NOTES FOR INK-STAINED WRETCHES: Sun-Times Co. newspapers ought to split

The parent company of the Chicago Sun-Times has hired a firm to help determine just what is a reasonable price to ask when it puts itself up for sale later this year. Hopefully, this means we’re another step towards the breakup of the Sun-Times from all the suburban newspapers it has acquired in the past two decades.

For the record, Lazard Ltd. is studying ways to make the company more profitable. But stockholders of the Sun-Times Media Group have made no secret of the fact they want to be bought out – thereby ending their 14-year-long stewardship of the Sun-Times and imposing the fifth sale of the newspaper in the past quarter century.

THE COMPANY THAT once was an international media conglomerate known as Hollinger and run by now-convicted Conrad Black would love it if someone would come along and buy the whole package intact. My understanding is that the federal government will hit someone with a large tax bill if the company is sold off piecemeal.

That tax hit is the reason why the Chicago newspapers were held on to for so long, while other pieces like the London Telegraph and the Jerusalem Post were sold off years ago.

But I’m skeptical that anyone is going to want to take on the nearly dozen daily newspapers along with Pioneer Press, a Glenview-based company that publishes nearly 70 editions of a weekly newspaper.

Is this attitude the future for the Chicago Sun-Times? Illustration provided by Radar.

FOR THE INDIVIDUAL newspapers and the people who still read them, a break-up would be a good move. The concept that the Sun-Times will no longer be a sister newspaper to the SouthtownStar, the Herald-News of Joliet or the Naperville Sun (just to name a few titles) makes so much sense because the idea that these papers were considered all one unit with the Sun-Times was always an awkward fit.

Those newspapers often circulate in distinct portions of the Chicago area with little overlap. Yet the story-sharing measures that Sun-Times management has tried to impose on its papers has often resulted in newspapers that are filled with junk that is not directly relevant to the people actually reading any one edition.

They also often produce newspapers that look too similar to each other. There are times when the only difference between the Sun-Times and the SouthtownStar (both of which I read daily – I still miss the Star Newspapers, which I wrote for some twenty-something years ago) is the page size. Story selection is virtually identical.

THE LAST THING a newspaper should ever be is generic, and that is what has happened to the newspapers owned by Sun-Times company. If sold off, newspapers like the News Sun of Waukegan and the old Gary Post-Tribune (which now is headquartered in Merrillville, Ind.) will get back a sense of freedom and likely will come to view their ownership under Sun-Times as an aberration – if not an outright absurd era.

Splitting up the company makes sense from a business standpoint because the smaller circulation titles are likely to attract more attention from buyers. Smaller newspapers are often preferred because they are less expensive to publish and require less gross income in order to achieve a profit.

That’s why the Sun-Times itself has an uncertain fate. Anybody who buys it will have to go into head-to-head competition with the Chicago Tribune. Unlike a small market newspaper where there is no direct competition and one does not have to pay as much attention to editorial quality, anybody who buys the Sun-Times is going to have to come up with a serious plan to improve its quality.

Quality means money being spent. Most newspaper companies these days are run by corporate drones who don’t have a clue how to boost quality or increase circulation. The Sun-Times is not a challenge for the weak-hearted.

NEVERTHELESS, I CAN’T help but think there will be a buyer.

Somebody with a desire to try to influence Chicago’s economy, culture and politics is bound to be willing to take on ownership of the Bright One. After all, buying the Sun-Times is going to be significantly cheaper than trying to buy the Tribune if (and when) real estate developer Sam Zell ever decides to put that newspaper on the auction block.

Some people remember Yusef Jackson, the Chicago businessman whose father is a prominent civil rights leader and whose older brother is a member of Congress. His business partners made an effort years ago to place a bid to try to purchase the Sun-Times.

IN MANY WAYS, he is exactly the kind of person who would be likely to purchase the Sun-Times. Getting the newspaper now (possibly at a “bargain” price due to the business trauma it underwent from Black and his ilk) would give Jackson and his business partners a sense of Chicago clout apart from what he gets from family ties to his father and brother.

