Entries associated with the tag "Tribune Company":

Since May, Los Angeles has had its own Web site dedicated to savaging Sam Zell and the crew that now runs the Tribune Company. According to this observer in LA, tellzell is maintained anonymously by an LA Times reporter fighting the despairing notion that "nothing that we can do can stop Zell, or job cuts, or the dumbing down of the Los Angeles Times."

A friend asked if we have anything like it in Chicago. Nothing so focused and relentless, but I don't hold that against Chicago. Zell's one of our own. Out in LA he's seen not merely as a Hun but as an invading Hun. At the Tribune they hope against hope that the Zell team knows what it's doing. In LA they pray he sells the paper to somebody local.

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? 

The Tribune has 578 positions on its editorial staff, and roughly 80 of them -- 14 percent of the staff -- will disappear by the end of August. The staff got the word Tuesday afternoon. Twenty of the positions are vacant and will simply be eliminated, but the rest will mean cutting people.

It's this way and worse throughout the Tribune Company. Last week the LA Times announced it was cutting 150 editorial positions, 17 percent of its staff. Earlier the Hartford Courant said it would eliminate 57 editorial jobs, or 25 percent of the staff, and the Baltimore Sun that it would get rid of about 60 -- that's 20 percent of the staff.

It's not a case of strapped papers boasting they'll do more with less. The Tribune Company papers intend to do less with less -- they're all shrinking their news holes to try to bring costs and revenues into balance.  A task force of about 30 Tribune staffers is now meeting daily to overhaul the paper, and we'll see the results in September. The same thing is going on at the other papers.

After the Courant's cuts were announced, managing editor Barbara Roessner wrote a letter to readers that began, "It's been a hellish week. . . . Man, when the company tells us we've got to cut our staff and newsprint by 25 percent just to stay in business, it's scary."  Roessner said she and her staff were trying to figure out "how to pack a smaller newspaper with such interesting, important, necessary news and information that you'll have to keep reading. You may even enjoy it, relish it, lunge for it."

Or, she went on, "I may soon be tending bar in Vermont. We'll see."

The age of denial is pretty much in the past at American newspapers. With Rupert Murdoch, who's 77, now predicting he'll outlive the print press has another 20 years or so and Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft, giving it maybe ten, the  scriveners who populate the nation's despondent newsrooms are willing to concede that -- in the words of industry analyst Ken Doctor -- "It's the end of the world as we know it."

All those scriveners -- the ones who know they don't know enough to negotiate a path from this world to the next on their own -- ask at this point is that they be led forward by people who do. Which is why it's so troubling to the hundreds of journalists at the Tribune Company when their new leader sounds like a nincompoop.

COO Randy Michaels, whose background's in radio, and not radio of any distinction, held a conference call with investors and media reporters on June 5 and made two striking statements. The first was that the company intended to shrink the news hole at its papers to bring the news-content-to-ads ratio to 50-50 (industry-wide it's usually closer to 60-40). The second was that output as measured in column inches would weigh heavily in the decisions about which staff to boot. Michaels said the average journalist produces about 51 pages a year at the Tribune Company's LA Times, about 300 pages a year at its Hartford Courant. "If you work hard and produce a lot for us, everything is great," said Michaels.

The following observations about the news-ad ratio owe a big debt to Doctor, who's just addressed the subject on an Editor & Publisher podcast and in his own blog. A lot of newspaper advertisers already have one foot out the door, and here's Michaels proposing to cheapen the environment in which their ads run. Big advertisers like the visual dignity of ads that stand alone on a page surrounded by important news. Reduce the news and you wind up with the cheesy sight of ads surrounded by other ads. And although newspapers have trained their big advertisers over the decades to think of Section A as the place to be  -- the section with tony national and international news -- that's the news hole in greatest danger of being shrunk. It's news produced by high-paid, underproductive (by Michaels's way of thinking) veterans who can be cleared out for an AP digest. 

In short, manipulating the news-ad ratio is a much trickier business than Michaels probably thinks it is. Has he asked the Tribune's advertisers if they want to be in a paper with less news?

As for staff productivity, measuring it by column inches per journalist is inane, but I'm guessing the Tribune Company survey amounts to Michaels pulling numbers out of his ass. (I made a call to the Tribune asking how Michaels got them and was told the info was proprietary. Why should it be? -- pollsters are obliged to reveal how they conduct their polls.) There are more than 200 journalists in the Courant newsroom. If each produced 300 pages a year, the average size of a daily Courant would be something like 164 pages. (If Michaels means full pages of edit, then the advertising pages would make the paper far bigger.) The Courant doesn't average 164 pages or anything close to it. It's probably more like 70.

Since last December, when Sam Zell took it over, the Tribune Company has faced almost $13 billion in debt and a business environment worse than Zell apparently ever imagined. He's already had to sell off Newsday, one of the company's healthiest properties, just to service the debt. But while Zell, who personally put up just $315 million, runs the show, the stock is held by an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). The employees Zell enjoys addressing as his "partners" have a huge equity interest in the fate of the company. So one way to think of Michaels's initiatives is that a hired hand showed up one day talking big about getting rid of the people he works for, people with no say in the matter.

If you're interested in the audio, Charles Madigan and I discussed all this this morning on WBEZ.

FOOTNOTE: When I calculated above that the Hartford Courant would average some 164 pages an issue if what Randy Michaels said about its staff's productivity was true,  I was supposing that all the news in the paper was staff generated. Of course, that's ridiculous. Add wire copy and copy from other Tribune Company papers, plus comics and other syndicated features, and we're surely looking at another 20-30 pages.

If you're a fan of the corrections columns in which newspapers daily confess their sins, the more trivial the better, you might conclude they gladly stand naked to their enemies. But not so much.

Editor-at-large Mark Fitzgerald of Editor & Publisher observes that troubled companies such as the Journal Register Company and MediaNews Group have decided to stop filing those arcane but revealing financial reports such as the SC 13D and the 10-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It's a trend Fitzgerald doesn't like much, but he expects it to continue.

Fitzgerald, who's based in Chicago, discusses the matter on "Fitz & Jen Give You the Business," a podcast he produces about once a week with Jennifer Saba, an E&P associate editor in New York. Saba assumed what I did: that public corporations are legally bound to file with the SEC. But Fitzgerald explains that companies willing to surrender the opportunity to raise capital via markets such as the New York Stock Exchange don't have to. And woebegone media companies that recognize they don't have a prayer of raising public capital are concluding that the elaborate financial statements the SEC asks for are too expensive, too much of a hassle, and too embarrassing to submit. They'll file whatever the banks they owe money to tell them to file, and Fitzgerald thinks these banks want them to keep under their hats the concessions the banks have been willing to make to keep the companies from going under. 

He observes that the Tribune Company, now that it's gone private, doesn't have to tell the SEC anything the banks that financed Sam Zell's takeover don't order it to tell. And as for the Sun-Times Media Group, whose stock is now worth about 70 cents a share -- it's a prime candidate to tell the SEC to shove it. Fitzgerald savors the irony. He tells Saba it was the brokerage firm of Tweedy, Browne that began studying the documents Hollinger International turned over to the SEC when Conrad Black ran the company and wondering, "Who are all these guys getting all these financial fees? And why are you selling everything to yourselves and getting fees back on top of that?" Fitzgerald continues, "That kind of exposed the accounting house of cards going on -- according to the federal authorities the larceny going on.”

UPDATE: The Sun-Times Media Group announced Wednesday that it has no steps in mind to bring its greatly depreciated common stock into keeping with NYSE standards, and therefore expects the exchange to stop listing the stock. In the future STMG stock will be traded on the OTC Bulletin Board. 

When the Tribune Company announced last year that it was going to start charging employees who smoked an extra $100 a month for medical coverage, it had an excellent rationale for doing so: while recouping a little of the $100 million a year it was spending on medical coverage, the company would encourage smokers to quit -- if they completed a company-sponsored cessation program the surcharge would end and be refunded.

When the Tribune Company announced Tuesday that it was dropping the surcharge, it had an excellent rationale for doing so: "While well-intentioned," executive vice president Gerry Spector told employees by e-mail, "we think the tobacco-use fee implemented by the previous management team is inconsistent with the new culture we're developing -- we'd rather you use your own judgment when it comes to tobacco use, not impose ours upon you."

The $100-a-month fees will all be reimbursed, said Spector, whether employees stopped smoking or not. The free cessation program will still be offered.

