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-

Gee, she produced trivial, meaningless content that’s now on the Internet. Is that really a fire-able offense?

Let me state up front that I do not know Susannah Collins. I have never met her, and for all I know I never will.

COLLINS: Looking for work

And since I don’t pay much attention to professional hockey, I have to confess that I never saw the now-former Comcast SportsNet Chicago reporter-type person at work.

AT LEAST NOT until she had the on-air flub earlier this week (letting the word “sex” instead of “success” slip into her report) that caused people to start paying more attention to her; thereby digging up her work from past broadcast jobs that showed a body of work that was downright trivial.

Some might even call it stupid.

So stupid that the Comcast sports people felt compelled to let her go from her current job – which strikes me as being hypocritical. Because I suspect the “content” that some are now claiming to push the boundaries of sports journalism and good taste (that’s how the Chicago Tribune phrased it) was completely in line with what her former employers expected.

And which is oh so similar to much of what appears on so many Internet sites – the ones that supposedly are providing people what they’re really interested in and why newspapers and other organizations (the alleged “legacy media” that some like to dump on every chance they get) are supposedly on our way out of business.

FOR THE RECORD, Collins used to work for an entity called Middlebrow Media, and was co-host (with another attractive female) of a program called SportzNuts – some of which still exists in video clips posted on YouTube.

As far as I can tell, she did a lot of interviews with “fans” that devolved into double entendres, although the Tribune dug up the video of a parody of a dramatic reading of the sex stories included in former pro basketball player Darryl Dawkin’s ghost-written biography “Chocolate Thunder.”

Quite frankly, I just can’t get outraged – except at the thought of Comcast SportsNet Chicago now thinking it can play all high and mighty and claim it is shocked, shocked to learn that trivialities and nonsense were uttered during a broadcast report.

I have just seen and heard way too much non-news committed by people who want to think they’re journalists to think there’s anything at all unique about this!

HECK, THE SAME kind of people who thought it was so titillating to hear Collins say “sex” instead of “success” that the Comcast video went “viral” are the same types who motivate alleged news outlets to produce the trivialities that Collins (and many others) are producing.

If that is what some people want to fill their minds with, it may well be their choice. Just don’t expect me (or anyone else with sense) to take them seriously.

Because I’m sure these are the individuals who think there’s something legitimate about that study last month by CareerCast.com that claims being a newspaper reporter is the “worst job” in the United States.

Although the report that got to me was one published by Yahoo! That pointed out five “dying” careers – and labeled “reporters” (all, not just newspaper types) who ought to look into an alternative career of “public relations specialist.”

WHAT ABOUT THE fact that if reporters really do die off as an occupation there wouldn’t be any need for corporate types to hire PR spokesmen to deal with reporters? I suspect the kind of people who think that the stuff Collins was doing was fully legitimate are the ones who think there is something logical about this thought.

They’re probably the ones who think that the problem with “the media” all these years is that they have focused attention on “boring” stuff like “news!” They’re the ones who think that Collins’ work was legitimate, and are only dumping on her now even though she produced what her bosses wanted.

Which is why a part of me is hoping that Collins manages to become something other than the “sex reporter” from Chicago and manages to find work elsewhere, other than as someone's public relations spokeswoman.

Does the world really need another PR hack?

  -30-

A bigger Sun-Times? Or diminished suburban press? All a matter of priorities

We’re at the end of the month, which means there’s been a significant change in the makeup of what passes for Chicago-area journalism these days. Whether it’s for good or bad depends so much on where one’s priorities are.

For the fate of the Chicago Sun-Times, I’m sure the moves that were made by the newspaper’s owners are a plus. They shore up what was a shrinking publication by combining all the editorial resources of the various newspapers the company publishes all at one site.

PERHAPS SOME ARE deluded into thinking it’s like the old days, with more people working out of what passes for the Sun-Times building (in my mind, the barge-like building on the Chicago River at Wabash Avenue will always be the paper’s true home) to put together a series of publications that when combined cover the entirety of the Chicago metropolitan area.

But the reality is that those suburban publications are gutted to the point where it is questionable whether they should be thought of as separate publications.

Is the SouthtownStar newspaper really now just the south suburban edition of the Sun-Times? Is the one-time Gary Post-Tribune really just an Indiana-oriented edition of The Bright One (which doesn’t look so bright to me)?

