(RACHEL KONING BEALS) Chicago celebrated its 179th birthday on Friday. Just a few days earlier, the hard reality of another number emerged in news reports as the media covered itself: Is Chicago — once home to a pretty good crosstown print rivalry to match its baseball divide — on its way to becoming a one-paper town?
The city’s famed big shoulders are already slouching beneath the burden of anembattled mayor, a looming teacher strike, and the tension of a spitting contest between the city and a “downstate” that’s operating sans budget under a dug-in Democratic speaker and a new Republican governor. The state’s bond rating is the lowest among all 50 states, Chicago’s own rating is at junk, and the Chicago Public Schools just agreed to pay steep interest rates for a debt refinancing that will only keep the lights on. Oh, and George Lucas’s narrative-arts museum on the lakefront — a dream the “Star Wars” creator shares with Mayor Rahm Emanuel — has become mired in court.
Now there’s the very real risk that any of this No. 3 U.S. city’s hits and misses won’t get the press scrutiny they deserve if no longer energized by fully competing newsrooms. This challenge got more serious in recent days and weeks with a handful of business moves involving both dailies.
Cozy quarters: Tribune Publishing Co. TPUB, -1.30% , which puts out the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun, among others, will merge the roles of publisher and editor at Tribune’s 11 dailies — jobs traditionally walled off from one another, till digital changed the rules altogether.
It gets more interesting. The changes came less than a month after Merrick Media LLC, which is owned by Chicago entrepreneur Michael W. Ferro Jr., acquired 5.2 million newly issued shares of Tribune for $44.4 million, with Ferro landing the role of nonexecutive chairman.
Ferro subsequently stepped down as the chairman of Wrapports LLC, which owns the rival Chicago Sun-Times, although he maintained his equity stake at that time. On Wednesday, though, Ferro transferred that ownership stake to a charitable trust.
From the Second City to … the fourth? Shrinking Chicago is developing identity issues. So, more than ever, it needs strong media representation to tell its stories. Just ask the family of Laquan McDonald.
Houston’s population is projected to top Chicago’s, bumping the Lone Star oil town to third place within 10 years, according to some demographers.
Rivalries: Friday also marked 38 years since the Chicago Daily News published its last edition. Its masthead at one time or another included critic Carl Sandburg and the beloved columnist Mike Royko, who typed his column there from 1964 to 1978, when the afternoon paper’s demise pushed much of its staff over to the sister Sun-Times. Royko left to join the Tribune in 1984, purportedly in protest of what would be a brief Sun-Times ownership by Rupert Murdoch (whose News Corp is the parent of Dow Jones and MarketWatch), who had sought to bring a New York Post approach to the Sun-Times.
Older Chicagoans recall a time when the city had not just two or three rivalrous dailies but a dozen and more. Check out this history of Chicago newspapers. The Inter Ocean? Yup, that was one.
Confession time: This Chicagoan today gets most of her local news from the Tribune’s WGN television (on a TV itself as well as via online wrap-ups); Sun-Times coverage flags from friends who work (er, worked) there; and the Ricketts family–owned DNAinfo.com, which has beat reporters assigned by neighborhood. I also read Greg Hinz’s political column in Crain’s Chicago Business, which can’t be dismissed as a quasi-trade anymore because it is increasingly picking up coverage abandoned by the embattled big boys. So, right, no Chicago daily finds its way to me. Not atypically in 2016, the only stories from the local dailies that I see are the ones I have actively sought out.
The last on-paper paper I recall holding in my hands was a copy of the weekly Reader (like the Sun-Times, it’s Wrapports-owned). I’d become absorbed in its comprehensive series on Chicago’s parking-meter privatization, which its critics argue was (is!) penny wise and pound foolish and lacked transparency. Such topics as parking meters and TIF districts, another subject that the Reader covers more frequently and in greater depth than just about anyone in town, may not be glamorous, but they serve as examples of the value that investigative journalism and the holding accountable of institutions by the press deliver. Democracy requires that they outlast the media-business shake-up.
All Chicago media, of course, are being challenged to compete digitally for a public that largely gets its information (it stumbles upon news and analysis sometimes, too) any way it can. And Chicago media share this challenge with all media, so, yes, Chicago’s media could technically fight it together (after all, they joined forces to share printing facilities some years ago). That’s clearly at the root of consolidation. Who’s to say a shotgun wedding isn’t the best, or even sole, way to survive? For now, the death of either paper is far from imminent, but is anyone — other, perhaps than Reader rival NewCity — thinking this through? Will news consumers find a voice or surrender to the undertow?
There’s more than nostalgia for the Royko era or the need for a birdcage liner at stake. This is serious news.