The Republican Party rose up with the Chicago Tribune in the 1850s, and a century and a half later they’re flat on their backs together–the GOP seeing stars on page one, the Trib in its own business section. In the 70s the paper covered itself with glory by publishing the first batch of the Watergate tapes. Today it’s righteously covering the collapse of the Tribune Company media empire.
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One thing Hiller brought was a message to the Times staff, and Rutten quotes from it. “What we do in applying our great resources to our mission and business has to follow our vision of where we are taking the business over the next five years and beyond. It is clear that some of this will require moving resources from print to online, and other growth areas. It also means continuing to reduce costs in the core print business, across every area of the company and doing so thoughtfully and strategically.”
Then Rutten sets Hiller straight. “If the Tribune Co. or its successor as owner of the Los Angeles Times continues to ‘reduce costs’ by cutting the paper’s staff in the interests of maintaining a profit margin of 20% or better, then the only way to reinvigorate local coverage and to establish the kind of strong online presence that will guarantee the paper’s future is to stop doing something we now do for readers or to do it less thoroughly and less well, hoping that those readers just won’t mind. Nothing is impossible, of course, but some things are highly improbable.”
He said he hadn’t gone west to dismantle the Times, and when he was asked how he could justify obeying the marching orders Baquet had defied, he said he wasn’t sure he could. “If I think there is too much staff I will say so,” the Times quoted him as saying. “And if I think there is not enough I will say that too.” He also said their newsroom wasn’t much different from the Tribune newsroom–neither one likes what the Tower is telling it to do, and both are resisting.
In Chicago O’Shea’s being succeeded by two new managing editors, George de Lama for news and James Warren for features. It looks like a bake-off to decide who will one day succeed editor Ann Marie Lipinski, but it may not be: a lot of Tribune staffers would put their money on Tim Franklin, a former Tribune sports and financial editor who’s now editor of the Tribune Company’s Baltimore Sun. Of course, these predictions suppose a recognizable Tribune Company down the road–not the safest of assumptions. Last Sunday’s Tribune reported that the massive Gannett chain, publisher of USA Today, is the latest to kick the Tribune Company’s tires. Handing the Tribune to Gannett would be like turning over the New York City Ballet to Radio City Music Hall.
aThe local newscasts on election night were mercilessly parochial. Alexi Giannoulias’s eager-beaver acceptance speech had its charms, David McSweeney’s dour postmortem its fascinations. But it wasn’t until Jesse Jackson Sr., a talking head back at one of the studios, mentioned in passing
aLead in November 14 Sun-Times story: “Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, famously imprisoned because she refused to identify her source to U.S. Attorney and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, on Monday testified on his office’s behalf.”
