned Gaines his second Pulitzer. He shared the award with two other Tribune reporters, Ann Marie Lipinski and Dean Baquet.

Baquet wound up at the LA Times. He became editor in 2005 when John Carroll, his predecessor, quit to protest staff cuts demanded of him, and the next year Baquet refused to make more cuts and was fired. (The publisher who fired him, David Hiller, fell out of favor with Zell and the other new bosses in Chicago and resigned Monday. That development was completely overshadowed here by Lipinski's resignation.)

Thinking about 1988 reminded Gaines of Ellen Soeteber, who was the Pulitzer-winning team's metro editor. Soeteber later moved on to become editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  That paper was sold in 2005, and the new owners decided to cut the staff. So Soeteber quit.

And Gaines remembered Jim O'Shea. He was Lipinski's deputy ME at the time of the Jelly Roll Morton project, and he and Gaines worked on several stories together. "It’s a passing era, I think," Gaines reflected. "Over the years we had a certain type of journalism I don’t think anybody else was able to match. It seemed like we could take on any challenge."

O'Shea was the Tribune's managing editor when the Tower sent him to LA to replace Baquet. Coldly greeted at first, O'Shea wound up resigning early this year after fighting with Hiller over staff cuts. 

And now we have Lipinski's inscrutable resignation. 

Are there enough swords to supply all the editors falling on them? Are we seeing the birth of a proud new tradition? 

Ann Marie Lipinski resigned Monday after seven years as editor of the Tribune. She's being replaced by Gerould Kern, vice president of editorial for the Tribune Company's Tribune Publishing subsidiary.

Lipinski said she's no longer a good fit for the job. She'd held the job of editor about as long as most of that paper's editors do, if not longer, but her sudden resignation, with the Tribune in flux and jobs being slashed, is troubling. Like most Tribune editors--but unlike Kern, who joined the Tribune from the Daily Herald as an editor in 1991--Lipinski came up through the paper's newsroom ranks; in 1988 she won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting. And, in my perception at least, she championed the