Tribune slow jams the news

Tribune Tower is converting to condos, and the Tribune is converting to hedge fund control.

The Big Buyout: Everything Must Go!

Reading the Chicago Tribune is hard these days because all the columnists are writing the same thing. No, not that Trump really won the election. They're posting farewell columns. Dahleen Glanton, John Kass, Steve Johnson, Phil Rosenthal, Mary Schmich, Heidi Stevens, Eric Zorn—nearly everyone with photo next to their name is taking themselves out of the picture. No relief on Twitter; the people who I worked with behind the scenes are adding the word "formerly" to their bios. Even people barely out of journalism school have stopped chasing crime scenes. It's not a brain drain; it's a royal flush.

Let's just call it the big buyout. The hedge fund Alden Global Capital is taking Tribune Newspapers private. Perversely, it can pay off shareholders by borrowing against the Tribune's own physical assets. Now Alden is disposing of the papers' human capital, giving 80 employees severance deals to eliminate their jobs; 26 of them in the Chicago guild. It's not the first round of buyouts, either. I left in a round of them 7 years ago. It wasn't the first round. Newspapers of course aren't the only place to lose your job. Any business with a steady cash flow is an opportunity for the owner to cash in. They get taken over, they shed overhead and in another decade it's all over.

It's hard to get old working in newspapers. A few of the departing columnists will stay in the Tribune in syndication, which costs the Tribune much less than keeping them on the payroll. Newspapers always been low-cost operations. They're willing to make new stars and lose the old. But until this point they've been able to draw replacements from the pipeline of new journalism talent at small daily papers and suburban weeklies. Before I worked at the Chicago daily papers I was in the pipeline, reporting for the Elmwood Park Elm Leaves. I talked to politicians, teachers, merchants, realtors, wannabe actors, nursing home residents. I judged the Kiwanis Club Miss Peanut contest. I looked up a lot of dictionary words, and wrote about all of it. This is how I learned how to spell, how to write in a hurry, doublecheck what I know, and know what I still haven't learned. My readers learned if what I wrote was worth reading.

The Elm Leaves publisher now is the Chicago Tribune. I looked it up and read the editor's farewell column. It's hard to imagine what the pipeline for daily journalists looks like now, with so many fewer journalists. Maybe they'll hire from TikTok. We'll all learn a few new dance moves, but not much else, unless Jimmy Fallon will still slow jam the news.

Abe Lincoln's News Feed

It's distressing to have so many streaming media choices and so few news media choices. The streaming options keep expanding. The news options keep shrinking. If we think reporters are not playing it straight, we should want more competing reporters to prove them wrong, or more editors to keep them honest. If we think we could do a better job of reporting, we may be right. We might even convince our Twitter followers we're right. But there won't be much actual reporting.

But wait, I hear you say, that's not true. My Facebook feed is full of news. I don't doubt that it's true, although due to the wonders of the algorithm I have no idea what your news feed looks like. There may not be news from Elmwood Park; the editor's gone. Maybe District 401 will post the school lunch menus. There'll be news about Chicago, but we won't want to register to get it. The alderman will post the garbage pickup schedule anyway. Surely there'll be political news, but we won't believe any of it. Or we'll just believe what we're predisposed to believe in the first place. At some point, Facebook will just give us more of whatever we clicked on last time. We won't know what we're missing.

This is how news worked back in Abraham Lincoln's day. All news was political. The Daily Republican would report Lincoln's speech, and the Daily Democrat would present Stephen A. Dougias' speech. It wouldn't look like much of a debate unless we read both papers, and we wouldn't. The point was whip up supporters into cheerleaders. Of course the war comes, because we're mostly talking past each other. Still the news might catch us unaware, or think those Southern Democrats deserve it. That's about how it works now with news on Facebook, except for learning about the war. We'd still need to be registered for that.

So it goes. The Tribune Tower is being converted to condos. Chance the Rapper might have bought one. Or maybe not. It's hard these days to believe what we read, unless we like the beat.