Things Not Looking Good for Chicago's Daily Newspapers

Once again, Drive and Dish takes time out from talking about basketball to ponder the falling fortunes of Chicago's daily newspapers. Today's reminder that the city which once claimed the most vital print journalism culture in the world -- sorry New York; during the newspaper industry's prime, Chicago was the true newspaper capital of the world -- is perilously close to having no major daily newspaper comes courtesy of the Associated Press:

Today, only two major dailies remain in this city of 3 million, and both are in serious trouble from declining circulation, plummeting ad revenue and a new kind of competition that threatens to make newsprint itself obsolete...

Even as the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on federal corruption charges brought the latest and most luscious of scandals to the teeth of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, questions were swirling about their futures...

In the 1970's, Chicago had four major daily newspapers. By the 1980's only two remained. But even through the late 1990's, the parent companies of the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, Tribune Company and Hollinger International respectively, remained in good financial shape. And as recently as the early 2000's, countless industry analysts considered Tribune Company -- with its myriad media/entertainment holdings -- to be a company that served as a model for how media institutions could position themselves to take advantage of the 21st Century era of media consolidation and synergy.

But these days, even the Rod Blagojevich scandal can't move newspapers. In days gone by, Chicago's rampant political corruption -- and the intersection of Chicago and Illinois state politics with organized crime -- helped to fuel its legendary newspaper wars. Journalistic heavyweights like Mike Royko and John "Bulldog" Drummond became household names because of their reporting and/or commentary on those all-too-common subjects.

How dismal must the current climate for Chicago's dailies be that amidst one of the biggest political scandals in the history of Illinois (a state replete with political scandal), no one expects the scandal to provide the papers with a shot in the arm?

The tabloid-size Sun-Times' average weekday circulation has fallen 3.9 percent from last year, to 313,176, and its Sunday circulation has declined 4.5 percent, to 255,905.

Those declines actually were better than the industry average and not as steep as the Tribune's 7.8 percent drop. But the broadsheet Tribune, with a higher proportion of sales from outside the city, still sold about 203,000 more newspapers than its rival on weekdays and 609,000 more on Sundays, despite a higher newsstand price ...

Gary Weitman, a spokesman for Tribune Co., said the Tribune newspaper remains economically viable, and the Dec. 8 bankruptcy filing by the parent company didn't suggest otherwise.

"The Sun-Times is in a more dire situation than the Tribune," he said.

Sun-Times spokeswoman Tammy Chase agreed Chicago's second-largest paper faces serious financial challenges. But she said the Sun-Times is doing everything it can to stay afloat, including slashing costs by about $50 million in 2008.

"We're not giving up," she said. "We're not waving the white flag."

Notice that, in his attempt to ameliorate the concerns of Tribune employees/analysts/creditors/potential suitors and present the Tribune as economically viable, Tribune Company's spokesman, Gary Weitman, pointed to the "more dire situation" of the rival Sun-Times.

I'm sure that will allow everyone to sleep better.

Implicit in Mr. Weitman's description of the Sun-Times' situation as "more dire" than the situation of the Tribune is the acknowledgement that the Tribune's situation is, indeed, dire ... just less so than the situation of the Sun-Times.

As for Tammy Chase's parallel attempt to spin a rosy future for the endangered Sun-Times, protesting that "we're not giving up" and "we're not waving the white flag" doesn't do much to inspire confidence. That's the kind of statement one might have expected to hear from the John McCain campaign once the first 2008 election returns began to trickle in and it became eminently clear that Barack Obama would be swept, by landslide, into the Presidency ... except for the fact that the John McCain campaign -- perhaps taking their cue from John McCain himself -- had given up and had waived the white flag, long before election day.

Tribune Company to File Chapter 11?

For the last several months, Drive and Dish has followed the demise of several print media publications (more here). Of particular interest to Drive and Dish has been the precipitous decline of the Chicago Tribune following the sale of Tribune Company -- the parent company of the Chicago Tribune -- to Chicago real estate mogul Sam Zell (more on Mr. Zell's takeover of Tribune Co. via The New York Times).

This afternoon, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Tribune Company may be preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy:

In recent days, as Chicago-based Tribune continued talks with lenders to restructure its debt, the newspaper-and-television concern hired investment bank Lazard Ltd. as its financial adviser and law firm Sidley Austin to advise the company on a possible trip through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, people familiar with the matter say.

