Fulfilling the public’s “right to know” caused me to freeze my fingers numb

Just about everybody who could find an excuse to justify it made a point Wednesday

Bogart's 'editor' never warned … 

of staying inside, not going anywhere and basically behaving themselves like a lazy slug.

I, however, was running around in the sub-zero freezing temperatures that, when combined with wind chill, felt something more like 50-below – all because of my work going about the business of trying to inform the general public.

… of winter weather reporting hazards

I AM A reporter-type person, willing to go out and seek the truth on a wide variety of issues; all with the thought and belief that I am somehow performing a sacred duty – letting the general public know what is happening in the world around them.

Wednesday’s temperatures, of course, dove down to such historically low levels that – for once – the weather was a legitimate news story.

In fact, I woke up Wednesday to learn that I was amongst the many thousands of people who had lost access to electricity during the overnight hours. Which is when I got a call from an editor-type person – ordering me to check out a tip about power outages.

Artsy images such as this … 

In this particular case, I was able to tell him from first-hand experience that there were places where there was no power.

ME, AND MANY of my neighbors, actually.

Which led me to getting into the car and driving around my neighborhood for a few blocks – looking for evidence that I wasn’t alone in being without power and no one could legitimately write me off as a financial deadbeat who fell behind on the electric bill.

I eventually found a good-samaritan type of person who was outside walking over to check on an elderly neighbor, while his own wife and child were resorting to using the fireplace to keep warm.

It made for a nice anecdote that eventually was contributed to a larger story about wintry weather conditions throughout Chicago on Wednesday.

… and scientific graphs don't adequately convey how cold Wednesday was

BUT I HAVE to confess, I was only out of the car and exposed to the elements for less than five minutes. I wore nice leather gloves that usually keep my hands warm.

When I was through, my fingertips were numbed. It actually took me about a half-hour for my digits to warm up to the point where I was physically capable of typing anything up that resembled news copy.

As I write this, I’m fine physically. There’s no lasting damage – although I wonder how much longer it would have taken before I had suffered some sort of lasting physical damage to my being. And if I could have mentally justified it.

I happen to know that when my father found out what I had done, he let it be known he thought his son was stupid (and didn’t get paid enough) for enduring such a brief moment.

BUT IT IS something I justify doing on the grounds that I’m trying to get the details, no matter how minute, about this historic day in Chicago history. Literally one in which our minus-50 degree figure will be regarded as the coldest ever in city history.

Also one where I lost count of the number of wiseacres who felt compelled to post blurbs on Facebook saying that Chicago was colder than both the North AND South poles. Even though news reports indicate we'll be back up to about 40 degrees by Monday.

Carmelo (left) and Rocco had enough sense Wednesday to 'do their business' within a minute, before racing back inside for the warmth of home

That may be factually true. But it doesn’t change much about the reality that I felt compelled to be outdoors (even though for just several five-minute bursts of time throughout the day) on this day when people who think they’re more sensible than myself made a day of doing as little as possible – and enjoying the likelihood that their employers told them to take the day off.

One final thought; will we remember this day come the summertime when we have one of those 100 degree-plus days and we’re complaining about how much we’re roasting – while thinking that a quickie blast of air from the polar vortex would somehow be a shot of relief.

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Vulgar? What the f@#% else is new!

When I first learned that President Donald J. Trump went about spewing obscene trash talk about select African nations, I can’t say I was surprised.

'Da winnah' among front pages

Heck, when I first heard he was using a phrase related to caca to describe them, my first thought was that Trump was on another one of his nonsensical rants about Mexico. It would have been totally in character with his line of stupid talk.

SO I DO find it a little interesting to learn that Trump, in talking with Congress members earlier this week about various issues related to immigration policy, let his inner potty mouth run rampant.

Seriously, I’ve lost count of the number of newspapers on Friday that felt compelled to put Trump’s vulgar rant on their front pages. If you question use of the word “vulgar” to describe the president, it was in the front page headlines of the Chicago Tribune and the State Journal-Register of Springfield, Ill. – just to name a couple.

Which makes me wonder why people feel compelled to make an issue out of political use of profane terms. Such as the New York Daily News putting “S**t” on its front page Friday to describe what it was Trump felt compelled to say.

Trump 'vulgar' in both Chicago ...

But very few would dream of going that far in expressing what it was Trump said.

