EXTRA: Sox/WGN not radical change

Still the voices, for better or worse ...

For those of you still having fits over this week’s announcement that the Chicago White Sox are shifting their radio broadcasts (for the next three seasons) to WGN-AM, relax.

Yes, that station once spreading the Tribune Co.’s image throughout the nation’s airwaves did develop an unnatural closeness to the Chicago Cubs – helping to bolster their image as a cutesy batch of losers.

... of White Sox baseball

BUT THE REALITY is that in sports broadcasting, it’s really the ball clubs that are in charge. It’s still going to be the voices and personas of one-time White Sox ballplayers Ed Farmer and Darrin Jackson who will be doing the games. It’s still former ballplayers whom the White Sox think are best employed in the broadcast booth, and not on the field as a manager or coach!

Besides, WGN has the history of Chicago in its background – even that part of the history that occurred around 35^th Street and Shields Avenue.

It was long-time Cubs announcer Jack Brickhouse who actually was the voice we find on the recordings of that September 1959 night when the White Sox actually won the pennant (not that he’s to blame for the city officials who celebrated by sounding Chicago’s air raid alarm system).

Comiskey Park on Brickhouse statue

Maybe it should also be noted that the only time the legendary Chicago broadcaster got to do a World Series was that very same ’59 Go-Go Sox ball club that, sadly enough, lost in six games to the Los Angeles Dodgers.

GOING ALONG WITH the tradition of the times, the World Series paired up the lead broadcasters for both ball clubs – creating a Vin Scully/Jack Brickhouse team that many baseball-minded people would regard as a broadcast fantasy pairing; both recipients of the Baseball Hall of Fame's Frick Award for broadcasters.

Besides, the Cubs have been off WGN radio for a few years now. The tie was already broken.

Nobody liked this image

It’s not like the ghost of Ron Santo is going to return from the Great Beyond to become the Voice of the White Sox, just as he spent the final years of his life adding to the image of Chicago Cubdom by being their radio voice.

Now as someone old enough to remember the sight of an aging Santo trying to play infield for the White Sox, that truly would be a dreadful thought. But it’s going to be the same sounds of Sox baseball – only at a different spot on the radio dial.

  -30-

State of the Press: Is being dumped by your owner a good thing these days?

I don’t quite know what to make of the newspaper business these days.

How long until it becomes WGN Tower?

On the one hand, so much of the actual content that fills the airwaves of broadcast outlets and the pages of assorted websites continues to originate with the work done by newspaper reporters.

THEN AGAIN, EVERYBODY seems way too eager to dump on those actual publications.

By dump, I mean literally.

The Tribune Co. has made it clear it wants to get into the broadcast business exclusively – and views its newspapers (including the Chicago Tribune) as a drag on the company.

To the point where they plan to break off the newspapers into a separate business entity – which they will then try to sell off to someone else in the near future.

WE’RE AT THE point where the Chicago Tribune will now have to pay rent for the office space it has occupied for nine decades at Tribune Tower – which probably should be renamed WGN Tower and thought of as the place where the radio and television interests named for the one-time World’s Greatest Newspaper (even though it never was) are headquartered.

For all I know, the Tribune newspaper interests may wind up some day having to rent space in the Willis Tower. Or maybe they’ll wind up getting office space in the same building on the Chicago River as the Chicago Sun-Times?



Will NW Herald be better sister ...

That would be the ultimate tacky joke!

The point is that the current ownership on Michigan Avenue no longer views the idea of a media entity that controls a major metro newspaper, a television station, a radio station with a signal powerful-enough to reach across the Midwestern U.S., a local cable news outlet and assorted other properties as being worth the hassle.

WE WILL GET to the day when the concept of WGN being both the Tribune’s all-powerful television and radio station that bolstered the newspaper's influence will be an alien concept. Future generations will get the same blank look at the concept just as much as the youth of today don’t get the point of how overwhelming Larry Lujack was in his heyday – and probably think WLS-AM always spewed a batch of political nonsense in between its commercial spots.

... to Joliet newspaper than Chicago Sun-Times was?

The times change, and I suppose we all have to adapt with them. Even if it means becoming something that gets dumped upon. Although the New York Times reported a story that speculated the Tribune Co.’s moves to maintain the broadcast properties may wind up hobbling any chance of the newspaper properties’ long-term survival.

Of course, we can always float down the Chicago River just a few blocks to the Sun-Times situation, where officials in recent days made it official that they’re selling off one of the suburban newspaper properties they acquired in the past couple of decades to strengthen the overall company.

Now, they need whatever cash they can get ahold of.