The new culture came in with Sam Zell, the Marlboro-puffing CEO who took over in late December. The smoking surcharge kicked in on January 1 but it was doomed from the start. A few days later employees received a new handbook whose rule number one says, "Use your best judgment." Not that smoking ever represents good judgment, but the real point of the handbook is to exhort employees to loosen up and risk being wrong. "Play to win. . . . Question authority and push back if you do not like the answer. . . . Working at Tribune means accepting that sometimes you might hear a word that you, personally, might not use. You might experience an attitude that you don’t share. You might hear a joke that you might not consider funny. That is because a loose, fun, non-linear atmosphere is important to the creative process. This should be understood, should not be a surprise and is not considered harassment."

There's a hint of wishful thinking in all this, unfortunately. If only the troubles of the newspaper industry could all be blamed on lost gumption.

What is a journalist? A journalist is someone reduced to tears by gibberish passing as thought, especially from the desk of someone who's got control of your future. Don't cry, but here's a memo from Lee Abrams, the newly appointed "innovation officer" of the Tribune Company: "News and Information is the NEW Rock n Roll." 

He soon asserts: "On a very personal level, it is important to me that I help Tribune fight 'junk culture'. Smart re-invention that enlightens. Websites can be Disneyland for the mind; TV stations (especially news) can put the Kent Brockman cliché to rest and create a visual experience that intoxicates with brilliance and freshness; And Newspapers! We owe it to our culture to make sure they thrive...We can make America smarter. Not more elite . . . just smarter."

Reading this in context doesn't help, but here's the entire memo.

And here's more: "Average sucks. Best to be brilliantly good, or SO bad, it's engaging. It's that evil zone of average that American Media is stuck in. WE MUST not accept average. Fight it! It's gotten to be accepted that average is fine. No it's not . . . it sucks! Theater of the Mind. We have to play there. We gotta deliver the magic . . ."

AFTERWORD: For a thoughtful contrarian view of Abrams from the Reader's Whet Moser, click here. 

In mid-January a friend e-mailed me a piece of advice: "Look up stories about [Sam] Zell barnstorming his new newspapers . . . and look for quotes in which he assures the staffs that cost-cutting is crazy. Save for later use."

Later turned out to be Wednesday. Zell's Tribune Company announced it was cutting its workforce by 400 to 500 people, roughly 2 percent -- most of the bodies to be lopped from the company's nine newspapers and corporate staff. About 100 jobs will be lost at the Chicago Tribune.

"Make no mistake. This is not my ultimate strategy for our company," Zell e-mailed Tribune Company employees. "I believe we can achieve greatness. I have staked my reputation on it." But for now, "a weak economy and significant declines in advertising volume" are mandating "immediate action." And Zell warned, "While I will do everything in my power to drive, pull and drag this company forward, I can't promise we won't see additional position eliminations in the future, if we continue at our current rate of cash flow decline."

From Orlando, a great moment in press baronry captured forever. Here's video of Sam Zell, new boss of the Tribune Company, addressing the staff of the Orlando Sentinel on January 31. Photographer Sara Fajardo wonders where the paper's going and expresses her disdain for coverage of "puppy dogs." Zell defends stories about puppy dogs, tells her the paper needs to make enough money to afford stories about "puppies in Iraq" (or possibly just "puppies and Iraq" -- you be the judge of that) and as the staff laughs and applauds, steps back and says "Fuck you."

Why? You can't tell from the tape. But Tribune Company spokesman Gary Weitman told the Tribune's Phil Rosenthal that "whether she intended it or not, Sam's perception was that she was being disrespectful in both the tone she was using with him and the fact she was shaking her head as he was answering the question and, ultimately, before he finished the answer, turned her back on him and walked away." Weitman said Zell has tried to reach Fajardo to apologize.

As the year ends, a time to reflect . . .

Former CEO Dennis FitzSimons, who gave the Tribune Company 25 years, just walked out the door Sam Zell held open with a package worth $38.3 million in severance and stock. The sums bandied about in civil litigation were vastly larger, but in the end Conrad Black was convicted of stealing $6.1 million from Hollinger International and he just got six and a half years in prison. Maybe he should have fired himself instead.