What kind of newspaper would Jackson and his business partners publish?

They own one other media property – the pop culture magazine “Radar.” That publication lists Yusef D. Jackson on its masthead as the “chairman” of Integrity Multimedia Co.

THE MAGAZINE OCCASIONALLY does political reporting and media criticism. It has a harder edge than the now-defunct “George,” the political fluff magazine published by John F. Kennedy Jr., before his death in an airplane crash.

But celebrity coverage seems to be its purpose for existing. The one time I plunked down $3.99 for a copy, I got a magazine whose lead story was about Hollywood stars who have had cosmetic surgery.

The cover for that issue? It was a picture of movie actress (and former Mrs. Tom Cruise) Nicole Kidman, altered in ways to make her appear to be more well endowed than either Dolly Parton or Barbie.

What other stories are taking place these days in the realm of news media in Chicago and the Midwestern U.S.?

THE WHOLE (media) WORLD IS WATCHING (Madison, Wis.): I have never been to Madison, Wis. I’m not a fan of the University of Wisconsin. Something about the Wisconsin Legislature seems too “goo-goo” for it to be taken seriously.

But I have always been a fan of the Capital Times newspaper, in part because it is one of the few newspapers in this country that deserves to be called “liberal” media. I mean that as a positive.

Now, everybody in the news racket is going to be rooting for the news types in Madison, who in mid-April are going to quit publishing as a daily newspaper. They will continue to publish weekly supplements in the competing Wisconsin State Journal (similar to how the now-defunct Star Newspapers still publishes a twice-weekly tabloid section in the paper formerly known as the Daily Southtown).

BUT THE IDENTITY of the Capital Times will continue to exist as a website. The company is putting its efforts into maintaining an Internet presence that will provide detailed news coverage of the Wisconsin capital city/college town.

Success in Madison could be the light at the end of the dark tunnel that many newspaper companies are staring into these days. If they fail to be profitable enough, then we have to hope that the folks at Google accept the fact they’re going to have to start paying people to generate quality content.

After all, what good is a search engine if the web sites they’re searching are filled with nothing but junk?

‘WORLD’S GREATEST WEEKLY’ RESURRECTED: The Chicago Defender this week officially began its new publishing schedule. It now comes out only on Wednesdays.

The paper has a similar look and feel – even though at 48 pages it was 20 pages thicker than the final “Daily” Defender published Feb. 8. At first read, the paper has significantly less syndicated junk. I only noticed a couple of Associated Press features and photographs.

Of course, it is still the same small staff. It looks like their reporters are going to be worked until they drop – unless a serious hiring binge upgrades the newspaper’s talent pool.

One plus. The headline of the first weekly paper was “World’s Greatest Weekly,” which was the newspaper’s motto back in the old days when it could legitimately claim to be one of the best weekly newspapers in existence. Despite the fact that it doesn’t literally fulfill that slogan, I’d like the Defender to keep it. It is a throwback to the paper’s glory days and could be a motto to inspire the staff to achieve greater things.

NOT EVIL, JUST LAZY: Reporters who fabricate stories or make up quotes are not evil, just lazy. I have never made up a story because reality gives me stories far more bizarre and interesting than anything my mind could imagine.

But I’m not terribly offended by the Medill School dean (that’s Northwestern U.’s over-priced and over-rated journalism school) who is facing accusations these days that he made up anonymous student quotes for a column he wrote for an alumni magazine. The quotes themselves were innocuous. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn Dean John Lavine was trying to clean up some quotes to make it more clear what the students meant to say.

In reality, there are times when that is proper. Face it, many people talk in a semi-literate manner (and write even worse). I have always believed the nastiest thing I could ever do to somebody was to literally quote what came out of their mouth.

If Lavine should have done anything different, it would have been to lose the quotation marks altogether and just paraphrase the quotes in his own words. The student journalist who wrote the column in the “Daily Northwestern” newspaper that exposed the questionable quotes thinks he has a story of a journalism dean acting unethnically. Actually, all he has is a piece about a writer who wrote a dull puff piece.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: The process of selling off the Chicago Sun-Times to a fifth owner in the past quarter century (http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=28222) is proceeding. Whether it will remain connected to various suburban newspaper properties is less certain.