The same could be said for any of the other publications that stretch from Waukegan south down to Joliet, all of which shuttered their offices in recent days. Many editors whose duties could be done by someone else found themselves laid off of jobs.

SOME ARE NOW commuting downtown to do the work that is supposed to monitor communities such as Naperville, Aurora or Skokie.

As for reporters who are supposed to be hitting the streets, they’re now going to be among those expected to work out of their cars going from assignment to assignment.

Some will figure out ways of working from home (Will they get to wear pajamas all day?), or occasionally finding places with a wireless connection from which to actually file copy for the next day’s editions.

Along with the updates that are meant for the same day’s websites.

WHEN YOU THINK about it, where would modern-day journalism be if not for Starbucks? Those havens of free Internet connections are inadvertently going to make it possible for many publications to cut their operating expenses – which is what all of this restructuring is really about.

Now as one who has, on a few rare occasions, filed news stories for publication on deadline from a Starbucks, trust me when I say it stinks. Too many distractions. Way too many other people around. And invariably, you have to fight it out with these java-ed up junkies for a seat and table near an outlet.

Otherwise, you run the risk of your laptop computer losing power in mid-story. Why do I suspect that in the near future, some award-winning piece of journalism – perhaps even a potential Pulitzer Prize – will get lost due to electrical failure!

Although more important than that factor, there’s something about filing copy under such conditions that feels downright amateurish. You’d think that at a time when many publications are struggling to survive, the last thing they’d want to do is impose such restrictions on themselves?

THEN AGAIN, THERE are those who will view the cost-savings as impacting the bottom-line for this quarter. But what will they slash away at the next quarter so as to achieve their financial goals?

 

 

Ultimately, it’s all self-defeating. Because the lack of a home-base will wind up costing those publications stories that you pick up on by actually being there. And as for the surviving newspapers that aren’t a part of the spreading mass that comprises the Sun-Times Media Group, they may find themselves getting lazy if they’re not careful. Because it often is the presence of an aggressive competitor that motivates a newspaper to get off its collective duff and work just a bit harder.

It is why I feel like the suburban press has suffered a serious blow because many of the long-running newspapers that covered their communities are now doing nothing more than propping up the Chicago Sun-Times; enhancing the delusions of their current owners that (when all put together) they’re a bigger and more substantial newspaper than the Chicago Tribune.

One that, it seems, can’t even afford to pay its printing bills to the Tribune – whose presses now create the bulk of what passes for newspapers throughout the Chicago area. Which, when you think about it, is a sad set of circumstances all the way around!

  -30-

EDITOR’S NOTE: As for the film posters, it is little more than some reminiscing on my part as to the public image of old of newspapers and reporting – the pursuit of which still has me hanging around newsrooms in search of what little romance remains. What happens if someone tries to make a “newspaper” film of the 21^st Century? Somehow, I doubt that a film with characters who spend all their time hanging around Starbucks so they can file their copy about press conferences where nobody says anything interesting or relevant would seem all that intriguing to moviegoers.

How reliant we are on computers

If you're one of those rare people who actually checks into this weblog on a regular basis, you will have noticed there was nothing fresh on Monday.

My days-old commentary about the coming of winter-like weather had to suffice for an extra day.

IT IS BECAUSE I experienced technical glitches so severe that I had to break down on Monday and spend some money in order to buy myself a new computer. My now-former laptop computer developed a glitch so severe that I could no longer rely upon it to write copy.

I could still scan the internet. But there were certain letters on my keyboard that no longer functioned properly.

Such as the letter "o," which everytime I hit that key would cause the keyboard to start spewing out an endless supply of o's that would have turned my thoughts into even more gibberish than they already were.

And yes, in this particular case, I know exactly what provoked my 3 1/2-year-old computer to crash. A few drops of Coca-Cola got spilled into the part of the keyboard where O, L and P congregate.

IT WAS ENOUGH to make my old device functionally useless and require me to buy my new HP-brand computer, which came already loaded with Windows 8 -- so I get an upgrade technologically for my moments of clumsiness last week.

As it was, I filed the commentary about winter weather from a computer at a public library -- which isn't something I relish the thought of doing on a regular basis.

Besides, too much of my living as a freelance writer requires that I have a functioning keyboard to grind out copy -- along with a reliable way of transmitting it via e-mail.

Which is a condition I suspect most of us deal with in our lives these days. In fact, it amazed me just how cut off I felt from the rest of the world during this past weekend with an inability to just log on to my laptop computer and check things out.