I've given it a couple of days and it's still hard to work up the anger I'm supposed to feel over the arrogance of FCC chairman Kevin Martin. His critics are saying Martin, a Republican, delivered the store to Big Media Tuesday when the FCC, by a 3-to-2 party-line vote, gave single owners permission to go on running both newspapers and TV stations in the same markets, and made it easier for such arrangements to be made in the future. Said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, a national advocacy group that that bitterly opposes Martin's change, "The waivers and giant loopholes contained in these new rules could spell disaster for citizens everywhere." On its Web site, Free Press has set up a form letter asking Congress to step in and "take action." With a couple of clicks, an angry citizen can tell Washington that "the FCC has turned its back on its mission and its mandate. Their decision to let Big Media get even bigger will erode localism, diminish minority ownership, and decrease competition."

But the Big Media Free Press is describing isn't the Big Media moaning and groaning here in Chicago -- among many other places. Here in Chicago the FCC vote (preceded several days earlier by a waiver intended to let Sam Zell's deal go through) lets the Tribune Company's new owners get off to a running start. "The ruling keeps our employer from having to dump several properties at fire-sale prices during a de facto media recession," allowed a grateful Tribune editorial Wednesday. That "media recession" is actually a change in the business so transformational that most journalists whose paychecks are issued by Old Media -- Big Media is, by and large, Old Media -- have no idea what that business will look like and whether it'll have a place for them in five years. The Tribune Company's biggest and most rebellious paper, the Los Angeles Times, reported Friday on the consummation of Zell's deal with a story that began: "For the second time in eight years, control of the Los Angeles Times changed hands Thursday, passing from a staid Chicago conglomerate to a private company headed by an unpredictable and colorful billionaire, in a debt-heavy deal that creates tremendous opportunities and risks for one of America's top newspapers." "Tremendous opportunities"? They hope. That whistling in the dark is a subconscious expression of faith in a colorful billionaire who doesn't sound scared of the future.

Look around. The Sun-Times is planning wholesale layoffs and could be gone in a year. Blame Conrad Black, David Radler, and RedEye if you will, but if Radler did one good thing in Chicago it was to assemble the "Chicago group" and gird the Sun-Times with a hundred smaller titles; and if the Tribune hadn't launched RedEye someone else would have, probably the Metro chain -- free rapid transit tabloids weren't a new idea. The Tribune Company, if Zell hadn't taken it over, would have continued on its path of slow, hapless decline. It might anyway.

The city's flailing mastodons aren't keeping tomorrow's journalism from being born around them. It might turn out that the only thing the FCC just did for Big Media was buy it a little more time before it bites the dust. 

There was a time when a cloud of smoke meant one of two things: a passing train or a city room. But today the smokers at the great newspapers of America have been ordered to take their filthy habit to the street, and the Tribune Company has something harsher yet in store for them: Beginning January 1, smokers in its employ will have to pay an extra $100 a month for medical coverage. If they've signed up for family coverage, they'll also pay extra if any dependent smokes.

Is this Big Brother, policing the vices not only of the worker but of his or her entire family--and not merely at the office but at home? That's certainly one way of looking at this new policy, but Tribune Co. prefers another: the company spends $100 million a year on medical coverage, and the smoking surcharge recoups a bit of that money while encouraging employees to improve their health.

Last October, during the company's last open enrollment period, its employees were asked if they, their spouses, or their children smoked. Employees who said no are on their honor--Gary Weitman, VP of corporate communications, says no one's being asked to turn in mendacious colleagues. But anyone answering yes will be docked the extra $100 a month unless and until the family smoker(s) enroll in and complete a cessation program, Free & Clear, covered by the company. "We've always promoted cessation programs," says Weitman. "What's new is we're 100 percent funding it."

The drawbacks to this new initiative are easy to spot. "Fucking Nazi Germany -- if someone comes to a party at your house and sees you smoking, does he turn you in?" at least one Tribune staff writer wonders. "What's next? People with more than two drinks a day, or bacon for breakfast?" On the other hand, this staff writer named a senior Tribune editor and a photographer who've decided to quit as a result of the policy. And parents of teenage smokers have been given another card to play:"You want to smoke, you pay the money."

The new Tribune policy is part of a growing movement in the corporate world. What will happen to it when Sam Zell shows up with his Marlboros remains to be seen; maybe he'll inherit Mike Royko's old personal smoking room.

