Entries associated with the tag "Michael Cooke":

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

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.

OK, so Garry Steckles is Michael Cooke's longtime friend. He's also -- he very much wants us all to know -- every inch a journalist and someone with plenty to offer the Sun-Times: "I'd like to think that Michael is keeping me on because I've had more than 40 years experience putting out major papers in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean.  

Steckles's career began in England in 1960 on the sports desk of the South Shield Gazette in County Durham, wended its way to Manchester, crossed the pond to major Canadian papers in Toronto, Montreal, and other cities, and later led him to create a new tabloid, Caribbean Week, in Barbados and to somehow function simultaneously as a news editor of a paper in Vancouver and as the proprietor of a restaurant on Saint Kitts. In this context, it's certainly worth mentioning that his biography of Bob Marley will be published in March.

Let's stipulate that Steckles is the sort of  journalist any newspaper in a position to would leap to hire. The problem is that the Sun-Times is in no position to. As I discussed in my most recent post, Cooke, the editor in chief, intends to lay off more than 30 Newspaper Guild employees, and he's obliged by the guild contract to be guided in his layoffs by seniority. Steckles, a "consultant" until last autumn, when he was given an editing job covered by the guild, has no seniority to speak of, but Cooke has protected him by promoting him to an unspecified management position. Understandably, guild members are outraged. If he lives, one more of them dies.

"It's a very difficult situation for everybody," Steckles said today. "Trust me, it's not something I feel particularly good about. One of the great tragedies to me is that the paper's never looked better. There are some really terrific designers and fine columnists and reporters here. We're all going through bad times, you know, and the Sun-Times's prospects aren't helped by the fact the coffers were decimated by the previous proprietors [Conrad Black and David Radler]. They were two very experienced, brilliant newspaper proprietors, but there's no doubt that what they were doing here was not good for the paper.

"This is not something that  gives me a feeling of anything but sorrow for the way things are. [But] there's nothing much I can do about it. I need the money. We ran a restaurant for 30 years on Saint Kitts. I'm in my early 60s, in no way wealthy, and I need a job, too. If there's a way I can keep my job I want to keep it."

The Sun-Times wants to eliminate more than 30 Chicago Newspaper Guild jobs, and when guild leaders and union officials met Monday to begin discussions of how this should be done or might even be avoided, emotions ran high. They peaked on the subject of two employees whose jobs are safe. That's because James Smith, a page designer, and Garry Steckles, an editor -- both recent hires -- were just promoted to exempt positions by editor in chief Michael Cooke, thus getting them out from under language in the guild contract that protects members according to seniority. Cooke "was at the meeting. His basic position was 'I can promote whoever I want,'  and he was pretty arrogant about it," says Gerald Minkkinen, executive director of the CNG. "The subject of exempting his buddies and making others vulnerable was a matter of considerable discussion. We were pretty angry about it."

Minkkinen concedes that Smith is, by reputation, a superior designer who distinguished himself at the Sun-Times Media Group's daily in Joliet before coming to the Sun-Times. But Steckles was a mystery to him. Not to me, however. A couple years ago I had a couple of long phone conversations with Steckles, who described himself to me as a restaurant owner in Saint Kitts who served Cooke as the Ed McMahon to his Johnny Carson. "I help out wherever he needs me," said Steckles, and whenever Cooke doesn't, Steckles lays low. "I don't miss it when I'm lying on a beach in the Caribbean," he said about the newspaper biz, "But I always enjoy doing it when I get the chance."

To Cooke, Steckles is a friend so old he's comfort food. "Michael's from Lancashire -- " Steckles told me, "[from] a little village outside Lancaster. He grew up on back lanes with outside toilets. I did as well. It was cold and rough. Michael started work at 16." They both entered journalism, went to Canada, and worked on papers together in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. When the New York Daily News hired Cooke  away from the Sun-Times three years ago to be its editor, Steckles thought he would become the Daily News's Sunday editor. But Cooke didn't stay in New York long enough for that to happen. By the end of 2005 he was back in Chicago as the Sun-Times group's vice president of editorial operations. When Cooke decided to turn Waukegan's News-Sun into a prototypical tabloid, he summoned Steckles from Saint Kitts and James Smith from Joliet to help him do it.

"Michael realized James is a major talent," Steckles told me back in 2006. "He has all the flair of a terrific graphics designer but also a great sensitivity for newspapers." In another conversation, Steckles called Smith "absolutely brilliant," and said that by the time he got to Waukegan Smith had pretty much wrapped up the design work, leaving it to Steckles "to pull together editorial." Pretty clearly, Steckles thought of himself and Cooke and Smith as a wonderful team, and apparently Cooke thinks the same. Gerald Minkkinen says Cooke kept Steckles "under the radar" as a Sun-Times "consultant," and when the guild pointed out that the guild contract didn't provide for consultants, he put Steckles on staff last fall in a guild job. I caught up with Steckles briefly Tuesday and he allowed that "I haven't really had a title" other than consultant. But for the time being I could call him a "copy editor for the Showcase" if I wished, though that will change "under the new scheme of things" to something he can't yet disclose.

The guild is entitled to two weeks of talks before the Sun-Times can lop heads. On Monday night the Sun-Times's guild members met to "brainstorm" -- Minkkinen's word -- possible alternatives to the layoffs. Buyouts -- which the paper hadn't mentioned -- were one, and Minkkinen said he'd like to keep the others under his hat. By the time I got to work Tuesday morning an anonymous guild member had left me a steaming voice mail message. He told me about the two employees Cooke was protecting and he said the staff was “incensed and flabbergasted at such a shameless injustice."

The goal of the Sun-Times Media Group is to cut costs by $50 million and thereby turn a profit and stay in business. At another of its properties, Pioneer Press, publisher Larry Green wrote a staff memo Monday that began: "Today we notified the Chicago Newspaper Guild that we would be eliminating 4 positions in the Pioneer Press editorial department before the end of January." In addition to these four guild positions are two that were held by guild members who recently quit and won't be replaced and four non-guild positions held by editors who'll be let go. "An additional five positions will be eliminated at the Lake County News-Sun [the paper Steckles and Smith overhauled in 2006]. An additional 16 full and part-time positions are being eliminated in the circulation department."

Green said Pioneer Press was closing three northwest-side city papers "where subscriptions and advertising have been weak." But the "suburban titles remain strong," he told his staff, and vowed that he's "committed to maintaining our unique strength as suburban Chicago's premiere sources of local news."

"More with less" I suppose.

Grim news Friday afternoon from Sun-Times editor in chief Michael Cooke in this memo e-mailed to the staff:

This afternoon the Sun-Times News Group issued a press release stating its intention to cut operating costs.  Among other things, this will eliminate newsroom positions at the Sun-Times. It is not clear yet how deep these cuts will be.

We have no choice. Advertising and circulation revenues continue to decline and, in the case of the Sun-Times, the drop is way outside the industry average. We have worked hard to minimize the effect on journalists. You will have noticed over the past few weeks how much smaller the paper is. As well as newsprint, we are also cutting wire and freelance costs.

This action, among other cost-saving moves, gives us a future. I am hoping you will join me in focusing our energies on that future, on minimizing the distress that this development will cause everyone, and in maintaining the cherished tradition of excellence at this newspaper we all love.

I know this is a time of great anxiety. I want to answer all your questions and my door is open. However, I cannot yet tell you the answers to the three most pressing questions: How many? Who? And when?

We will proceed with planning and implementation quickly, respecting the Guild contract, and I will communicate to you further as often and as much as possible. -- Michael

In the newsroom, they're saying about 40 jobs will be lost, a quarter of the editorial staff. And that's from a paper that had no fat to begin with.