ADMITTEDLY, I STILL had a functioning smart-phone (one of those Nokia Lumia devices) that allowed me to continue to check my e-mail (which I rely on for work-related messages) and to do limited checking of the Internet.

Although off those dinky little screens, it becomes a pain in the buttocks to try to read anything of any length on any particular website.

As it is, this is the first piece of copy I am writing on my new machine. I'm trying to get the feel of how it functions, and my ability to grind out copy is definitely slowed as I try to figure out how all of this works.

Because this particular laptop computer actually looks more like my smart-phone. It seems like it is designed for people who want to view their machines as something to play with -- rather than just a tool to do actual work with.

THEN AGAIN, I always suspected that I was different than many people (particularly the younger generation) in that I'm interested in the actual content I'm viewing on this machine -- rather than spending time on the machine itself.

If all of this reads like I'm some sort of aging malcontent who can't quite get with the program, perhaps you're right. Because a part of me wonders how much different the next laptop computer I purchase will be from this machine.

It definitely makes me reminisce fondly of the first laptop I ever purchased -- one that I managed to get seven years worth of use out of. That is a statistic that manages to amaze every technological geek I ever encounter.

They seem to be too used to the idea of replacing something every couple of years.

ALTHOUGH I DO have to admit to one bit of pleasure from my new purchase -- the price.

For someone who can be a cheap as I can be at times, I was amazed at how inexpensive these devices have become.

Particularly since that aforementioned first laptop cost just over $1,000, while the second one (the one that died last week due to Atlanta's finest soft drink) cost me just over $600.

This one was about $475 -- and that includes a couple of upgrades to add memory, along with all the taxes that assorted county, state and federal entities added to my purchase.

WILL THE DAY come when I can get one of these overelaborate typewriters (I am old enough to remember when professional copy was typed out on actual paper, then mailed to a publisher via the U.S. Postal Service) for a couple hundred bucks?

Perhaps. But I'm also wondering if the day is coming when the machines will be designed to take my oral dictation and convert it into printed words; including all the "uhs," "ums" and "you knows?"

Somehow, it doesn't sound like progress to me.

  -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-

Bigger and bigger offers us less and less; are we on eve of (news) destruction?

What happens when they all print the same copy?

I can recall a moment a couple of decades ago when I was chatting with my colleagues at the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago.

The topic was the fact that the Chicago Sun-Times ownership back then seemed eager to bolster the company by buying up more and more publications – particularly in the suburban areas.

“A BLOB EATING everything in its path,” was how one colleague phrased it, and it is a phrase that has managed to stick in my mind throughout the years.

It also was the phrase that popped into my brain Wednesday when I learned of the fact that the Sun-Times has another acquisition in mind. Crain’s Chicago Business used its website to report that the Sun-Times is on the verge of buying the Reader – that relic of the ‘60s (even though it wasn’t created until the early 1970s) that for many years was the publication of choice for people trying to find out how to entertain themselves during the weekend.

Because I can recall when that publication ran in four sections; three of which were detailed classified ad sections that could enable people to find all sorts of ways to amuse themselves – both legit and sordid.

Yes, I recall the days when Chicago police on vice details claimed one of the tools they used to bust escort services for prostitution was to check out who was advertising in the Reader.

THOSE DAYS ARE long-gone. The publication is rather skimpy these days. And any “edge” it ever had disappeared when the current owners (who call themselves Creative Loafing) took over a few years ago.

Now, it seems that the Reader will become a sister publication to the Sun-Times, along with other newspapers such as the Post-Tribune of Merrillville, Ind., and the Herald News of Joliet (just to name a couple).

I don’t pay as much attention to those publications as I used to, mainly because the current mentality that runs the Sun-Times is to treat the copy content of all those publications as one massive effort.

Which usually means that the best copy coming from the SouthtownStar newspaper or the Beacon-News of Aurora will wind up getting reprinted in the Chicago Sun-Times.

WHEN I DO pick up those suburban publications (occasionally, I just can’t resist), I am always amazed at the degree to which they are loaded with Sun-Times copy. How many different times can I read the stories of the long-time City Hall reporter Fran Spielman?

And the Chicago Cubs are an equally pathetic excuse for a baseball club no matter which paper’s pages I’m reading the same story in!