“Editor Emeritus” sounds like it ought to be an academic position. But the Capital Times could lead (http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/271540) the way for many newspaper companies to continue to exist long into the future.

The “World’s Greatest Weekly” is back (http://chicagodefender.com/view.php?I=439) in Chicago.

Here’s the student columnist who started the whole debate about the journalism professor (http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticle&ustory_id=fef115ac-93d3-4f9e-b4d5-f8b8f0176809) who may have made up quotes for a column.

Chicago "Daily" Defender, R.I.P. -- 1956-2008

I want to believe the death of the Chicago Defender as a daily newspaper is a good thing. This newsboy hawks the Defender back in the newspaper's glory days. Photograph provided by the Library of Congress collection.

Now that it is reverting back to a weekly publishing schedule (on Wednesdays), the potential exists for a thicker newspaper, one that has longer, more in-depth stories than the current product and whose reporters truly dig into the collective lives of Chicago’s African-American community.

It would be a shame if the shift to a lesser publishing schedule allows the newspaper to dwindle down to insignificance. If that turns out to be the case, then we have to debate whether we would be better off if the newspaper would just die.

The Defender dates back to 1905, but it has only been a daily newspaper since 1956. At its peak, it published Monday through Thursday, and had a weekend edition that came out on Friday. In recent years, the newspaper cut costs by reducing itself to editions on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and weekends.

The newspaper’s editors say they expect the new Defender to be a more substantial paper that could run between 48 and 60 pages, compared to papers like the one published this week Wednesday, which only ran 28 pages and only had seven staff-written stories in the entire paper (four of which were written by the same reporter – Wendell Hutson).

THE REST OF the newspaper that day was filled with syndicated junk produced by the Associated Press (Ugh!) and the National Newspaper Publishers Association.

The Negro press of old used to play a significant role in holding together the African-American community in this country. At a time when the white press diminished (if not outright ignored) the contributions of black people, it was newspapers like the Defender that gave black people a sense that their accomplishments actually meant something.

It also was the black press that for many years agitated for the need to end the Jim Crow policies of segregation that split our nation in two.

To this day, the Defender still pushes for racial equality. The top two items in the Defender platform are, “Prejudice and racism in all of its forms must be eliminated and destroyed,” and “Racial profiling and police brutality must be removed from police practices.”

But the Defender of today (and the newspaper it will become in the near future) is far from the significant news organ that it was back in the first half of the 20th century – back in the days when the Defender (as a parody of the Chicago Tribune’s “World’s Greatest Newspaper” slogan) billed itself as the “World’s Greatest Weekly.”

THE THING IS, the Defender may not have been exaggerating when it made that claim. The newspaper used to have a national edition that circulated across the southern United States. Black people in segregated communities were able to read the paper and see the image of a better life in the north, particularly in the Second City.

The Defender was an integral part in inspiring the “Great Migration,” by which southern blacks came up north on the Illinois Central railroad, boosting Chicago’s black population from about 40,000 people just before World War I to about 1 million by 1950.

The newspaper went out of its way to detail the evils of segregation, particularly the ways in which lynch mobs were not a rare southern practice. It also was the Defender’s sportswriters who were among the leaders in putting the pressure on Major League Baseball to integrate itself – a move that finally occurred in 1947 when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers.

But that recitation of fact does not do the newspaper justice. One has to read the power of the prose that ran in the Defender back in its glory days. One of my favorite books is a copy I own of “Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender,” in which several of the Harlem writer’s columns (his critics slandered him as the ‘poet low-rate’) for the Chicago-based newspaper are collected.

The graphic details of segregation and the humiliations that black people had to endure as just a routine part of their lives makes it clear why the African-American population gets worked up over so many slights that white people would prefer to think of as petty.