Also, bacon's safe for now. The latest word is it could help protect your heart. 

A kid stands at the door to my CTA stop every morning handing out the latest RedEye, and commuters not only accept it but carry it upstairs to the el platform. This display of real if minimal interest distinguishes the RedEyes foisted on the public from the ones in the box across the sidewalk, which I never see anyone bother with, and from the Sun-Times's in an adjacent box, which cost 50 cents and which no one on the trains I take seems to read any more. And to judge by what gets tossed in the first available dumpster, a RedEye hawker is a more welcome sight to a passerby than either a Jehovah's Witness handing out pamphlets or the day worker giving away out fliers that tout the two-for-one special of the floundering eatery on the corner.

We all laughed when RedEye was launched in 2002, but it survived our ridicule and a cunning counterstroke by the Sun-Times to take its place in Chicago. In 2003 Tribune Company launched another free tab, AM New York. Now it's on to Los Angeles!

David Hiller, publisher of Tribune's Los Angeles Times, said the other day that the same sort of paper is in the works out there. Reuters reported, "Hiller, speaking at a luncheon in Los Angeles, said the new paper would be similar to Redeye, a paper published and distributed for free at commuter stations by the Chicago Tribune."

History's written by the daring and the foolhardy, and we'll see in time where this idea falls. Aggressive young newspaper hawkers are surely not in short supply in LA. But rapid transit stations for them to hawk at and commuters who'll take their product because they crave distraction for the 20-minute trip into town surely are. I asked a veteran journalist who knows both Chicago and LA what he thought:

"It's absurd. . . . The reason it wouldn't work in LA is the same reason a Red Eye wouldn't work in Milwaukee: with rare exceptions, 95 percent of people here commute in cars and not to fixed destinations. They'd have to give the rag away at gas stations or Starbucks. A Spanish-language edition would be necessary for these downtown office and maintenance workers who make full use of the buses in the wee hours . . .

"It's possible that RedEye could be distributed at commuter destinations -- studios, malls etc -- but you'd have to get permission to get on property or behind security gates, and there would be the same problem with honor boxes and litter. LA is quite a bit less tolerant about such things than Chicago."

Meanwhile, Sam Zell is trying to bring off a $8.2 billion deal and take the Tribune Company private. And a lot of hands at the LA Times are hoping that if and when that happens Zell will sell their paper to somebody local, somebody who knows how LA goes to work. 

According to a story in the Tribune’s Perspective section last Sunday, a recent study of media transparency concluded there’s not enough of it. Various news outlets were rated by a University of Maryland-based research group according to five criteria: “willingness to correct mistakes, receptivity to reader criticisms, and openness about ownership, editorial policies and conflicts of interest.”

The Tribune itself wasn’t surveyed, but former public editor Don Wycliff commented in Perspective that he thought the paper would rank well according to the five criteria. “The question is whether those criteria by themselves are sufficient to really tell the story.”

The Tribune aggressively polices its trivial mistakes. True transparency would mean publishing a full account of the slow process by which its endorsement of the war in Iraq has turned into deep skepticism. It would mean accompanying next year’s presidential endorsement with a candid chronicle of how that endorsement was arrived at, describing the role played by each member of the editorial board, by the editor, by the publisher, and by Sam Zell, who if his deal to take over Tribune Company doesn't fall apart will be the Tribune’s supreme power by that that time.

Does the public really need to know how the sausage is made? I’m not sure it always does. But that’s transparency.

Canadian reporters in Chicago should take note: Conrad Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, is nothing we haven't seen before. Black's blunder was to take his company public, putting his vast vanity and indulgences on a short leash held by stockholders. Sam Zell is buying the Tribune Company to take it private, where goofy media moguls can do what they please. (John Kass's column Tuesday is essentially an open letter to Zell saying, "Respect us.")

When Canadian journalists asked a few weeks ago what Chicagoans thought about Black's federal corruption trial, I had to tell them most Chicagoans weren't thinking anything. I had a flash of deja vu Monday as another out-of-town reporter asked about the reaction of Chicago to the sale of the Tribune. I said that if she were asking about the sale of the Cubs then we might have something to talk about, but the proprietors of the Tribune haven't made much of a dent on the public consciousness. Colonel McCormick died half a century ago. His successors have been ciphers. What we know about Zell is that he's a fierce-looking local guy who rides motorcycles and is taking over an $8.2 billion company with about $315 million of his own money. If you work for him now and the debt's on your back, you're probably feeling a little numb. But if you don't, you probably think a deal like that makes him sound kind of cool. (Here's a piece that suggests he might not be the world's shrewdest multi-billionaire.)

Zell keeps a low profile, but he's no cipher. Freelance writer Joy Bergmann is among the people who have seen how Zell likes to spend his loose change. Bergmann lives in New York now, but in 1999 she had a place on Lawrence Avenue in Uptown, and she could see from the trucks and the work crews that a very big event was coming up at the Aragon Ballroom. The event, she found out, was Zell's birthday party. She hooked up with Redmoon Theater, which had been hired to provide strolling musicians and masked actors dressed as birds on stilts. 

I just called her and asked her to reminisce. "It's important to remember 1999 -- September 1999 -- and what a puffed-up era that was," she says. It was before the economy crashed and before 9/11, and the only thing looming on the horizon was Y2K. The night of the party cops shut down the Lawrence el platform and held back the winos so Zell's guests could arrive on chartered trains. They wore T-shirts that said "Z2K" and "Zellenium." 

Bergmann remembers "Trojan warriors at the front door and girls painted in gold body paint with vines twisted around their nipples wearing little bikini thong bottoms. They were nymphs of some sort, bodacious nymphs draped along the buffet. I don't think his guests had a very good time -- that was the big take-away for me. The theater people I was with had a really good time and ate great food and saw great entertainment, and the people who were his guests were there to make an appearance with Sam Zell. I didn't sense a feeling of celebration for this man's birthday. It was a see-and-be-seen business function."

For instance, "James Brown was the opening act. The guests ignored him. They treated him like a Holiday Inn cover band. But we performers went apeshit." Later, Aretha Franklin came on. Her closing number sticks in Bergmann's memory because for about eight minutes its lyrics consisted of one word, "Jesus." Then the 200-strong Soul Children of Chicago chorus appeared in the balcony singing:

We've got euro-dollar currencies, in our hands.

We've got ADI securities, in our hands. . .

The evening's extravagance suggests that Zell -- though he insists he's getting into media only for the money -- has a little William Randolph Hearst in him. Some will say that the only thing that can happen to a newspaper worse than being publicly held is being privately held, and that may be true, but the press lord whose ego knows no bounds is one of the great capitalist archetypes. It's a role Black played to perfection until ungrateful shareholders did him in, and Zell, with none of them to answer to, might triumph in it. And if Zell ever deigns to meet any of the working stiffs in his employ, he might like them. No journalist would ever have turned his back on the Godfather of Soul.

Meanwhile, the Black trial creeps along, before a Canadian press corps that wonders if a man of Black's stripe can get a fair trial in this grubby blue-collar town. Who knows? Bergmann recalls a supervisor telling a paramedic posted to Zell's party. "If you have to deal with any of these people, remember, kiss their asses." The paramedic wasn't buying. "Kiss their ass? Maybe you got the wrong guy for this job. Billionaire or no billionaire, I don't give a shit. Everybody looks the same in the back of an ambulance."

Black must hope that man's not on his jury.

The Tribune Company is compared (and not favorably) to Donald Rumsfeld and told to -- like Rumsfeld -- go away in an editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review. It asserts that the best thing the troubled company can do for the newspapers it owns is to get rid of them. "Good editors will cut costs when it is part of a sensible business plan. But in time Tribune appeared to be simply harvesting the assets of its properties," says CJR. "Tribune has great resources, but those resources aren’t doing much public good. The company seems less than the sum of its parts. And so, like Rumsfeld, it should go. We’ll take our chances with the gaggle of billionaires who are lining up to buy those newspapers." CJR, out east, where no one reads the Chicago Tribune anyway, can afford to be more nonchalant than I am about what happens to that paper -- I'm not aware of any gaggle of Daddy Warbuckses queuing up outside Tribune Tower to bring Chicago more enlightened journalism. But as a comment on what the company has made of itself, the editorial is on the money.

At Newsday more than 100 newsroom employees protested to the chairman of the parent Tribune Company that staff cuts  have "damaged Newsday as an instrument of public information and accountability." Here's the story from Editor & Publisher, with the complete letter.