Edit:

Interestingly, the Tribune Company's law firm, Sidley Austin, used to employ both President-elect Barack Obama and future First Lady Michelle Obama. It was at Sidley Austin in the summer of 1988 that Michelle Robinson and Barack Obama first met. At the time, Ms. Robinson was a young lawyer and recent graduate of Harvard Law. She was tasked with mentoring a summer associate (and Harvard Law student) named Barack Obama.

Sidley Austin also used to employ Bernadine Dohrn. Ms. Dohrn is the former leader of the Weather Underground, a former domestic terrorist, a former fugitive, and the current wife of controversial University of Illinois-Chicago Distinguished Professor of Education (and fellow ex-Weatherman, bomber and fugitive) William Ayers. More on the Weathermen (later known as the Weather Underground) and Bernadine Dohrn here (Ms. Dohrn reads a declaration of war on the United States 40 seconds into the video), and here. View the FBI's 1976 file on the Weather Underground here. Finally, The Claremont Institute discusses Ms. Dohrn's past here.

President-elect Obama's friendship with Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers (as well as his work with Mr. Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and on the board of the Woods fund) was a source of controversy in both the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary and the 2008 general Presidential election.

Bernadine Dohrn began working as an associate at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin in 1984, four years after ending an eleven year run as a fugitive. Ms. Dohrn worked at Sidley Austin from 1984 to 1988. As the Northwestern Chronicle notes (Ms. Dohrn is currently a faculty member at the Northwestern University School of Law), " at the time, the law firm was headed by Howard Trienens, who (represented) Dohrn's father-in-law Thomas Ayers when he was running Commonwealth Edison."

The Chronicle noted the concern of some Northwestern Law alumni that Ms. Dohrn's employment at Sidley Austin may have "represented a serious conflict of interest and reeked of influence peddling." It also noted that Ms. Dohrn was unable to pass the Character and Fitness portion of the New York bar due to her criminal past, and cited one Northwestern Law alumnus' befuddlement as to the kind of work she could have done for the firm, given her criminal record:

"Show me another law firm that hires a known criminal who can't get into the bar," O'Shea said.

In October, Drive and Dish noted the Tribune Company's close ties to (and apparent sympathies with) the campaign of then Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama.

So what is Drive and Dish trying to say? We're just noting that Sidley Austin is a firm that has clout. And in Chicago, there's nothing more important than clout. But while the word clout may have originated in Chicago, the old saying that it's not what you know, but rather who you know is not exclusively applicable to the Windy City. No one enters the spheres of power and influence without having connections.

At his old blog, the Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez discussed three pieces which dealt with Barack Obama's rise in Chicago politics and Mr. Obama's place in what Mr. Fernandez termed the "Byzantine labyrinth of Chicago connections." Mr. Fernandez cited the work of University of Santa Clara law professor Steve Diamond who asked "who sent Barack Obama:"

(Mr. Diamond) explains the context of the word "sent".

In Chicago politics a key question has always been, who "sent" you? The classic phrase is ... from an anecdote of Abner Mikva's, the former White House Counsel (Pres. Clinton) ... As a young student ... he walked into the local committeman's office ... and was immediately asked: "Who sent you?" Mikva replied, "nobody sent me." And the retort came back from the cigar chomping pol: "Well, we don't want nobody that nobody sent."

So it is reasonable to ask, who "sent" Barack Obama? In other words, how can his meteoric rise to political prominence be explained?

Mr. Fernandez continued:

Diamond's answer is speculative, but informative because it provides a look back into the youthful life and times of the man who might be the next President of the United States.

(So), who did “send” Obama? The key I think is his ties not to well connected uber lawyer Newton Minow, as Kaufman suggests, but more likely to the family of (in)famous former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers – not just Bill Ayers, but also Bill’s father Tom Ayers and his brother John as well. Obama was a community organizer from about 1985 to 1988, when he left Chicago for Harvard Law School.

In a May, 2008, article about Mr. Obama's connections with Mr. Ayers, the Chicago Tribune's Ron Grossman wrote of how Ms. Dohrn's and Mr. Ayers' connections had helped to propel the former fugitives to prominence in Chicago:

(I)t's hard for an outsider not to see the map of family connections behind their paths.

