You Get What You Pay For
“I guess I just haven’t codified a philosophy of Fluff,” she said. “If it’s fun and goes down easy, then I run with it.”
She did point out that the Sunday paper isn’t all fun and games. When the Sun-Times added Fluff five weeks ago it also added Controversy, a growly new commentary section (with an impressively expanded books department). “And you know ‘Scurrilous’ has been immensely successful, and ‘Scurrilous’ lives in Fluff.”
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“Red Streak is status quo,” she said. “We’re publishing it five days a week, and we’re going to do that forever.”
I wasn’t so sure. Weeks ago, when the Sun-Times decided to give away Red Streak, I noticed something. The Tribune’s competing RedEye was being handed out free to commuters at CTA stations, but most RedEye boxes on street corners still required a quarter. At the end of the day those boxes were full, yet the adjacent Red Streak boxes, with big free stickers plastered on them, were empty. It seemed clear that the brand loyalty RedEye worked so hard to cultivate didn’t exist. Its readers seemed to have switched to Red Streak the minute they didn’t have to pay for it.
Plenty of critics of the war in Iraq would agree that there’s no connection, beyond 9/11 giving President Bush cover to start a war he wanted to fight anyway. But the Pentagon’s press release drew no distinction between American troops and the war they’re fighting at the moment. And it’s probably not a coincidence that Clint Black made the charts with a song that goes like this:
