Illustration: Jeremy Sorese

By Brian Hieggelke

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
—Flannery O’Connor quote chiseled into Tribune Tower inner wall, as quoted, twice, in “The Deal From Hell”

What would it mean if history lost its first rough draft?

The inevitable doom of the great American newspaper seemed imminent just a couple years ago, as company after company tumbled into bankruptcy, or worse, turned out their lights for good, many with legacies longer than a hundred years. Even the mighty New York Times was teetering, grasping at a quickie loan from a wealthy Mexican billionaire, and finding itself the source of speculation that its lifespan was measured in months, rather than years.

Here in Chicago, the bloodbath was a flood, with the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Reader and, most astonishingly, the Chicago Tribune all filing for bankruptcy within a six-month period straddling the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. With the entire economy teetering on the brink of depression, it was a surreal time.

An interesting confluence of events this month brings the recent past and uncertain future of journalism back into the spotlight, with the release of the acclaimed documentary film, “Page One: Inside the New York Times” and, most notably in these parts, the release of James O’Shea’s “The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers.” As if on cue, the Chicago Tribune graciously launched a major redesign on June 15, undoing many of the most egregious affronts to its audience perpetrated under the regime of its notorious former CEO Randy Michaels. Michaels himself even jumped back into the news hole last week, resurrecting what seemed to be an already decomposing career with a buyout of local radio stalwarts The Loop and Q101. Read the rest of this entry »

James O'Shea/Photo: Jose More

By Brian Hieggelke

James O’Shea’s new book, “The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers,” chronicles his career at the Tribune Company, where he rose to managing editor of the Chicago Tribune and, finally, editor of the Los Angeles Times. We spoke at length about his book and, in a section too long for print but published here, about his latest endeavor, the Chicago News Cooperative.

Let’s talk about the Chicago News Cooperative. It will be two years old this fall.
You know, this in a way is sort of an R&D experiment. How can you finance quality journalism? Some people pay $2 for the New York Times on weekdays and $6 on Sunday, they aren’t the problem. It’s how are you going to cover City Hall and how are you going to pay for it because nobody’s going to say to you ‘I’m going to buy an ad on an exposé on Mayor Emanuel.’ They want nothing to do with that. We did find out people will pay for information. We did that ‘Early and Often’ political site for the election cycle. You paid 175 bucks for online reports delivered to you via email that you didn’t get if you weren’t a member. We got advertising revenue, we got maybe 300 or 400 people to pay for it—which wasn’t as high as I wanted, but when I tell people that number they say ‘well that’s pretty good.’ We’re now building an education site. We’re going to start trying to get some advertising revenue, but we’re still a nonprofit 501c3 heavily dependent on donations. If you cannot figure it out within a three-to-five year period, some way of sustaining yourself or taking fairly steep leaps toward self-sustainability, foundations and nonprofit is not the answer. You’ve got to get to the point where you’re going to have multiple streams of revenue, but foundations are not going to underwrite you for five years to produce news. They’re just not going to do it. Read the rest of this entry »

The guys at Tap.Me, a developing mobile in-game ad platform based here in Chicago, readily admit no one likes being sold something. Not even them.

“We’re gamers. And pretty much all gamers hate advertising,” says Tyler Crane, one of Tap.Me’s developers. “But if we were known as the guys who fixed advertising, that’d be awesome.”

The idea behind Tap.Me is to find the most non-intrusive way to make ads in mobile gaming as beneficial as possible to the gamer and the advertiser. Since the mobile-gaming market supernova late last decade (between the summer of 2007 when it debuted through the fall of 2010, Apple says more than 1.5 billion games have been sold for the iPhone alone) the standard way for advertisers to reach audiences has been through banner ads that often completely halt game play. Most users hastily click past, often only interacting with them by mistake. Tap.Me creates context around advertising, tying the characteristics of a brand to a game’s mechanics through optional “power-ups” that give the user a bonus in the game and potentially in real life as well. For example, a user chooses a speed bonus sponsored by Redbox (who the group has already struck a deal with, though the specifics haven’t been made public), and could possibly see a discount on their next rental. And while the average engagement rate of a regular banner ad might be around .03 percent per day, Tap.Me has found that users opt in nearly 5 percent of the time. Certainly not the majority, but it is unquestionably a giant leap forward. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s biggest winners:

1
Rahm Emanuel
Landed a NATO and G-8 summit and got your house back? No wonder you looked so proud in Boystown Sunday.

2
Mike Ditka
Famed salsa personality will make a cameo appearance on the final episode of “Entourage.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): When astronaut Buzz Aldrin flew to the moon and back on the spacecraft Apollo 11 in 1969, he was paid less than $8 a day. That has to stand as one of the most flagrant cases of underpaid labor ever—far worse than what you’ve had to endure in your storied career. I suggest you keep Aldrin’s story in mind during the next six months as you meditate steadily on the future of your relationship with making money. Hopefully it will help keep you in an amused and spacious and philosophical frame of mind—which is the best possible attitude to have as you scheme and dream about your financial master plan for the years ahead. Read the rest of this entry »

This June evening is too pretty for the subway, so I bicycle south to the Pink Line’s California station to meet up with the Active Transportation Alliance’s Tony Giron. He’s leading a march across the largely Mexican-American neighborhood of Little Village to Farragut High School for the first of seven public input meetings on the Chicago Pedestrian Plan.