Ayers' father moved in philanthropic circles with Howard Trienens, an attorney with the powerhouse firm of Sidley Austin. The two served together on Northwestern University's Board of Trustees. Ayers was chairman of that group, then handed the post off to Trienens in 1986.

Trienens headed Sidley Austin when the firm hired Dohrn in 1984. She had never practiced law and had been out of law school for 17 years.

Ultimately, the Tribune Company's retention of Sidley Austin to handle it's rumored bankruptcy proceedings is more instructive than it is surprising. As Mr. Grossman wrote in the Chicago Tribune, Sidley Austin is a "powerhouse" law firm; it has deep ties to many of Chicago's movers and shakers. And Chicago, like New York and Washington, D.C., is a city where powerful individuals run in small, insular circles.

There's nothing wrong with the Tribune Company's retention of a powerful law firm to represent it's interests. To the contrary: hiring Sidley Austin was an obvious move for Tribune Co. But it's worth noting that in Chicago -- the city that gave rise to the concept of "clout" -- the Tribune Company's law firm has more clout (i.e., connections to the powerful) than almost any other.

US News to Abandon Weekly Print Edition; Redirecct Focus to Online Edition

Via Yahoo! Finance:

U.S. News and World Report plans to cut its publishing frequency by half for the second time this year, making it the latest news publication to embrace an online-heavy approach, according to a published report Tuesday.

This comes on the heels of last week's announcement by The Christian Science Monitor that it plans to discontinue its print edition in order to refocus on publishing online (The Christian Science Monitor is the first national newspaper -- but, almost certainly, not the last -- to make such a decision).

Expect more magazines and newspapers to make similar moves in the next few years, lest they go the way of the New York Sun.

Drive and Dish Prediction: Within 5 years, the Chicago Sun-Times will be forced to make a similar move (I hope I'm proven wrong).

The Hastening Decline of the American Newspaper

Last week Tribune Co. debuted the all new, redesigned Chicago Tribune. Frank the Tank, who publishes the Chicago sports/Illinois Fighting Illini sports/national sports/politics/pop culture blog Frank the Tank's Slant, and who has been critical
of recent changes that the Chicago Tribune has undergone since real estate mogul Sam Zell purchased the Tribune Co. in 2007, voiced his displeasure with the redesigned Tribune in the blog post "Someone Vomited on My Newspaper."

Mr. Tank wrote that the redesigned Tribune looked like USA Today -- which was the exact reaction that I had when I first saw the new paper. So upset was Mr. Tank by the design/content of the new Tribune, he emailed the paper's editor to articulate his objections. Mr. Tank prefaced those objections by explaining to the editor that he had feared the worst upon learning of the pending redesign:

"I feared that the Tribune was advocating “form over substance”, meaning that it would switch around portions of the paper and make heavier use of graphics without making real substantive changes. I also questioned the paper going the route of USA Today as opposed to the New York Times or Wall Street Journal not just from a journalistic perspective but from a pure business standpoint. It’s incredulous that a local newspaper that depends on hometown subscribers would follow the model of USA Today, whose circulation is primarily based upon giving papers away for free to out-of-town travelers in hotels and has virtually no subscribers."

Mr. Tank went on to explain why he thought the Tribune's redesign would fail to revitalize that newspaper:

"(I)t’s insulting that the leaders of “old media” seem to believe that members of Generation Y just want flashy graphics and junk food news about celebrities and crime. While those of us 30-and-under certainly enjoy snarky blogs about Hollywood, we are also the most media-savvy generation anywhere and crave great substantive reporting as well (hence, that’s why you see the New York Times and Washington Post websites high on the list of most-visited sites on the Internet but USA Today is nowhere to be found). The Tribune has made a huge substantive error with its redesign. At the end of the day, it will not attract any more of the younger set of potential readers while also alienating its long-time subscribers like myself."

In August, Drive and Dish discussed the Chicago Tribune and its relation to the overall decline of the American newspaper.

Implicit in the Chicago Tribune's recent decision to change its design is a certain desperation to keep that paper relevant in a rapidly changing media landscape.

