In 1974 a White House under duress released a transcript of President Nixon’s secret tapes. The next day the Tribune published all 246,000 words, and a week later it asked Nixon to resign.
The Tribune newsroom tends to regard the Times newsroom as a collection of prima donnas to whom Chicago is, in one Tribune writer’s words, a collection of “hayseed interlopers.” But that’s the generality. Baquet is a specific. He came up through the Tribune and went on to the New York Times before going to Los Angeles. (His managing editor, Doug Frantz, also worked for the Tribune and later the New York Times.) In Chicago–where he shared a Pulitzer in 1988 with William Gaines and Ann Marie Lipinski, today the Tribune’s editor, for coverage of City Council corruption–he’s greatly admired. “He’s an intellectual straight shooter,” says a longtime Tribune friend of Baquet’s who asked not to be named. “People who know Dean know he’s very, very smart, and people who know him even more than that know he’s got something going on. He’s not the kind of character who’d do something like this as a gesture. You can’t be in a better position today than being a noble newspaper editor against a corporate giant, and I mean that in the most positive way for him. I expect he could bounce out of there and land anywhere he wanted to land.”
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It’s a given in Chicago that the Times spends money as if it were water. But the big industrialists out there who need wining and dining aren’t in dry goods. “Perception is everything,” says an LA newspaper friend, “and any sign of weakness not only is exploited but ridiculed.” If you don’t have enough money to waste money, it sounds like you don’t have enough money to stay in the game. I don’t know–I don’t live in LA. Neither does FitzSimons.
Back in Chicago, the Tribune ran a long, candid business article last Sunday noting that after over two years in which Tribune shareholders “had seen their stock drop like a rock,” the board meeting was a watershed: it was the start of a process to “dismantle” the company, which “will likely never be the same.” I’d welcome the same blunt clarity from the Tribune’s editorial page, which could expend it on behalf of, say, Maher Arar. He’s the Canadian software engineer arrested in 2002 while changing planes in New York City and behind the back of Canada shipped by the FBI to Syria, where he was tortured for ten months before being let go. The suffering of Maher Arar hasn’t roused the Tribune to anger or to editorial comment of any kind. It speaks like a paper whose mind is somewhere else.
That first impression was Cooke’s high-water mark. The Daily News wasn’t big enough for both Cooke and editorial director Martin Dunn, who saw Cooke come and saw him go. By the end of 2005 Cooke was back in Chicago as the news group’s vice president of editorial operations. He’s just finished converting the News-Sun in Waukegan into a tabloid–impressing the staff there by banging on neighbors’ doors late one night to embellish a police story about an unchaperoned, out-of-control teen party.
I asked Cooke on Monday, his first day on the job, if the front page was at the top of his list.