Which makes me think that the Reader is destined to wind up becoming yet another part of this copy-sharing initiative. That might benefit the Sun-Times if the weekend entertainment listings now being published in the Reader (which are still better than most anyone else is doing) wind up being used to bolster the Sun-Times’ weekend entertainment section.

To be honest, that section has become so scrawny as to offer little to read. But it will have the feel to me of offering one less publication to be worth checking out.

I’M SURE THERE is a business model one could throw in my face in which all of this makes sense, particularly since every time someone starts up talk about the Sun-Times being “sold,” it always winds up coming out that they’re looking to sell the complete package.

Anybody who had any interest in buying merely the News-Sun of Lake County (formerly of Waukegan) would have their bid pooh-pooh’ed – if not rudely ignored.

Perhaps it allows the Sun-Times people to configure their circulation figures in such a way that they could try claiming recently that they have surpassed the Chicago Tribune in readership (it takes a lot of fuzzy math to make that claim believable).

But to my mindset, it merely means one less publication – and I’m not sure the improvements to the bottom-line make it worth it.

CALL ME OLD-FASHIONED (or a crotchety old fart, or whatever). But the reason I got into the news business is because I am interested (even still) in creating content that is interesting.

Soon to lose identity?

I’m also silly enough, I guess, to believe that “interesting content” means real news about public policy and events – along with the occasional bit of fluff for levity (although I will forevermore detest animal stories, largely because I have written way too many in my lifetime).

We’re getting less and less these days, and it’s not so much that I think we get too much fluff. I think we get too little of anything, which ultimately is what makes these publications seem like we can get by without reading them. There are times when newspapers feel like they’re taking on the Internet mentality of “aggregating” its content from elsewhere – and thinking that someone else will always be there to provide that content/news copy.

Some two decades later, “the blob” continues to devour. Until the day comes when it has devoured everything, and will find itself starving to death.

  -30-

Heirens will bring out our ‘worst’

It was just over the weekend that a thought popped into my head – How long will it be before Bill Heirens pops back into the news again?

Headlines like these swayed sentiment



Back a couple of decades ago, I was a reporter-type who covered the proceedings in which Heirens argued that he “didn’t do it” – as in the slayings of three females (including 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan) back in 1946.

NOT THAT THE authorities were ever swayed by Heirens (who at times has had fairly sophisticated P.R. ‘machines’ trying to build sympathy for him). His efforts to gain release from prison were never successful.

Until now.

For it seems that Heirens is dead, and not by electrocution (which would have been a real possibility back in the mid-1940s) or lethal injection. News reports indicate he was found unresponsive in his cell at the Dixon Correctional Center and was transported to the University of Illinois Medical Center.

He was pronounced dead Monday night at about the same moment that I was driving home from a candidate forum significant only because I can now claim to have met Patrick Thompson (the Daley nephew and grandson who is running for a seat on the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District).

BUT BACK TO Heirens. He’s gone.

So the “event” that I expected to put Heirens’ name back in the news will NEVER happen. Meaning, he won’t make another appeal for release from prison. The Illinois Prisoner Review Board won’t be put in a position to have to reject him again.

Books like these also hurt

Because those officials always made it clear they weren’t about to do anything to seriously consider the claims of Heirens, which at one point tried to blame the fact that he went to prison on the news coverage of the era.

Admittedly, the crimes for which Heirens ultimately pleaded guilty got big attention. They had two visual elements that were so grisly and creepy that readers could latch onto them – the head of Suzanne Degnan being found in a sewer and the message written on a mirror in lipstick that read, “For heaven’s sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”

WHICH MEANT THEY got major coverage as hysterical as anything that Nancy Grace or anyone of her ilk is capable of doing these days on television. The mood in Chicago was angry, and Heirens claimed he entered a guilty plea to avoid being railroaded into a conviction and execution.

I know law enforcement types who say the fact that Heirens was allowed to live at all (even in prison, where he is officially the longest-serving inmate in Illinois Department of Corrections history) is evidence of how compassionate a legal system we have.

Not that anybody is pleased. I have been reading countless comments on assorted Internet sites from people who are seriously arguing that one execution would have been cheaper than 66 years of incarceration.

They want him dead. They want him suffering. I wonder if, even now, there will be people who will forevermore complain that Bill Heirens didn’t get what he deserved – even though he literally is a case where our system locked him up and threw away the key!

INSOFAR AS WHETHER or not he “did” the crimes, I never really knew what to think. I don’t doubt that our society was prepared to behave with a ‘lynch mob mentality’ when Heirens was arrested.

I know some people who were always convinced of guilt by the fact that Heirens’ fingerprints were found at the apartment of one of the dead women AND ALSO on the ransom note that was sent to the parents of Suzanne Degnan.

But I also know there are so many ways in which police can react to public pressure to make an arrest and close a case, rather than worry about trying to get at “the truth.”  It also helped his case that Heirens ultimately became a “model” inmate – the first to earn a college degree while incarcerated who ultimately worked his way down to minimum-security prisons.

A significantly different portrait



He even had a woman, Dolores Kennedy, take him seriously, as she wrote a book (“His Day in Court”) that tried to make his case. I have a copy that I can see sitting on my bookshelves while I write this commentary. But I don’t know who was swayed by her prose.

PROBABLY, NO ONE. The official “mood” of the populace was such that he wasn’t going anywhere, and now there is nothing more that can be done.

When you have modern-day prosecutors comparing your behavior to something out of a Stephen King horror novel (as what happened to Heirens), you probably never had a chance of having your argument taken seriously.

Now if we could only just lay his remains to rest and put an end to this horrid saga – instead of having to listen to the crackpots of our society, who seem to be enjoying his death too much and feeling the need to take one last pot-shot.

  -30-

What will become of News Coop?

I must confess to being one of those people who was making a point of buying a copy of the New York Times on Fridays and Sundays – even if most of the rest of the week the paper was not a “must have” purchase for me.

For those are the two days that the Chicago News Cooperative was publishing two pages worth of content in the editions of the Times that were printed in Chicago.

WHILE I REALIZE that the News Coop has its reporters and free-lance writers out and about every day to come up with copy that fills their web site, there was something about being able to see the printed word that made those two days a little different.

So learning Friday night that the fate of the News Coop is uncertain, it made me wonder what hope there is to assuage those individuals whose judgment of the news business is based purely on a financial “bottom line.”

According to the various reports (although it seems the Chicago Reader gets credit for having this story first), the News Coop will cease to exist in its current form at the end of this week.

Which probably means that the New York Times editions printed this coming Friday and Sunday will be the last to have two full pages of local news content.

THERE IS SOME speculation (reported on by Crain’s Chicago Business) that the Chicago Sun-Times will take on the News Coop, although nothing is definite on that front.

Which makes it likely that this effort to create an Internet-based site that generates quality reporting (some of their stuff, including James Warren’s commentaries, was quite interesting) will continue to exist in a scaled-back form – if at all.

From what I have read, it seems that the New York Times was not willing to consider paying more money for the project, since it did not significantly bolster the circulation levels they achieve in the Chicago area.

Soon to move from the New York Times to the Sun-Times? Or nowhere at all!

Although I can’t help but think that such an attitude misses the point. Maybe they weren’t selling more newspapers because of those four pages per week (actually, three, since a half-page on each day was devoted to local advertising).

BUT I’M GOING to wonder how much lower their Chicago circulation would have been had they not been involved with this News Coop project.

Which is to say that I think many business entities that are trying to make money off of the reporting of news had better come around to realize that there are certain levels of content that are going to have to be maintained if they are to remain viable.

Acting as though there can be continual cuts in quality without hurting the financial bottom line is short-sighted. If anything, people are going to reward those entities that bolster their coverage with their readership (whether it be of the actual printed newspaper or of the Internet sites that use their content).

Of course, it also amuses me to think that the Sun-Times may seriously be considering an effort to use News Coop content in their newspaper. Because I believe their motivation would be to have the News Coop reporters and freelance writers do the actual work of news coverage.

WOULD THAT MEAN further cutbacks of the actual Sun-Times staff – which has become so blended with the remaining staffs of the daily newspapers the company owns throughout the suburbs that I have a hard time telling these days who writes for what newspaper!

Could we get the day that the Chicago Sun-Times would be a few dozen pages filled with stories from a scaled-back Chicago News Cooperative, along with the reports put together by the Better Government Association and the assorted wire services?

That makes it seem like we have a big-city paper trying to behave like one of the daily papers published in many rural communities – where on any given day there might be one locally-produced story published alongside the wire copy that fills the space surrounding the display ads.

Which is why I think it a joke whenever these small-town publishers claim they are somehow more responsive to the needs of their communities. In reality, they are simply putting together cheap products – and feeding off the fact that they have no competition that would reveal just how cheap they are to read.