IT’S THE OLD-SCHOOL attitude toward profanity in the newspaper – all that talk of a “family newspaper” that we’re supposed to pretend people don’t speak crudely – even when they happen to have crude thoughts and behave in a crude manner.

Which causes us to dance around with the English language when describing what happened. It may be the one time reporter-types think it appropriate to fudge with the facts.

... and in Springfield, Ill.

Personally, I’m of the belief (I’ve argued with editors about this many a time) that if a profane word is really essential to a story, you ought to just spell it out. Otherwise, just delete it altogether. Find other quotes to flesh out copy.

That wouldn’t work in this case, because there’d be no story to report IF NOT for the profanity. The idea that Trump thinks in derogatory ways toward nations that aren’t of a white racial mix is so in character with our president.

I WOULDN’T BE surprised to learn that Trump backers are totally supportive of their political idol for further reiterating he has the same crude way of viewing the outside world as they do.

Which is why the rest of our society is thinking these days what a rube Trump is. The man who thinks his garish casinos, hotels and other overbuilt structures around the world somehow equate with class and sophistication.

The lede story in D.C.

The Daily News, with its cartoonish pile of poo emoji on its front page, may wind up becoming the “collectible” image from this particular moment. Although perhaps it should be noted that the Washington Times and New York Post – a pair of newspapers that pride themselves on providing a conservative spin to the world’s happenings rather than straight reporting – managed to ignore this issue for their own front pages.

Down in the corner in Gary, Ind.

I’m sure they’re spouting high-minded rhetoric about not peddling trash by reporting news based on profanity. Although I’m sure they’d eagerly report the story if it reflected their news biases.

SO WHAT SHOULD we think of Trump’s trash talk – the one that has inspired Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, to name a couple, to respond critically?

Like I’ve already written, he’s made so many hostile comments about foreign lands that my original suspicion was to think this was another Mexico rant. I’m sure he’ll find an excuse to add our neighbor nation to the south to his list – which does include El Salvador and Haiti along with parts of the African continent.

It reiterated his belief that is shared by many of his ideological allies that certain types of people have no business thinking they have a place in our country. A part of me wonders if Emanuel has a point when he compared Trump’s talk to the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler during Germany’s Nazi era when it came to Jewish people.

Because Trump talk certainly doesn’t have anything to do with the “American Way” of viewing life.

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Alternative facts? Lyin photographs? Can’t we see the 46 percent who love Trump know what's best for all of us

I remember back when the government of mainland China held a press conference to publicly announce that all the protests against government back in 1989 at Tiananmen Square never happened.

The Chinese government officially says this 1989 moment broadcast by CNN and the world over never happened. Is that merely a use of alternative facts?

The protests that reportedly involved more than 100,000 people and gave us the iconic image of the man single-handedly standing in the path of a tank?

“PICTURES LIE,” IS what we were told by government officials. The whole tale of people speaking out against their government was just a plot by people who couldn’t accept the wisdom and the success of the Communist movement in China.

It’s laughable. It’s ridiculous and absurd.

Yet it also is what I couldn’t help but think of when we went through the weekend ordeal of being told that Donald J. Trump’s inaugural ceremonies were witnessed by more people live and on television than those of any other president in our nation’s history.

And when people tried to point out the absurdity of such statements, we were told by Trump mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway about the concept of “alternative facts” that will be her political legacy.

CONWAY IS THE one who showed us just how much she, and many of the Trump types who back her, have a touch of Chinese Communist in them. Or perhaps Russian authoritarianism and an appreciation for the strong-arm mentality.

Trump, from 'You're Fired!'...

That may be the reason they feel so at home with the people who run what once was the Soviet Union – which may have given up Communism but certainly still appreciates the approach of telling people when to shut up and do what their told.

Which is so much of what the Trump-type of voters appreciate – the idea of a boss who bellows “You’re Fired!” or barks out other orders, and expects them to be followed.

Now personally, I don’t care how many people actually showed up on the National Mall in Washington on Friday to see Trump take the oath of office.

... to "alternative facts"

THERE MAY BE a point to those people who look at the aerial photographs that compared Trump to the Barack Obama inaugural of 2009 and see that certain areas were blocked out, thereby spreading the crowd out thinner for the Trump event.

Personally, I think it’s mere trivia to worry about an exact figure of how many showed up – just like those people who forever argue against the Million Man March of 1995 by saying there weren’t one million people present on the very same National Mall.