Last month in the American, Jonathan Yardley described the newspaper business as an industry in crisis:

"Make no mistake about it, this is a crisis. Speaking in May to a group of journalists, Rupert Murdoch pointed out that, as his own newly acquired Wall Street Journal reported, “in the last five or six months, the average newspaper had seen its ad revenue drop 10 to 30 percent.” A decade and a half ago, the average daily circulation of the Post was 832,232; it is now 638,000. The Washington Post Company’s operating revenue in 1999 was $157 million; last year it was $66 million. Newspaper consultant Mark Potts has examined the overall financial picture for American newspapers and, as reported by Charles Layton in the June/July issue of The American Journalism Review (AJR), predicts that “by the year 2020 print ad revenue will be about half what it is today,” leaving newspapers with “six more years of economic pain—continued cuts in staff, newshole and newsgathering resources—before they even start to turn a corner” with improved revenue from Internet advertising."

Yardley continued:

“The scariest problem,' AJR reported, 'is that many papers won’t share in the online growth….And even as the industry as a whole survives, we may begin seeing, pretty soon, big American cities with no daily newspaper.' As Potts puts it: 'It’s going to be really bloody, incredibly devastating. And I think there are going to be a lot of major metros that don’t make it.”

I've always loved newspapers. I started reading the sports page of my local daily (a suburban Chicago newspaper) and of the Chicago Tribune when I was about nine or ten years old. Every day, I would read the sports page in its entirety as soon as I got home from school. Eventually, I started reading other sections of the paper too.

And whenever I visited out of town family members, I read their daily papers too. By the time I was in junior high, I was reading three newspapers a day. Since the local suburban papers had coverage of youth sports leagues and junior high scholastic sports, I poured over the box scores of every soccer game, little league game, and junior high basketball game -- obsessively comparing my statistics (and those of my friends) to the stats of kids from leagues/schools in other, nearby towns. And I read my suburban hometown's weekly community paper from cover to cover.

When I was in 8th grade, my mother's elderly aunt fell and broke her hip. After she got out of the hospital, she moved in with us. She had her hometown paper mailed to our house every day (it would arrive one or two days late). I started reading that paper too. My great aunt stayed with us for a little over a year, but after she left (and her newspaper no longer came to our house), I truly missed reading that newspaper every.

By the time I got to high school, I was regularly reading at least four or five papers (although a couple of them were small suburban papers that specialized in coverage of high school sports, and which I read for the primary reason of finding out whether or not I'd made it into the sports page).

As a freshman in college, I started reading the local papers from the area in which I attended college (in addition to the Chicago Tribune that college students could subscribe to and have sent to their campus). I transferred to a different school in a different city, and started reading that city's paper too. And when I had a Comparative Politics class, I had to subscribe to the New York Times to keep up with global geopolitical events.

I've been a regular reader of the local paper in very city that I've lived in, no matter how short my stay in that particular city. And I've always made a point of buying the local paper in any city or town that I visit.

What's more, I've read -- and continue to read online -- the hometown papers of cities in which I (or organizations for which I've worked/had other strong ties) have had regular business/work related dealings. I think that it's always good to have a working knowledge of what's going on in the cities and towns that you -- or your company/organization -- do business in. And since I've worked in politics, worked for a large service based corporation and worked for a family owned (my family) manufacturing business, and have tried to keep up with the daily news from a lot of cities, towns, and nations, I've read an awful lot of different newspapers.

Ultimately, I've been either a regular or semi regular reader of the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Daily Southtown, Joliet Herald News, Orland Park/Frankfort/Mokena Star, Daily Herald, Naperville Sun, Quad City Times, Rock Island Argus, (Harlingen, TX) Valley Morning Star, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, San Antonio Express-News, Raleigh News & Observer, Charlotte Observer, Nashville Tenneseean, Bloomington/Normal Pantagraph, Peoria Journal-Star, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Post, New York Daily News, New York Sun (R.I.P.), Buffalo News, Indianapolis Star, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Florida Times-Union, Salt Lake Tribune, Desert News, Denver Post, Rochester Post-Bulletin, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Miami Herald, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Philadelphia Inquirer, New Orleans Times-Picayune, etc.

Seriously.

And that's not even counting the papers that I've read for business related/work purposes (several of which are overseas papers). Based on my newspaper reading habits -- both past and present -- I could probably be considered a connoisseur of American Newspapers. And as such, I find Yardley's prediction of an America in which many cities have no daily newspaper to be troubling.