Cooke's memo followed by nine minutes a more expansive notice to all employees of the Sun-Times New Group employees from CEO and publisher Cyrus Freidheim:

As you know, 2007 has been a tough year financially for our company. While the Conrad Black trial is behind us and we have settled our tax bill with Canadian revenue authorities, the company's financial results for the first nine months of this year have been well below plan and unprofitable. The decisions I must share with you today have all been difficult, but are essential to realizing our No. 1 goal:  to ensure the long-term viability of Sun-Times News Group properties."Yesterday our board of directors endorsed the broad strokes of a plan to reduce our operating costs by $50 million next year, as we announced in a press release today. This is by far the biggest cost-reduction effort in our company's history. We are still working out the details of the plan and will communicate specifics during January. Those actions will include a reduction in staff, further outsourcing of selected activities and reformatting of our products. The plan will begin in January and should be completed by the end of June.

The turnaround plan put into place earlier this year included a number of objectives that were achieved. However, one of our most important goals was not: to slow and eventually stabilize the decline in advertising revenue. The market for print advertising has been terrible. We did make good progress with online advertising revenue (up more than 50 percent) and we performed better than our Chicago competitors in print advertising in the third quarter of this year -- but it was not enough. Simply put, we have to accept that the print advertising market may never again reach the levels of the past.  Consequently, we must scale our organization to meet that reality."Other sizable issues remain as well, including a large potential tax bill from the Internal Revenue Service for tax decisions made between 1999 and 2003. We hope to resolve this matter soon, but the settlement will likely require financing, which we cannot obtain reasonably unless our operations are profitable.

Our costs and revenues must be in balance and yield a positive cash flow. Virtually every newspaper company in America is facing similar pressures.  We've made several important changes already, including consolidating printing plants from five to three, outsourcing our newspaper delivery to Chicago Tribune Company, combining papers to create the SouthtownStar, reducing our newsholes to be in better balance with advertising, and outsourcing our customer service call center. Our investments in New Media are paying off.  We have a robust agenda for enhancing our New Media capabilities and will continue to invest.  Much more, however, must be done to meet our future financial obligations.We are proud of the quality of our products, the strength of our franchises and the energy and capabilities of our team.  We are fighting a tough market and are burdened by legacy issues that continue to cost us time and money.  At the same time, we are moving rapidly into a new world of news and information with different channels, different competitors, different economics, and excellent opportunities. We are in the midst of a tidal transformation in our industry. Yes, print accounts for most of our revenue and we are not abandoning print, but the growth in this business is online. Leadership in online local news and information and advertising is ours if we will grasp it."To confront these realities we need to take bold actions - some of which are painful, but I see no alternative.  We cannot guarantee a smooth ride, but we can look to a future with promise and opportunity and impact on our society.

Please know that we are committed to providing you with more specific information beginning in January.

NOTE: After the above was posted I received an e-mail from Michael Cooke, who said, "Even if the 40 number was true, that would be less than a fifth of the newsroom, not the percentage you give in your blog. And I don't know for sure what the number will be."

Just as I believe it's only fair to let a few episodes of a new sitcom go by before drawing conclusions, I'm reluctant to judge the "new look" Sun-Times until I see it on a day when there's actual news in it. Wednesday's debut edition, with its front-page pictures of a pucker-faced Dalai Lama (alongside the headline "Hello, Dalai") and a wary coyote that wandered into the Loop, was longer on attitude than content and longer on repackaging than attitude. "Let's Get Into It" is the new watchphrase, and the hallucinatory vow to its readers is this: "So starting now, we're giving you every chance to flex your muscles. How? By digging deeper into the neighborhoods for the most detailed local coverage Chicago has ever seen. And giving you every last detail you need to get involved. We may step on a few toes, but if it gets you off the sidelines, so be it." If I were a reader who took this personally, I'd be scared silly that the Sun-Times means to run my mug shot on a civic-deadbeats page if I don't join the block club. 

What I notice leafing through Wednesday's paper is that the stories are incredibly short and there are now two classes of columnists: the ones with conventional head shots and the stars photographed full-body from above, like models in a bank ad. When I saw these pictures I wondered if editor in chief Michael Cooke personally held the ladder steady for the photographer -- a way of saying "We're all in this together and if it doesn't work I'll be out on the street with the rest of you."

A two-page feature on a Liberian family in Wilmette separates the first two pages of comic strips from the third page. I've never seen anything like that before.

Debra Pickett resigned from the Sun-Times Monday afternoon, minutes after being asked to do a story she thought was preposterous.

“I laughed,” says Pickett, recalling her response when features editor Christine Ledbetter called with the assignment to breast-feed her infant son in public places and write about it. "I have to say I didn't take it terribly seriously." She'd seen other Sun-Times stories begin with an "outrageous premise" then get negotiated into something not beneath the dignity of adults. Some other day, she and Ledbetter might have begun negotiating. But not this time. Pickett, who was due to return from maternity leave February 26, tells me, “I said, ‘Well, there’s probably a conversation I need to have with Don Hayner before I can talk to you further about this assignment.'” Hayner’s the managing editor. Pickett had been trying to reach him all day. "I felt the ground had shifted a little bit under my feet while I was gone," she says, and she wanted Hayner to tell her where she stood. Her resignation was already a possibility, perhaps even a likelihood. The breast-feeding assignment shifted the ground a little more. She called her husband, an Amtrak executive who was on a train between Washington and Philadelphia, and they talked. Then she reached Hayner. She didn't ask where she stood. She quit.

The idea for the breast-feeding story came from editor-in-chief Michael Cooke, who says it was simply an idea -- a paper could no more assign such a story than it could assign a reporter to pose nude for an art class. And just as it wasn't the story, per se, that drove her off, Pickett insists, it also wasn't a desire “to stay home and be a full-time mom to my baby.” It was simply this: “When it’s time to grow up and move on it’s time to grow up and move on.” In journalism, she observes, “people’s stars rise and fall.” Hers had gone up -- she “trembles on the cusp of stardom,” I wrote in 2002, when she'd been at the Sun-Times two years, her profiles of interesting people she met for lunch were making the Sunday paper worth reading, and her column had begun appearing Friday’s on page two. And then it started to head down. While Pickett was on leave the column, which she continued to write once a week, was moved back to the Lifestyles pages. "It's not where I wanted to be professionally," she says.

"She was a young, single Chicagoan," says Ledbetter. "That was the mantra for the column. She morphed into what she morphed into. If she chose to write about her boyfriend and her baby, those are Lifestyles topics." 

Pickett doesn't disagree. “As a columnist you get locked into a persona," she says. "There were a lot of serious things I was interested in that I wanted to write about which weren’t in line with the mission of the paper and my role at the paper. I’ve developed a strong interest in Africa and the AIDS crisis there. The dilemma was that for every column about that there were three columns about the boyfriend. That’s what people expected.”

She says the paper encouraged her boyfriend columns, which led to husband columns and baby columns -- three of her last four columns mentioned her son (whom, by the way, she does nurse in public places). “That’s what my unique signature was,” she says. “That’s what people came to expect and associate me with. That was fine, a lot of fun, but it’s not necessarily who you want to be your entire adult life.” By the measure of what it covers and with whom, the Sun-Times is a small paper. There’s not much opportunity for personal reinvention. “The Sun-Times has a great staff writing about politics,” Pickett remarks, perhaps wistfully; an assignment to go forth and breast-feed is a pretty blunt way of being told your services won't be required for that coverage. She says she wants to finish a novel she’s working on and supposes she’ll freelance. “I’ll certainly make some calls and have some lunches and conversations. This is very much a happy thing for me.”

"Sometimes she drew laughter. Sometimes she drew blood," says Cooke, recalling the lunching stories. "An editor can't ask for more than that."

UPDATE: Eric Zorn does a good job of thinking about Debra Pickett on his Tribune blog. Link here.

UPDATE: Wow! Blogger Tom Roeser has more to say about Pickett than you'd think any one person could, no matter how keen a cultural observer. "Bravo Pickett," he writes. "For the first time I find her interesting, not as a narcissistic marketing sell but for herself." Link here.