Chicago Tribune limps into the future

The suffering will feel familiar; Alden days will be much like olden days, only more so

The world’s greatest newspaper, not quite under water.

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I was behind the journalism curve from the beginning.

But so was almost everybody else who worked for newspapers in the last couple of generations. We reported on a world with technology progressing exponentially while stubbornly running our own little worlds as if we were invulnerable to everything happening around us.

We all acted like we were Superman, but we were really more like Clark Kent. Old-fashioned and slow-witted, cowardly and cheap.

Unable to bend steel bars in bare hands, but willing to bend over so shareholders could welcome hedge fund operators and random megalomaniacs who wanted to own our product.

So it’s not shocking that the Chicago Tribune is in such a fix now that it’s owned by Alden Global Capital, an evil empire delighting in prospering by chopping up the papers it buys. 

Alden and all the other diseases that afflict newspapers have been coming for a long time.

I fell behind the first day on my first full-time newspaper job, in Winter Haven, Fla. I was thrilled that the New York Times Company had provided me with a working IBM Selectric typewriter, and promised that if it broke, they’d send a guy out to fix it right away. But even that cheap thrill didn’t last.

The other reporter in the branch office showed me a closet-sized room just big enough to house a hulking machine and a folding chair set up in front of it. 

“Get a load of this thing,” he said. “This is what you’ll use to send stories to the desk, except when you give up and drive your copy in.”

I’m being so dramatic here that you might imagine he was telling me that we sent our stories by telegraph. 

You would imagine correctly.

“This is a Teletype teleprinter,” my office partner said. “Welcome to Florida. Welcome to the past.”

It was the same kind of machine that was old when my mother had employed one to relay orders in the World War II Navy. Women who hadn’t been born when she was operating it had already had children of their own by the time I sat down in front of mine. Some of those children had their own children.

Like the typewriter, the Teletype had a keyboard. Unlike the typewriter, the keyboard only had capital letters. 

That meant that at the end of a story transmission, I sometimes added a note to indicate what really was supposed to be capitalized: “CAPITALIZATIONS, FIRST GRAF, SECOND SENTENCE -- POLK COUNTY, MICHAEL SMITH. THIRD SENTENCE -- SCHOOL BOARD, JUDGE HARRY LONG. SECOND GRAF, 1ST SENTENCE -- … ” 

The Teletype was not forgiving. As the writer reached the end of each line, it would send it. No takebacks. So we often added a note like this:

THE THIRD WORD IN THE FIFTH LINE OF THE THIRD GRAF IS MISSPELLED. IT SHOULD BE … ”

It was hard enough to Teletype a story from a typewritten draft, but we were expected to compose deadline stories directly on the Teletype keyboard. 

That led to panicky notes: (((PLEASE FIX: THE MAN CHARGED WITH MURDER IN THE EAGLE LAKE SLAY STORY IS ALBERT MARTIN, NOT BUCK FRANK. FRANK IS THE COP WHO ARRESTED MARTIN. PLEASE CALL ME IN HAVEN SO I’M SURE YOU’VE SEEN THIS. MAY GOD PROTECT ME)))

It was a challenge to work efficiently and accurately with this kind of equipment. But it wasn’t as if there wasn’t any money coming from the Times’ Florida papers to spend on something modern. The paper I worked for, The Ledger, was read by 50,000 people. And the Times didn’t overspend on supplies, like newsprint. It owned forests.

But newspapers were supposed to return 20 percent on investment annually. So shareholders often came first. 

I thought at the time that might be set aside at least temporarily  with the crisis of the Internet’s onset. The bountiful diversity of newspaper revenue streams -- display advertising, classified advertising, copy sales, legal advertising, birth/death/wedding announcements and syndication -- were all threatened.

So firewalls should be quickly constructed while money was socked away, so the papers could afford to wait while people got used to the new way to pay to read. Right?

That didn’t happen. The 20 percent equation lived on as long as possible, while the papers often gave away their product online. So they cut staffs and closed buildings. 

And something like that will now happen at the Tribune. Immediately upon the sale to Alden, buyouts of staffers' jobs were offered. But that’s nothing new. That’s happened at the Tribune many times before, to make the product more palatable to previous investors. 

In recent years, the Tribune has bought other media properties and quickly decimated them by cutting their human and physical assets. It bought newspapers that had traditional commitments to local news, and watered down those commitments through staff reductions, shutdowns and policy.

Publications that subscribers knew fondly as “my newspaper” soon tended toward regional news. I worked for one of them, the Pioneer Press chain, and found myself behind the curve again, this one created by the Tribune. I was actually disciplined for insisting on writing about local issues. 

I heard a so-called expert pontificating on WBEZ about how the Alden-owned Tribune would soon lose local connections with communities, leading to digital competition. That actually happened a decade ago, of course. DNAInfo filled the need, at least for city neighborhoods, in 2012, succeeded by Block Club Chicago in 2017.

Last week, I listened to the Chicago City Council debate a classic neighborhood choice: Should zoning be changed so McKinley Park warehouses might be converted to housing, mostly affordable, though that meant that the new residents would be living within about 700 feet of a smoky asphalt plant?

The Tribune had not had a story alerting the public to the imminent decision about the locally-controversial project. Both Block Club and the Sun-Times had, following the zoning committee meeting that preceded the vote.  

Block Club had a story about the approval of the zoning the same evening. The Trib didn’t. Two days later, it rushed into print yet another long story about general environmental problems on the Southwest Side. It tacked on the end a few paragraphs about the project approval. It credited Block Club for some of the background.

Tribune management seems convinced that people want The Big Story. Most other organizations seem to accept that today’s readers want to read about their neighborhoods. Heck, if they could, many would probably like to just read about themselves.

Whether it’s popular or not, however, it’s been good to have the Tribune trying to attack big issues in Chicago. Now, with Alden, it won’t have to also pretend to cover the neighborhoods where people actually live. 

If it wasn’t impossible before, it will be soon.

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