I hope it doesn't come to that. But I wouldn't be surprised if it does.

The Quick Decline of the Chicago Tribune ?

Much has been made about the ongoing decline of the American newspaper industry. With advertising revenues and circulations in seeming free fall, newspapers are widely believed to be the modern equivalent of the buggy whip (i.e., a product from a bygone era on the fast track to obsolescence in a changing marketplace). Dailies are furiously slashing staff and desperately attempting to make their content appear more relevant/edgier/hipper in order to attract a younger, tech-savvy demographic. More here. And here. And here. Still more here.

Frank the Tank, of the fine Chicago/Illini sports/politics/pop culture blog, Frank the Tank's Slant, writes about what he perceives to be a recent decline in the quality of content in the once great Chicago Tribune. According to Mr. the Tank, Sam Zell, the new owner of Tribune Co., plans to "cut staff and close bureaus to slash costs and redesign the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and other Tribune Company newspapers to make them more in tune with what focus groups supposedly say they want, which are more charts, colorful graphics, and shorter stories."

Mr. the Tank argues that Mr. Zell is attempting to make the Tribune, and other Tribune Co. newspapers, look more like USA Today. But he questions the wisdom of attempting to make the Tribune hipper/edgier:

"Here’s the mistake that nearly every newspaper owner in the country is making when they are trying to attract the elusive Generations Y and Z: they equate short attention spans with smaller papers containing fewer stories about substantive national and international issues and more blurbs about Hollywood. This is a ridiculous notion since when you take a look at the top 100 websites in the United States by numbers of visitors, you won’t see USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, TMZ.com, People, or any site focused on celebrity news on the list. However, the New York Times, BBC, and Washington Post websites are all on there. People over 30 fail to understand that people under 30 are the most media-savvy consumers anywhere and can instantly identify fluff versus well-written stories. While young people certainly like their junk food stories about the latest travails of Brittany Spears and Lindsay Lohan along with snarky commentary from a slew of blogs and other media sources, they also crave substance and they will turn to media sources that provide them with that. Even if you grant that physical newspapers are eventually going to go extinct and media companies should focus on the web, the success of the Times and the Post websites ought to be an indicator that going for the high-end of journalistic scale is a lot more successful in drawing readers (and the advertisers that pay for such readers) either online or offline than a bunch of cost-cutting measures and flashy graphics.

So, as a Generation Y guy whose main complaint about today’s Tribune is that it has introduced too many empty journalistic calories (the What’s Your Problem? feature is more suited to a community flyer as opposed to the top paper in the nation’s third-largest media market that features multiple Pulitzer Prize winners, while the Trib’s Starbucks fetish has been well-documented), the path to long-term survival in the newspaper industry, whether it’s with ink and paper or on the web, is all about substance over form as opposed to the other way around."

Edit:

Considering some of the apparent (ahem!) esoteric preferences of the many visitors who click on certain Drive and Dish posts after having searched for fetish websites (I should note that the Drive and Dish posts which garner hits from the fetish community don't actually contain any fetish or fetish related material, but rather poke fun at a former college basketball player who urinated in his pants during a game last season), I'm almost afraid to see the web traffic that the term "Starbucks fetish" will bring.

Drive and Dish usually gets between 15-30 hits a day from people who find this site after having searched for such websites. And although some of the comments on the latter of the above linked posts are, undoubtedly, of a joking nature, the constant traffic from guys who accidentally stumble on this site whilst looking for fetish porn is definitely no joke.

Probably at least half of them come from Germany. But England, Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands are also quite well represented. And, unfortunately, an increasing number of such hits are coming from folks with strange tastes who live here in the good ol' United States (although a disproportionate number of them come from New York and the Bay Area).

Also:

Speaking of Starbucks, Frank the Tank has thoughts on "Race and Class (and Starbucks) in Chicago." It's a strong read and it hits close to home for this native of Chicago's South(west) Suburbs and former Naperville and North Side denizen.

It's recommended reading for Chicago area Drive and Dish readers, and even for readers who are reasonably familiar with Chicago. On the downside though, the post does reference and link to the Freakonomics blog. Be forewarned.