There, at Scripophily.net, was a certificate good for 100 shares of stock in the Chicago Daily News, and it was up for sale.
Illustration provided by Scripophily.net
Of course, the Daily News (the Chicago newspaper that may really have been the World’s Greatest at one time) is defunct. It has been 36 years since the Daily News won its last Pulitzer Prize (to columnist Mike Royko for commentary) and nearly 30 years since the paper published its last issue – dated March 4, 1978.
The shares are worthless as a financial document.
Yet the web site was offering to sell it as a collectible for people interested in journalism and the newspaper industry. The going price for it was $595 (with the site claiming that price was a 14 percent discount from their normal price of $695).
Seeing that stock share from 1935 made me wonder if I should start hoarding any and all merchandise I can come across with the Chicago Sun-Times logo on it, since there are signs that “The Bright One” could be the next casualty in the long-running Chicago newspaper wars.
For starters, I still have my copy of the Sun-Times from Jan. 4, 2008 – the one with
the word “HISTORY” in large type stretching the width of the page, atop a color photograph of Barack Obama celebrating his realization that he won the Iowa caucus.
Think of it. That paper has potential as a piece of political memorabilia, should Obama ultimately succeed in getting the Democratic nomination and winning the November presidential election.
Maybe a year or two from now, some person with endless attic space for storage of other peoples’ junk will go to eBay and be willing to give me a few bucks.
But to me, it would be worth more as a piece of Chicago memorabilia, a picture of all that was going on in the Second City on the day that we realized our very own junior senator from the Hyde Park neighborhood has a serious chance to become the Leader of the Free World.
It may also turn out to be the last significant news story covered by the Chicago Sun-Times, which on Thursday began singling people out for layoffs as part of a plan to remove $50 million from the company’s operating expenses for the upcoming fiscal year.
Thursdays’ cuts were of mid-level editors and editorial writers who were not covered by the Chicago Newspaper Guild contract. They have no way of appealing the decision to eliminate their jobs, unlike the union-member reporters, of whom about two dozen will lose jobs in coming weeks.
Union officials are trying to negotiate some sort of alternative to extensive layoffs. But even they admit that pay cuts for all reporters will not be enough to save jobs from being lost.
The Sun-Times has always tried to make it a bragging point that it is a smaller, scrappier alternative to the bloat of the Chicago Tribune, which despite all its resources always manages to fall just a bit short of being one of the world’s elite newspapers.
But lately, the newspaper is just getting downright scrawnier and sickly. It seems to be running about 60 tabloid-format pages per day, with classified and automotive ad pullout sections adding about another 24 pages per day. That compares to the 100-120 page newspapers the Sun-Times was publishing during weekdays as recently as last year.
The end result of these cutbacks is a news product (and no, I don’t have some news purist abhorrence to thinking of the news as a product – some of us produce a quality news product and others don’t) that is barely worth the 50 cents per day that I plunk down at the newsstand.
If the Sun-Times’ strategy for the future is to deteriorate into a tacky product whose readers would just as soon beg for it to be put out of its misery, then Sun-Times management is succeeding.
What makes this so sad is that it would leave the Tribune as the major newsgathering organization for Chicago. That thought is nauseating.
Although the Tribune has moderated many of its old conservative vices (I remember when its nameplate proclaimed it to be the “World’s Greatest Newspaper” and also once called itself “An American Paper for Americans”), it still has a touch of arrogance in its view of the Chicago area, particularly the way in which it ignores the inner city to the benefit of the outermost suburban areas.
The Tribune’s shortcomings can only be fulfilled for Chicagoans by having a news product produced by a competing news organization – one like the Sun-Times. Of course, the reverse is true. I wouldn’t trust the Sun-Times alone to provide news of the Chicago area. We need both papers, in addition to the suburban dailies that each zero in on a portion of the Chicago area and give readers a third (or in some places, a fourth) choice.
For those who believe web sites or web logs are an improvement over newsprint and can fill the information vacuum that will open with the decline of the Sun-Times, I respectfully disagree.
I have never seen an Internet operation that could handle newsgathering in the way a newspaper can. Most web sites consider themselves a way of distributing content that was generated for some other entity. Even sites like Salon.com or Slate.com, which try to write their own exclusive stories, generate little compared to what a respectable newspaper can do.
Many so-called news oriented web sites would instantly go out of business if they had to start paying the actual cost of generating news and content for themselves. The Internet business model is predicated on being able to leech content off of someone else.
Even this site is little more than a few news headlines from the Chicago newspapers, offered up alongside my “stellar” analysis and commentary. It merely supplements the newspapers, and would be pointless if not for the news people whose work is no longer adequately compensated by newspaper revenues.
So I wonder at times what would happen if the Internet fan’s wildest fantasy were to come true, and newspapers actually died off. Would web sites also die off because they can’t generate the kind of revenues from those annoying ads we all try to ignore to cover the cost of filling their news hole every day? Would the Internet literally become good for nothing besides cheap porn in the privacy of your own basement?
Is journalism destined to become the province of groups that assume the financial losses of publishing a newspaper or website in order to spread their perspective on the issues? It’s possible.
Newspapers such as the Washington Times and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review have never come close to breaking even financially. They continue to exist only because they are owned by business entities more interested in promoting conservative causes than in trying to intelligently cover news.
While that may please the vocal minority who these days are filling up Chicago newspaper website comment sections with cheap shots that the Sun-Times is dying a deserved death because it is too liberal, it would not be for the benefit of the masses.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Here are specifics about the latest in the continuing decline of the Chicago Sun-Times. http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=27709 I know some of the journalists who received layoff notices Thursday. They are all very talented news people.
For those interested in buying shares of the Chicago Daily News, click here. http://www.scripophily.net/chdaneinil.html
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