Similar to the Bike 2015 Plan, this Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) document will be a roadmap for making the city a safer and easier place to walk. The goal is to reduce pedestrian injuries by half and fatalities by 100 percent. “Chicago is a great city for walking,” says Giron. “But along with park paths and tree-lined streets, we still have roads that are difficult to cross, dangerous intersections and places that are inaccessible to people walking.”

Joined by a handful of young Active Trans interns and volunteers, we walk our bicycles west down leafy 23rd Street, past families hanging out on stoops and vendors selling paletas and elotes as Norteño accordion music plays on stereos. When we arrive at Farragut a man on an adult three-wheeler with a hubcap-covered sound system on the back is pedaling around the schoolyard, trailed by kids on BMX bikes and tricycles. Read the rest of this entry »

This Week’s Biggest Gainers:

1
Phil Humber
Sox starter pitched a victory at Arizona on Sunday, upping his record to 7-3 and putting him into the All-Star buzzosphere. Good thing he wasn’t the one with the kidney stone.

2
Sam Cooke
A Change Is Gonna Come: The late soul singer was honored with the renaming of a street near his boyhood home in Bronzeville to “Sam Cooke Way.” Even if his “way” led to his fatal shooting at 33—but not in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Golden orb spiders of Madagascar spin robust webs. Their silk is stronger than steel yet able to bend and expand when struck by insects. Here’s an equally amazing facet of their work: Each morning they eat what remains of yesterday’s web and spend an hour or so weaving a fresh one. I’m thinking that your task in the coming weeks has some similarities to the orb spider’s, Aries: creating rugged but flexible structures to gather what you need, and being ready to continually shed what has outlived its usefulness so as to build what your changing circumstances require. (Thanks to the California Academy of Sciences for the info on orb spiders.) Read the rest of this entry »

Architecture advocacy groups Landmarks Illinois and Preservation Chicago have spent more than a year trying to save the old Prentice Women’s Hospital in Streeterville. On Wednesday, they made it a national issue.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation named the now nearly vacant building to its list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places during a press conference and rally held just outside the building.

Both groups continue to fight for granting the building landmark status. In April, Northwestern University, the building’s longtime owner, agreed to table its demolition plans for sixty days while Chicago considers its possible status. But the Landmarks Commission deferred its vote on June 2, and now the advocates remain uncertain as to whether it will be even on the agenda for the July 7 meeting. In what he feels is a closing window of opportunity, Preservation Chicago director Jonathan Fine says the city needs to recognize the need to preserve its cultural legacy that extends inward from its most visible areas.

“Chicago, as great of a city as it is, sometimes can’t look beyond its own navel when it comes to architecture,” he says. “Two years ago we lost eight of the nine Gropius Buildings on the Michael Reese Hospital campus, and in exchange we now have a sea of taxpayer-funded mud down there. We are on the verge of making the same mistake twice. Read the rest of this entry »

By Hildy Johnson

More later, perhaps, but quick notes on the new Tribune, broadsheet edition:

It sure did feel heftier, as promised, but that sixty-two-page property-tax-sales insert added much of the weight to the ninety pages of news sections. Coincidental timing or?

The redesign is handsome and telegraphs “serious newspaper” instead of “almost like television, but…” or “almost like the Web, but…” or “almost like the RedEye but…”. The black-and-white skyline in the nameplate, a faux engraving, evokes the publication’s longevity while hinting that it, too, is a landmark like the skyscrapers. The typeface change, from Nimrod (an unfortunate name given the paper’s recent leadership) to Mercury Text is subtle but seems ever-so-slightly friendlier to the eyes of an aging population.

The absence of an ad on page one? Thank you. This page is your ad, for your product, Mr. Tribune.

The serious tenor and design of page one is partially offset by the colorful image of steak sauces above the nameplate, which reassure readers that, “Yes, we’re  more serious now, but there’s still fun content within, where it belongs.” This is probably the most carefully considered page one in years, if not decades: Investigative story to show how serious we are, check. Consumerist Metra study to remind suburbanites that we really really love them best, check. A story about moms and another about the declining life expectancy of women to appeal to the challenging female newspaper reader, check. Read the rest of this entry »