SO THE HERALD-News newspaper of Joliet goes from being a sister publication of the Sun-Times to being the sister of the Northwest Herald newspaper of Crystal Lake and the Kane County Chronicle of St. Charles. All are owned by the Shaw Media company that will take over Joliet. Although it seems Crain’s Chicago Business deserves credit for breaking this story.

Being dumped on by the Sun-Times may be a good thing here, because the sense was always that the Sun-Times company people were more interested in gutting the suburban properties they acquired to bolster the status of the downtown paper.

Now, the Herald-News may wind up with ownership that will care about it as an individual entity. Although whether they’re in a position to build it back up to a publication that can provide adequate coverage of Will County (the county that had the largest population growth during the past decade) is questionable.

Does remembering 'Superjock" make me old?

Could Sun-Times ownership have hobbled the paper to the point where nobody could rebuild it? We’ll have to wait and see.

THERE COULD BE one negative in this (or a plus for the Tribune, depending on how one wants to perceive it). Sun-Times people have claimed they are now the largest-circulation newspaper entity because they were adding in all the circulation of their suburban properties into one mass – and the total came to a figure barely bigger than the Tribune’s circulation.

Could the loss of the 25,000 or so copies of the Herald-News sold daily be just enough to dump the Sun-Times back into Second Place behind the Tribune?

  -30-

A new twist to an old tale – when ball clubs get too close to news coverage

The Boston Globe newspaper has new ownership – it became known this past weekend that the group that controls the Boston Red Sox baseball team is going to spend $70 million or so to purchase the newspaper, its assets and a sister newspaper in the suburbs.

Now some have tried to make much of the fact that when the New York Times bought the Boston Globe, they paid $1.1 billion. Or the fact that the Washington Post on Monday was sold for $250 million. The sale price is significantly less.

ALTHOUGH THAT ANGLE doesn’t intrigue me as much as the idea of just who actually bought the paper. Professional sports and news coverage have always been intertwined, and not just in Boston.

Here in Chicago, we had the ultimate combination of the two entities for the nearly three decades that Tribune Co. included among its assets the Chicago Cubs.

We had many decades worth of conspiracy theories about how the Chicago Tribune tailored its news coverage to bolster the Cubbie-blue image, thereby making it more attractive as a broadcast property carried over Tribune-owned television and radio stations.

A true combination of interests that was appalling to anyone who cared less about the Cubs!

IT’S NOT UNIQUE. Let’s not forget how Ted Turner turned his local Atlanta television station into a cable television powerhouse by carrying Atlanta Braves baseball – making it possible for people who didn’t live near any major league market to be able to watch Major League Baseball games on a regular basis.

And let’s not forget how Rupert Murdoch tried to bolster Fox broadcasting interests with a stint owning the Los Angeles Dodgers.

So the Globe and the Red Sox being business partners? This one is a little different. Because in this case, the ball club is going to be the dominant partner.

Instead of a case where a media property is hoping to bolster itself and its programming options by operating a baseball club, this is a case where a baseball club is going to have say over the coverage that it gets.

IS THE BOSTON Globe about to become a butt-kissing rag for the Red Sox that lives up to the worst conspiracy theories that Chicago White Sox fans have always held about the Chicago Tribune?

The new HQ of the Boston Globe?

I’d hate to think so. Because that is a situation where nobody would benefit. It can only be hoped that the new Globe owners view themselves as Boston people wanting to benefit their community to the point where they see their two business properties as being separate entities.

Because a news reporting property has more to it than a sports section, and it would be pathetic if people wanting to know more about Boston would have to turn to the Boston Herald for a more honest view of what happened in the world – considering that the Herald has its own ideological hang-ups it wishes to live up to.

I have always suspected that the decline of the newspaper medium was going to have consequences that would not be appreciated until it was too late to do anything about it. Many people just don’t comprehend how much the newspaper medium is the one that picks up on stories and does research that gets picked up by news programs on so many broadcast and Internet mediums.

AND WHILE I comprehend that a new generation exists that wants information presented to them on their assorted gadgets rather than the printed page, there are still assets of a newspaper that can be converted over to other information-based mediums.



Globe has headaches no longer at Tribune

The Globe has its benefits, and a $70 million price tag could turn out to be quite a bargain – if they are managed properly. But turning the newspaper into an entity that merely promotes the Red Sox could be what further speeds up the decline of the Globe.

Watching the Chicago media scene all these years, I am convinced that many Tribune people tried to avoid conflicts during that period when the paper was a business partner with the Cubs. But there were many moments when conflicts just couldn’t be avoided, and the paper came off looking ridiculous.

The Red Sox owners haven’t said what they plan to do with the Globe. Let’s hope they don’t bring ridiculous moments upon themselves on purpose.

  -30-

A DAY IN THE LIFE (of Chicago): 10 days to decide on firearms limits

The new law allowing people in Illinois to have permits letting them carry pistols on their person creates an option in which local governments can pass their own laws imposing tougher restrictions on firearms – but only if they act within the next 10 days.

Meaning, we might see a rush of local officials deciding to take up the issue.

ACTUALLY, “RUSH” MIGHT be the wrong word. A “drizzle,” perhaps?

There will be some. The City Council already has said it will take up the issue at a special meeting Wednesday, while several suburbs (Homewood, Highland Park and Elmwood Park, to name a few) are taking on the matter – even though some have considered it and decided to hold off on acting.

The one defining characteristic of this issue is that it is entirely a Chicago-area issue. If there is a municipality in the rural part of Illinois that is considering the issue, their officials are keeping quiet about it.

This actually was one of the issues that Gov. Pat Quinn tried to alter with his amendatory veto. He hated the idea of a 10-day limit on local governments being able to decide this for themselves.

BUT HIS REMOVAL of that time limit was one of the changes that legislators snubbed when they overrode his veto on Tuesday, and set the clock in motion.

Not that there’s going to be any rush of people legally carrying their pistols in public. Cook County Sheriff’s Police officials have said they expect it will take them until early in 2014 to set up the process by which “concealed carry” permits could be issued.

Which also is why I found it amusing that a woman from Whiting, Ind., was arrested last week at the Daley Center courthouse. She tried entering the building with a loaded 9 mm pistol in her purse – and thought her Indiana-issued permit covered it

At least we know now those metal detectors at the courthouse actually work! What else is notable about this glorious metropolis on the shores of Lake Michigan?

WHO GETS THE TOWER?:  Tribune Co. officials said Wednesday they are officially splitting into two divisions. Tribune Co. will now be a company that owns more television stations than any other entity in the United States, while Tribune Publishing Co. will operate newspapers.

Tribune Co. will continue to try to expand and be Chicago-based. While Tribune Publishing is the entity that Tribune Co. will try to sell off.

Nothing really new here. Although it got me to thinking about what happens when the sale takes place. Should we start calling the corporate headquarters on Michigan Avenue the “WGN Tower?”

Because the day will come when Chicago Tribune and WGN (both television and radio) will be separate entities. How long until we get tacky divorce-type jokes about who gets to keep the “house?”

RAMADAN NOW UNDERWAY FOR ALL:  We’re now in that month-long period of Ramadan – the holiest of all times of the year for Muslims. Some 400,000 Chicago-area residents are now in that period by which they fast from sunrise to sunset.

Although it seems there was some dispute as to when Ramadan began this year. Some persisted in beginning Tuesday, while many went along with the ruling of the Chicago Hilal Committee that said Ramadan this year actually began the following day.

Ramadan is set by a lunar calendar, and the Chicago committee was determined to have an actual physical observation of a new moon before declaring the holiday to begin. Although the Fiqh Council of North America said calculations are sufficient, and they calculated a new moon for Tuesday.

Although some Muslims told the Chicago Tribune they think the holiday should not devolve into mathematical calculations and ought to focus on spiritual and mental purification.

SETTING STANDARDS:  Mayor Rahm Emanuel says he’s not disqualifying state Rep. Deborah Mell, D-Chicago, for a vacancy in the City Council – just because the opening is for her father’s seat.

But if she gets that post, it will be interesting to see if Mell’s own views about replacing her in the Legislature are respected. Mell, who went to Iowa to marry her partner, says she’d like to see another lesbian chosen to replace her. She doesn’t want the General Assembly to be left without anyone who openly identifies with the gay community.

Will political officials really be willing to enforce that guideline in picking a new legislator?

Although it should be noted that if a new legislator has to be chosen, it is the committeemen (and not Emanuel) who makes the pick. And it would be Mell’s father, Richard, who would be the committeeman with the most say in the matter.

  -30-

Baseball coming back, even if it's not quite in the same form as we’d like

The Caribbean Series stoked the fire in my belly for baseball, and the fact that workouts are taking place now is keeping the flame a smoulderin’ to the point where I can say I can’t wait for April to come about.

I can't wait to see the scoreboard again live, even if its fireworks and lights display isn't anywhere near as intimidating as the old ballpark's scoreboard was. Photograph by Gregory Tejeda

Forget “March Madness.” I want to get out to the ballpark this season to see live baseball being played professionally.

AND I’M NOT up to waiting ‘til July or August (the latter of which is when the New York Yankees will make their annual visit to Chicago). A part of me wants to sit in the chill of April and see a ballgame. People who live in the south or west don’t know what their unnatural weather cycles are depriving them of.

All of this has me scouring any information source I can find for any tidbits of information about what 2013 and beyond will be like.

Which is how I happened on Monday to stumble on a pair of stories that make me realize just how much times change, even if certain elements remain in some form.

Coasters may be completely obsolete next year

Take the Chicago Cubs, who in the minds of so many Chicagoans are aligned with WGN, both television and radio, to the point that whenever a Chicago White Sox game airs on Channel 9, I know of some people who rant and rage that the Sox should go find their own station and stay off the Cubs’ station.

SO HOW ARE those people going to react come next season, IF it turns out that the Chicago Tribune got it right on Monday when they reported there’s a chance that the Cubs will not renew a contract that goes back to 1948. You’ll probably have to have some form of pay television in order to see the Cubs bumble their way through another season.

I wouldn’t pay good money for it, but I know many people who would.

The Tribune report indicates that Cubs ownership is being vague and refusing to say much of anything, other than hints about how they’d like to have their own station to broadcast their games and market their product and bleed dry for as much money as they could get.

Heck, when Tribune Co. owned the Cubs, they turned them into the big programming source that they made so much money off of – no matter how bad the ball club played.

NOW WE’RE LIKELY to get a Chicago Cubs’ channel, similar to the Yankees and their YES Network that gives people all the baseball-related programming they could ever dream of.

So no more bothering with Channel 9, which may well revert back to what it once was – a place where you could watch all those “Andy Griffith Show” reruns – except that in the modern era of television programming, there are many channels broadcasting Don Knotts’ “Barney Fife” character carrying his lone bullet.

Not that this is the only change. It seems some fans don’t have a clue that being at a ballgame can be a risky adventure.

For the Times of Northwest Indiana newspaper reported Monday about an Indiana Court of Appeals ruling in favor of the Gary Southshore Railcats (the ball club owned by the family of one-time Republican politico Al Salvi) – who were being sued by a fan who on Opening Day in 2009 was hit in the face by a foul ball that went into the stands.

MOST FANS I have ever known are aware of that tiny print on the ticket that says you should be wary of foul balls – which are rarely softly arching pop ups that you can catch barehanded.

While I sympathize with the fan who had several bones in her face fractured and also suffered some vision loss, I’m not surprised to learn that the Hoosier court rejected the lawsuit, saying that baseball fans ought to know enough about the game to protect themselves.

Although it has me wondering if the day will come eventually when some ballclub is going to feel compelled to extend the backstop screen from just behind home plate to all the way around the foul lines.

I was once in a minor league ballpark in Peoria (not their current stadium, but the old one) where there was such a screen, and it gave me the sense that the fans were somehow being caged in away from the playing field.

CERTAINLY NOT THE ideal for someone who has shelled out good money (and significant amounts, if it is a major league ballgame) for the live experience.

Perhaps the people who want such an environment are the ones who ought to stay home and watch the ballgames on television. Although they’d probably wind up filing a lawsuit claiming they can’t find the new Cubs’ television channel amongst the hundreds of channels that already are out there.

  -30-

And da winnah is, Da Sun-Times?!??

I can remember being a brand new reporter-type person back in the late 1980s and talking with some of the long-time (and now retired, and in some cases, deceased) veteran reporters of the Chicago Sun-Times when they would speculate on their publication’s fate.

Whose news box will prevail?

They seemed to think back then that the Sun-Times would be a product of the 20^th Century that would no longer exist once we passed over into the new millennium.

YET NOW WE’RE one-eighth of the way into the 21^st Century. All that transition into a new millennium talk seems like a life-time ago. And yet, we still have the Sun-Times with us – albeit in printed editions that now only get as fat as the paper used to be scrawny in the old days.

And I wonder how those old Sun-Times vets would react to not only seeing the newspaper still alive, but to the Crain’s Chicago Business report on Friday that indicated the Sun-Times ownership was talking about purchasing “assets” belonging to the Chicago Tribune.

Of course, Crains’ report was purposely vague as to what was meant by “assets.” That could mean anything from some websites that deal primarily in advertising to some of the newspaper or broadcast properties that Tribune officials are expected to try to sell off later this year as part of their way of becoming a financially-solid company.

Could we really get the day when WGN (either television or radio) is a sister property of the Chicago Sun-Times? Would they take on the monicker of the World’s Greatest Newspaper that those broadcast call letters perpetuate?

OR WOULD WE really get an effort by the Sun-Times to purchase the Chicago Tribune itself?

Sister newspapers published in coordination with each other? Or just buying the Tribune so as to fold it and eliminate the competition?

 

Whodathunk a quarter of a century ago that the great winner and new heavyweight champion (or are modern newspapers bantamweight instead?) of the Chicago newspaper wars would be the Sun-Times? It’s a thought that leaves me staggering with a headache.

Talk about an unpredicted outcome!

NOW LIKE I stated before, the report in Crain’s was purposely vague because Sun-Times officials are being vague. In fact, it may well be possible that this is just cheap trash talk by Sun-Times executives who want to make the Tribune types wet their pants a bit at the very thought of becoming merely a part of Wrapports – the Chicago-based company that now owns the Sun-Times and always engages in high-minded talk about how they’re going to turn the newspaper reporting assets to bolster a digitally-based media company.

This may be the ultimate evidence of talk being cheap.

Although it also has me wondering what will become of the high and mighty Tribune – whose cornerstone of the gothic tower along Michigan Avenue reminds us that it has been in place since 1847 and probably thinks it will outlive the city of Chicago itself!

Sold to the Sun-Times? Or is there anything to all that rumor-mill rumblings that Rupert Murdoch might actually consider purchasing the newspaper.

HE IS THE man who already owns the Wall Street Journal (along with his New York Post) and who allegedly believes that having the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune all aligned together would give him the basis of a truly national news brand in this country.

Which was the reason that the Tribune types themselves bought the old Times-Mirror Co. a decade ago – thinking that having the Times and Newsday in New York’s suburbs would give them a combo in the top three U.S. media markets.

Would that be enough to get a whole slew of Tribune types to jump ship and try to hook on at the Sun-Times – to avoid having to work for a Murdoch-owned publication? Or have times changed enough that no one would care that the Tribune would shift from being the sister newspaper of WGN-TV to being the sister publication of WFLD-TV (which originally was created to be the television counterpart of the Sun-Times).

I don’t know what the outcome of all this is going to be. Although it won’t surprise me if whoever does wind up taking on the Chicago Tribune will have some vision similar to the Sun-Times types – taking all those reporting assets and archives and trying to put them to use on the Internet.

THERE IS VALUE in all that information – no matter how many advertising-oriented dinks want to view the news “content” of a newspaper as space-filler in between the girdle ads.

About the only thing I am sure of these days is whatever the outcome of the Tribune (and Sun-Times) ownership situation turns out to be, it will be some status that – back when I was a beginning reporter-type for the now-defunct (and sorely missed) City News Bureau of Chicago – none of us could have dreamed of a quarter-of-a-century ago.

  -30-

No news ‘anchor’ won’t bother me

On the one hand, I once remember hearing about someone in management at a news organization complain that the company would be so profitable on its current revenues, “if only we didn’t have to pay for reporters.”

On the other, I got a kick out of reading Variety, where television executive Lee Abrams saying, “we’re trying to get away from Barbie and Ken sitting behind a desk chit-chatting with each other with their nice teeth.”

ABRAMS IS THE senior vice president and chief innovations officer for Chicago-based Tribune Co., who is developing the idea known as “NewsFix” – which I would guess is meant to be the 21st Century take on a newcast format.

It is being mocked because Abrams’ format calls for no news anchor. There won’t be some perky blond paired up with a man (either an older white man to give a sense of experience, or a minority to provide a sense of ethnic balance) sitting behind a desk while giving us introductions to stories that were written by someone else.

We have had jokes that it will be an empty set. No people. Maybe even no reporters. The perfect cost-efficient newsroom run by nobody.

Actually, what it seems like is that the “anchor” will be reduced to just a voice, who will read transitions from story to story, which will largely consist of video clips. It seems like the idea of actual people putting together the news is what he wants to eliminate.

VARIETY (THE LONG-time newspaper of the entertainment industry) says Abrams in part is trying to create a newscast that replicates the experience one has when they log onto a computer and use the Internet to try to find out information about events taking place in the world today.

They skip about and go from story to story, often from site to site – incorporating various news organizations. The “anchor” that puts these stories into a coherent picture is the person’s own mind because they have a certain logic as to why they look for one story, then try to find something else they think is relevant, then perhaps stumble onto something unexpected while looking for yet a third news item.

It sounds like chaos, but I’m sure officials are figuring it will appeal to those people who want to think they’re not relying on anyone else’s news judgment but instead employing their own to make sense of the society around them.

If anything, it will take more news judgment on the part of television stations that use this new format to make the randomness of an Internet news search appear to be organized, rather than truly confusing to people.

IT JUST WON’T give people who work in television news broadcasting as much face time.

I’m sure that will be a blow to some professional broadcasters who went into television because their ego is assauged by the thought that everybody can see their face and that they have the potential to become mini-celebrities.

Yet I have to admit I don’t care.

The emphasis on the visual, no matter how trite, is why I never got into the idea of working in television news. There are times when I find the Barbie-like look of the female anchor that has become a part of every news equation these days to be a distraction from the content of the news copy she is reading.

WE DO RUN the risk of turning news shops into places where deep, booming baritone voices prevail, and those who can’t sound like the “voice of God” while reading the news will get weeded out of the news business – no matter how much they comprehend the copy that is before them.

There is one thing to keep in mind. Tribune Co. broadcasting may be Chicago-based, but we’re not going to see this on WGN-TV any time soon. Variety reported that the new format will be tried on the company’s station in Houston, and may be considered most likely for stations that are lingering at the bottom of the local ratings.

WGN has too much going for it these days to be tinkered with, whereas a “going nowhere” television station has nothing to lose if the reality of NewsFix turns out to be much more bizarre than the rhetoric we have heard.

If anything, it might be something that Tribune Co. would try in Chicago if they owned WBBM-TV, the station that last week told us their latest change is to bring back “Bill and Walter” as the anchors of one of their evening newscasts – hoping the masses will think it is once again the 1970s when Channel 2 News was the undisputed leader in local news broadcasting.

THAT COMPARISON DOES strike me as having one similarity – Channel 2 is going back, in part, to “the voice” of Bill Kurtis (whose voice is so prototypical anchorman-ish that he narrated the 2004 film “Anchorman” starring Will Ferrell) to help give their news credibility. Just envision if WBBM were to try a NewsFix using Kurtis as the voice of their narration?

A half hour of Kurtis giving us the news, minus one minute for a Perspective read by Walter Jacobson – giving us his latest take on how big a goofball Rod Blagojevich has become.

Sound ridiculous?

It certainly couldn’t be any worse than what the people of Houston will soon be subjected to when they tune in to KIAH-TV.

-30-

News business is news-worthy

This is a response to a Chicago-area resident who is confused about why so much attention is being paid by area news organizations to what seems like the endless rounds of job layoffs taking place at the city’s newspapers.

His opinion was expressed earlier this week on the WTTW-TV program “Chicago Tonight,” when he wrote a letter to the station expressing disgust with the amount of coverage that had been given in recent months to the business problems confronting the Chicago Tribune, the Sun-Times and other news-oriented publications.

HE SEEMS TO think this is a case of reporter-types letting their egos run amok, thinking that their professional livelihoods are somehow significant enough for everybody to know about.

This letter-writer would prefer it if NO airtime or column inches of newsprint were devoted to the inner workings of newsgathering organizations (or should I say business entities that sandwich a few inches of “news” in between the steadily declining amount of advertising pages they manage to sell).

That attitude bothers me, and NOT because I am a person who has devoted my professional life to the gathering of news and analysis out of some belief that helping my fellow citizen better understand the world around them was somehow a worthy contribution to our society.

I have always been of the belief that the problem with the news business is that it is poorly covered – organizations that are more than willing to devote time, money and staff to uncovering the sleazy business dealings of other corporations in their community suddenly adopt all that secrecy they ridicule others for when the business is themselves.

I THINK WE need more intelligent reporting about why newsgathering organizations with significant staffs and traditions and capabilities to dig up more information than any other are suddenly being challenged economically.

I, for one, want to know why the newspaper thinks the way to achieving long-term financial solvency is to slash the size of its product – even though the advantage newspapers have over other forms of news media (and often do nothing to take advantage of) is that they offer more space and can go into more detail on any given story.

Now if one wants to argue that constant stories about layoffs (60 more editorial staffers will soon depart the Tribune) tend to sound alike and become just another meaningless number, that is one thing. Few publications are doing a decent job of covering the news about themselves.

We need to get more thorough reporting and explanations about the advertising situation, which is the real bulk of the newspaper industry’s problem.

TOO MANY COMPANIES that used to look to those full-page newspaper advertisements and ad inserts as the only way to reach a mass audience now realize that too many people (when they buy a newspaper) reach in and throw away those inserts before they start to read the newspaper.

By comparison, increased advertising through the Internet gives companies the option of tailoring their ads in a way that will focus specifically on the people they are trying to reach – much more than can be done with a newspaper where an insert has to be provided for every single copy of the paper, regardless of whether it is sold or if it is sold to someone who does not fall into the economic bracket the advertiser would like to reach.

There’s also the simple fact that Internet advertising is so much cheaper – it can be a few bucks for each ad, which has the potential to be seen around the world (although some businesses gain nothing by having their ads seen outside the local community).

Instead of thousands of dollars to publish that full-page advertisement (tens of thousands if one is going for one of the national-scope newspapers such as the New York Times), it can be a few hundred overall, with individual websites receiving a miniscule amount of the financial cut.

FOR EXAMPLE, THIS weblog recently became part of a network that is selling some advertising. That display ad near the top of the right-hand column is rather elaborate by Internet standards (compared to those links one can click on to buy reduced cost Viagra or similar products), yet my share of the proceeds for the first week that ad was on the site came to a grand total of $0.54.

While I realize that figure will increase in the future and that there are some websites and weblogs with much more significant readership than I have managed to achieve in seven months of operation, I am not alone in making puny dollars from selling advertising on the Internet to support their coverage of the news.

That is what people need to understand when they think it is totally acceptable for websites to replace newspapers, and why I think it is bad for one to think there is too much coverage of the news business’ financial problems.

If newspapers really are going to shrivel up and die (like some of the Internet’s biggest proponents desperately want to believe), I think we the consumer of news and information need to know why.

SINCE IT IS not likely that anything will fully replace the newspaper of old as a product that can generate the kind of income that can support a full news-oriented staff, we need to know why the kind of information we can get is going to become less and less available.

And in the future, when newspapers (and the more prominent websites, I believe) are supported financially by organizations that think it is in their best interest to run their own publications, we need to know that the types of news we will be getting are the stories that promote the interests of their publisher.

Some people might not have a problem with that concept, provided that the publisher/ideologue is honest about what causes they are promoting. I for one think the news business should be covering this saga.

It is one that affects all of us.

THERE’S ONE OTHER question that is popping into your minds. My answer to it is, “No.”

The current setup where one who wants to find out something about the business dealings of a newspaper needs to “read all about it” in their direct competitor is not adequate.

Having to rely on the Chicago Sun-Times to tell us why the Tribune is going to (again) slash its staff to bits and shrink the thickness of the overall newspaper is not right. Nor should we have to rely on “Mother Tribune” to inform us about all the flaws of “The Bright One.”

The business partisanship gets in the way of producing a clear account of what is wrong. Each paper is going to be more than willing to over-hype the flaws of the other.

IT’S LIKE THE situation in the recent past when the Sun-Times’ financial problems were coming up in court hearings related to former owner Conrad Black. The Tribune devoted endless amounts of space to letting us know every obscure detail about the paper.

In retaliation, the Sun-Times took advantage of an ongoing situation involving the Tribune Company and the Spanish-language sister newspaper to Newsday, whose officials were involved in some scandalous detail involving over-reporting of their circulation.

The Sun-Times’ coverage of New York Hoy’s circulation scam read too much like retribution for every nasty word the Tribune wrote about Black.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: More than 1,000 jobs have been lost by Tribune Co. newspapers (http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/printStory.pl?news_id=30355) across the United States during the past year.

WGN-TV’s general manager lost his long-time secretary in a recent round of staff cuts at the company’s (http://www.suntimes.com/business/feder/1079043,CST-FIN-feder29.article) media properties.

Tribune Co. is looking towards developing an advertising product that would send classified ads (http://www.tmcnet.com) to an individual’s cellular telephone, in hopes of generating the kind of revenues needed to keep the company’s publications afloat financially.

Can Newsday offer Sun-Times a lesson?

So does this mean that the fate of the Chicago Sun-Times (provided that its ownership doesn’t ultimately decide they can get a better tax break by folding the paper than they would a sale price by selling it) is to be a sister company to Comcast Cable?

If Tribune Co.’s recent sale of Long Island-based Newsday is any indication, it could be.

THE BIGWIGS WHO run the nationwide information and entertainment conglomerate from the gothic tower on Michigan Avenue recently dropped their interest in Newsday from controlling to just over 3 percent.

Newsday is now controlled by the people who run Cablevision, which is New York’s answer to Comcast – controlling what people get to watch on television and charging excessive rates for hundreds of channels of mediocre programming.

Yet to listen to Cablevision executives, they see Newsday as a brand name that they can leach off of in putting together news-oriented products on the Internet, and perhaps on television.

“Newsday TV” – a cable television channel that provides intensely local news programming unlike what is offered by the network owned-and-operated stations in New York City. That is one vision of what could become of the newspaper property in the New York suburbs that Cablevision has just acquired.

SOMEHOW, I DOUBT they paid over $600 million just so they could operate printing presses on Long Island.

For those of us who wonder the fate of newspapers, this is probably it.

The simple fact is that newspapers do have tremendous archives of material (unless they were short-sighted and turned it all to mulch). They provide more detailed accounts and better information than any other form of news media.

So it would make sense that people would want to turn that credibility developed over decades into a news product that can be used on other mediums.

TELEVISION IS THE most obvious – trying to feed off the credibility of newspapers, combined with the video skills of the broadcasters who also are losing viewers to people who’d rather sit in front of a computer screen (or, in some cases, would rather have a little audio and video snippet fed to their cellphone) to get a story.

I can see it happening in Chicago too.

Tribune Co. was always big on pushing the concept of “synergy,” getting their newspaper people to take their local television stations into account when rooting around for stories, while also getting their broadcasters to undertake projects that promoted the image of their local newspapers.

The big problem with Tribune in recent years wasn’t that synergy itself was a bad concept. It may have been that Tribune was trying to do too much in too many places, all in its attempt to create itself into a national media company.

THERE IS A natural tie between the Chicago Tribune and WGN (both the radio and television versions) that allow for Chicagoans to accept the notion that they work together. It is why the concept of ChicagoLand TeleVision seems logical – even though poorly executed at times.

Such a bond has never existed in Los Angeles between the Times and KTLA-TV or in New York between Newsday and WPIX-TV. (Whether Tribune could have succeeded if they had never sold off the New York Daily News is a different debate for another day).

Cablevision, which already provides television programming and sports in the New York area, would have a logical tie to a New York newspaper. The fate of newspapers that manage to survive in some form is probably to develop as many local ties and offshoots as possible.

If this means the day will come when Tribune Co. is nothing more than its Chicago properties, that is probably a good thing. People in the news business have long accused Tribune Co. of taking on actions that hurt their properties across the nation because they were more concerned about propping up the Tribune and WGN.

PERHAPS A CHICAGO-focused Tribune Co. (instead of having to worry about how the Los Angeles Times’ long-standing financial difficulties will drag down the company as a whole) will figure out a way to succeed. Perhaps Los Angeles-oriented ownership is best for the Times.

And perhaps Cablevision (a company that knows nothing of newspapers but understands the New York market) can figure out the way for Newsday to exist long-term.

So that takes me back to the original concept of this commentary – what about the Sun-Times?

If that news-gathering entity is to have a long-term future, it is going to be in the form of a business entity that wants to develop a Chicago-specific news product.

THERE ISN’T GOING to be some out-of-town newspaper tycoon with deep financial pockets who will come in and take over the Sun-Times out of some deep moral concern for the information needs of the people of Chicago. Newspaper tycoons only spend money on publications in markets with no competition.

Its future owner is going to be someone who wants to peddle information about Chicago and who thinks that the brand name “Chicago Sun-Times” still carries a lot of weight and could give instant credibility to any new venture.

Some people think the Sun-Times could follow the lead of the Capital Times newspaper of Madison, Wis., which recently converted itself to a once-a-week newspaper whose primary focus is now (http://www.Madison.com/tct/) its website.

I personally see this vision of Comcast deciding it can make money off a Chicago-oriented cable news channel (they already do Comcast Sports Chicago, channel 37 on many cable systems across the Chicago area).

THEY COULD HIRE up a new crew of kid broadcasters and put together something on the cheap, like they do with the local news interview inserts that run every half hour during the day on CNN Headline News.

Or they could use the brand and resources of the Sun-Times to give themselves some instant credibility – creating the image of more in-depth news than that offered on the conventional local television stations.

In fact, we could someday see the Chicago Newspaper War converted into something that is not fought on newsprint – Tribune-owned CLTV takes on Sun-Times/Comcast, with the two channels trying to convince the news consumers of this area that they offer the best, most-detailed report.

Both would probably also have web sites, and that would be where the archives of the two newspapers could be found – digging up the actual news accounts to provide the first-hand reports of when the significant events of Chicago took place.

SUCH A COMBINED Internet/broadcast combination is likely the future of our local news media. If Comcast isn’t the company to do so, perhaps someone else will take on such a venture.

Some will argue that it is just inevitable that Chicago will become Tribune Co. turf. Their products will control our local news reporting. I disagree, because I know there is a significant portion of the Chicago news consumer who (for whatever reason) wants nothing to do with Tribune and ignores its properties. There is a large enough market for a competitor. Money can be made by a sharp operator, particularly if they can combine newspaper expenses with their other media operations.

Of course, we’d have the inevitable battle over what to call such a new venture. Sun-Times/Comcast sounds right, but I’m sure there are those who would insist on putting the corporate Comcast portion first – just like it became AOL/Time-Warner when those media properties tried a joint venture a few years ago.

I must admit that while I will miss the feel of newsprint (and the concept of stories laid out on big pages in easy-to-read formats), I find such joint ventures a much more pleasant concept of the media future than the idea of the newspaper legacies dying out altogether and news reports falling into the hands of corporate types who think the First Amendment exists solely to let them sell advertising at overpriced rates.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Cablevision officials are trying to figure out how Newsday can help their (http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzdola135684073may13,0,6390185.story) media properties become a larger company as a whole.

It will take drastic measures to prevent the brand name of the Chicago Sun-Times (http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-fri-earnings-may09,0,5984608.story) from joining the ranks of the Chicago Daily News, the Herald-Examiner or the original Chicago Argus – namely, that of defunct newspapers.