ONE HUGHES COLUMN particularly catches my attention. On Sept. 18, 1943, he wrote about the disgust black people felt because of the difference in treatment Southern white people applied to them as opposed to dark-skinned Latinos.

He tells the story of a woman who was denied food service on a train, once it ventured south of the Mason-Dixon line into Virginia, although stewards admitted they could have served her had she been of a Hispanic ethnic background.

“How dare you refuse to serve me? How dare you ask me if I am Spanish? Spaniards may be served in this diner, may they? But not an American citizen buying war bonds and paying taxes and sending relatives to fight in Europe for Democracy!,” Hughes quotes the woman as screaming at train stewards. I can picture the scene in my mind, filled with emotion. It is a clear anecdote as to why black people of a certain age might not view Latinos as allies.

The Defender of recent decades has petered out into a neighborhood paper. Its circulation area is select black neighborhoods on the South and West sides, along with suburban towns south of Chicago that in the past decade have developed significant African-American populations.

Now there’s nothing wrong with neighborhood papers. Some of them are well written and do a good job of digging up stories about their tiny communities that might otherwise be overlooked.

IN SOME WAYS, the Defender is no worse (or skimpy) a newspaper than a publication like the Marion Daily Republican. The paper in that Southern Illinois city can easily be just as small and as overloaded with wire service copy as the Defender on any given day.

Both newspapers employ tiny staffs filled with young kid reporters who are willing to work for a year or two at low pay, before moving on to a better paying, more ambitious job.

So long as that is the situation with the Defender, I will be skeptical that any change in format will boost the paper’s quality.

The old weekly Defender employed some top-notch talent and had ambition to try to make the paper the best it could possibly be. The modern Defender is looking for ways to cut costs, and paying talented writers what they’re worth is not in their mindset. In fact, it may very well be counter to everything they are planning to do.

There’s also the problem in that the new Defender may want to think it is the voice of Chicago African-Americans. But the Chicago Sun-Times, in many ways, has replaced the Defender in that role.

THE SUN-TIMES IS the Chicago metropolitan paper with a significant black readership, much more than the Tribune – which prefers to focus on communities with certain higher economic standards where black people are scarcely found.

I have always thought the Sun-Times’ future (assuming its owners don’t just give up and accept death) is to accept the notion that it is no longer a major metropolitan newspaper, and is instead a local paper – albeit one with big ambitions and a glorious history of its own.

Its local community would be the city of Chicago proper. It could be the paper that roots around and “owns” the readership of people who want to know about Chicago itself.

Surrendering coverage of the Chicago suburbs to the small daily and weekly newspapers the company has purchased in recent years is a sensible and practical move.

Doing that would require the Sun-Times to start scouring the inner-city neighborhoods for stories that only the Defender now pays any attention to. It would require the Defender to upgrade its quality for a head-on fight with the Sun-Times.

IT COULD TURN OUT that one of the biggest questions confronting Chicago journalism in the next few years is whether both the Sun-Times and Defender can survive. Or will the success of one paper mean the death of the other?

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EDITOR’S NOTES: The Chicago Defender’s shift to a weekly publishing schedule is explained for newspaper industry professionals (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/ad_circ/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003705058) and for upper-income Chicagoans (http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-thu-chicago-defender-weekly-rosenthal-0131jan3,0,2584838.story).

I actually first learned about the shift from Sun-Times columnist Stella Foster (http://www.suntimes.com/news/foster/764198,CST-NWS-stella29.article), which is the first time Stella has ever broken a story I was interested in. In accordance with long-standing newspaper tradition (by which news about a publication’s business is most thoroughly reported in competing newspapers), the Defender itself has written nothing about the change.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/248.html) and Encyclopaedia Britannica (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9002511/Chicago-Defender) both have entries detailing the significance of the Chicago Defender, while the city commemorates the importance (http://www.ci.chi.il.us/Landmarks/D/Defender.html) of the Defender’s long-time Bronzeville neighborhood headquarters.

The Defender went all-out with its coverage the day in 1948 that President Truman officially de-segregated the U.S. military. Photograph provided by the Library of Congress collection.