SO I’M GOING to be watching over the course of the next few weeks to see how this particular situation shakes down, and it is something many of you should pay attention to as well – although I suspect most of you won’t give this a second thought until it is too late.

For the fact is that while many people think the Internet with various websites has already replaced the companies that were publishing the news on paper to be read without having to use a computer screen or any other kind of electronic device, they haven’t.

Too much of the content I read there is merely repeated from the places with actual reporters. The very business models of these entities is based on the idea of not having to pay for content creation (a.k.a., reporting the news).

What happens when the day comes that there’s nobody left with reporters for these sites to pick stories up from?

  -30-

Broadcast cameras in the courtrooms? Will they add clutter or comprehension

This may sound odd, but I am a reporter-type person who isn’t all that enthused about the decision by the Supreme Court of Illinois to let broadcasters have cameras in the courtrooms.



We'll soon get to see the inside of this bulding on our televisions.



And not just because I enjoy the sight of those sketch artists who do their quickie drawings that help illustrate for television newscasts what happened in a courtroom on any given day.

A PART OF me would like to think that those sketches would still be included in broadcast reports of courthouse activity. But I’m sure they will now be seen as a frivolous expense that can be cut.

Now, the courtrooms for the circuit courts throughout Illinois will come across as dull-looking activity with a lot of people speaking in legalese. The talking heads will wind up coming across as legal translators – letting people know just what was meant by all the gibberish they just heard.

If that means that people get a more honest view of what courtroom activity is all about, that is a good thing. And I suppose anything that encourages broadcast news reports to spend more time at the courthouse (many ignore it as much as possible BECAUSE of the fact that they can’t have their cameras inside the courtroom) is a positive.

Yet I’m still not enthused.

BECAUSE I WILL admit that during the times of my working life when I covered courthouse activity on a full-time basis (currently, I do some work for one of the suburban daily newspapers that occasionally sends me to the Cook County Criminal Courts building, the district courthouse in Markham and the Will County Circuit Court in Joliet), one of the attractions of the beat was that you didn’t have broadcast types adding to the clutter with their equipment.

The idea that we’re going to have masses of broadcast people cramming their way into what are often cramped courtroom facilities (I have seen rooms about the size of a master bedroom – minus the private toilet facilities) is going to add to the chaos factor.

For a reporter-type trying to comprehend what is happening in several courtrooms simultaneously, anything adding to the chaos is a potential drawback.

I also must admit to a selfish motivation – I always enjoyed the idea that the courts were a place where one had to turn to the written word for serious reporting.

NOT THAT I think allowing the broadcast news outlets more access to the courthouse will make their efforts more serious.

I’m well aware of the priorities of broadcasting and know that the time limits of a news story (1:30, at most; 30 seconds more common) will mean that most courthouse activity will still continue to be ignored.

It will be only the occasional trial that will draw broadcast news coverage. Most trials will continue to be newspaper (and their affiliated websites)-covered only!

I’m hoping that the circuit courts (the Supreme Court’s decision does NOT apply to the U.S. District courts in Chicago, Springfield or Marion) will follow the lead of the state appeals courts that have had limited camera access.

IN THOSE COURTROOMS, there is a lone camera set up, and television stations use the video provided by the courts themselves.

Which is a problem if the courts decide to start self-editing what they allow television stations to see. What it means is that anybody who thinks we’re getting unfettered access to the courthouse is reading way too much into all of this.

So we’re not really getting as much of a view of the courthouse as some people might think we are – and the pictures don’t mean much of anything without an intelligible reporter-type to explain what they mean. All the more reason to not get so excited about the change that the state Supreme Court announced Tuesday.

CUOCO: Believable as Stacey?



There’s one other reason I’m not enthused about this change. Because many television stations are only going to selectively send their cameras to the courthouses, it could well be that the first trial of any significance that will get broadcast coverage will be the case in Will County concerning Drew Peterson.

PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY watched that Lifetime network film about the case will get to see just how inaccurate (Kaley Cuoco as Stacey strikes me as a particularly large stretch of the imagination) it truly was. Peterson himself calls the film, “hysterical.”

Of course, I think the real Drew will turn out to be hysterical enough on his own.

And now, we’re likely to get to see him in all his glory. Which I’m sure will feed his ego even moreso.

An ego-bloated Drew Peterson might well be the perfect reason why we should question the idea of a camera recording the courtroom activity for all to see.

  -30-

Now, we have to rely on the Chicago Tribune for candidate endorsements

In a way, I can understand the logic of the Chicago Sun-Times, which on Monday said it was going to stop doing endorsements of candidates for political office.

We won’t have the Sun-Times to tell us who they think we should vote for when it comes to Congress, or the state Legislature, or any of the political posts that are up for grabs in the March 20 primary (and, if the policy stays in place) the Nov. 6 general election.

MY GUESS WOULD be that they’re tired of dealing with the letters (both on paper and through e-mail) they receive from people who are pissed that their preferred candidate did not get the paper’s backing.

They want to think they’re appealing to “all” people by doing some reporting on the campaigns (let’s hope they do) and by publishing the questionnaires they normally send to campaigns that many of the lower-level endorsements are entirely based upon.

Supposedly, we can count on the Chicago Sun-Times to give us a lot of raw data to sort through so we can make up our own minds.

Of course, that presumes the “raw data” is, in and of itself, complete and wasn’t compiled by someone with a bias determined to give us a skewed picture of the political people we get to pick from. In short, that it doesn’t make a mockery of the concept like Fox News’ “Fair and Balanced” and “We Report, You Decide” slogans do.

BECAUSE I MUST admit I will miss the endorsements, in large part because they gave us a clue as to just how skewed the newspaper’s perspective might truly be.

Reading through the collections of endorsements to find trends might give us a better clue as to what is going through the mindsets of the people gathering the news. In fact, many of those lesser posts get heavily influenced by which little coverage they get.

One not-so-negative piece of reporting for one candidate could result in his getting the endorsement. Would Napoleon Harris, a former professional football player and Beggars Pizza franchise owner (in suburban Harvey and Orland Park) have got the Sun-Times endorsement for his bid to replace state Sen. James Meeks, D-Chicago, in the Illinois Senate – because the Sun-Times did a lengthy profile about him in their sports section that ran just over a week ago, while the other candidates are likely to receive nothing?

It won’t happen now.

I ALWAYS GOT my kick from reading all the state Legislature endorsements as a whole, and then trying to figure out what kind of General Assembly the paper thinks we ought to have.

Then , we can start evaluating their coverage somewhat to see if “reporting” is trying somehow to back that view, or is somehow trying to report facts. And are they straight facts, or facts that back a certain viewpoint?

To me, the endorsements are more about helping to judge the honesty of a newspaper’s overall report, or letting us know that the newspaper has its own agenda that we ought to keep in mind (such as the Union-Leader of Manchester, N.H., which endorsed Newt Gingrich for president even though that is one place where Mitt Romney truly was the local favorite) whenever we read their dispatches.

It’s less about trying to get people to vote the way you want them to, and more about stating who you are. Which makes me wonder if the signed editorial that appeared in the Sun-Times on Monday ought to be taken as a sign that the Sun-Times would prefer not to do that.

OR MAYBE THEY’RE not eager to deal with the hostile e-mails (inevitably anonymous) that will come from the crackpots who think that everybody who doesn’t believe exactly what they do should be locked away from society.

While I don’t exactly enjoy those people, I figure they come with the territory of expressing an opinion. Because no matter what one thinks, there will always be someone else who completely disagrees with them.

Which is why sometime in a couple of months, most likely the morning of Election Day, I will do my very own “endorsements” on this weblog. Although since this is a one-person operation, what I really will be doing is telling you who I cast my vote for – just as I have done in all the election cycles that have been held since I began publishing this site in late 2007 some 1,503 posts ago.

I view it as a way of letting you know my overall perspective on candidates and how it translates to a perspective on issues. Then, you can take the rest of the commentary published here, and figure it for yourself. I don’t expect anyone to be swayed by who I “endorse.”

I MUST ADMIT one other point. I’m going to miss the idea of an endorsement for the Illinois Second Congressional district Democratic campaign. I was eager to see who the Sun-Times would decide should represent the Far South Side and surrounding suburbs on Capitol Hill.

Would they decide that the “scandals” that have attached themselves to the name “Jesse Jackson, Jr.” (many of which they had a heavy hand in reporting) be so intense that we should send Debbie Halvorson to Congress in his place?

Or would they find a certain verbosity that would allow them to decide that Jesse, Jr. is worth a 10^th term in Congress?

It seems we’ll never know.

  -30-