Citing deceptive photographs literally comes down to adopting the Chinese strategy – which is one that no serious person on Planet Earth finds believable.

Just like the concept of “alternative facts,” which apparently is the ideologue response to the concept of “fake news.” Which shouldn’t be a surprise – since the ideologues have made it more and more clear that they’re not interested in hearing anything that contradicts the way they want to view the world.

AS FAR AS they’re concerned, they’re the ones engaging in truth as it should be, and it’s everybody else who’s telling stinkin’ lies – particularly those people who keep harping on Trump opposition or the 65 million who voted for Hillary Clinton, or a few million more who backed alternative candidates.

The fact that only 46 percent of the electorate wanted Trump to be president? That ignores the reality that many of those people who cast ballots against Trump are just ignorant, or had no business voting at all.

 

CONWAY: Alternative fashion?

A majority of the people who actually matter, as the Trump-ites view it, are totally satisfied with the electoral outcome and are looking forward to the coming weeks, months and years in which the real estate developer with the overbloated ego rams his thoughts down the throats of the American people. All for our own good because the 46 percent inherently know what is best for everybody.

Which sounds like a very authoritarian approach of governing to me! Even if Conway tries to justify it as “alternative facts,” which is a concept even more laughable than that outfit she wore for the inaugural speech.

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Facebook for fluff, not the news?

One of the things I did awhile back was set up this weblog so that every single commentary I post here winds up on my Facebook page.

I suspect that for many of the people who have bothered to “friend” me on Facebook, it has nothing to do with them thinking of me as a real human being. It is more that a piece of copy I wrote caught their eye – and friend-ing me is an easy way to see if I come up with something else they consider relevant or interesting, or perhaps just downright silly and stupid!

WHICH IS WHAT I have always considered Facebook to be about – allowing people to indulge themselves in the trivialities of life.

Is Rocco cute enuogh to top Selena Gomez?

Particularly those that can be passed about from "friend" to "friend." I'm pretty sure a thoughtful commentary on my part about the politically partisan nonsense being spewed by public officials in Springfield, Ill., on Wednesday will be less regarded than if I were to post a picture of the dog my father and step-mother now care for.

The story of Rocco, I’m sure, would be more interesting to the Facebook kind of people than anything more legitimate.

It is why I’m not terribly shocked by the announcement Facebook officials made on Wednesday to say they’re making changes in the programs that determine what exactly makes it into the “News Feeds” that wind up on peoples’ personal pages.

THE EMPHASIS IS going to be placed on stuff that people choose to share with each other. The stuff that larger companies, including many newsgathering organizations that think the key to readership is Facebook, will be downplayed.

On a certain level, I get it.

 

Selena tops Rauner/Madigan ...

Facebook was originally created by college students as a social network one step up from the idea of passing messages along to each other via a particular computer’s network.

It wasn’t really meant for larger companies to use as a way of distributing their messages – or in the case of newsgathering organizations as an alternative way of disseminating their product.

I DON’T DOUBT that the most hard-core of Facebook users (the kind of people who are miserable if they’re not on some sort of device that gives them their access) are probably cheering at the thought that all the “boring” stuff will get less priority.

 

... any day of the week!

More cute, fuzzy pictures of kittens or pictures of our stupid cousin Johnny and the time he was foolish enough to stick a pickle up his nose – only to find that it got stuck (and that’s just a hypothetical, my cousin Johnny never actually did that – although he has his own share of silly moments he’d rather not share).

I know in my case, one of the most popular things I posted recently on Facebook was timed for Father’s Day; as in a decades-old photograph of my father with my brother and I.

Which actually fit in with all the other paternal pictures that people felt compelled to pass about a week ago – and will probably stash away for another year until Father’s Day returns.

STASHED AWAY BECAUSE they’re now rendered obsolete by the stories about singer Selena Gomez wearing a denim bikini in pictures on her Instagram account. There’s a reason they call these things “social media;” they’re not about anything significant – just titillating!

So I can’t quite get all worked up like some people are about how Facebook is supposedly undermining the free flow of information that people might need in order to live better-informed lives. That was never their purpose.

Just like anybody who seriously watches “The Daily Show” for news and information is worthy of any ridicule we throw their way – that program is about entertainment and generating a laugh at the expense of those in public life.

And perhaps at anybody who seriously thinks they can rely on their Facebook “News Feed” to give them the “News!”

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EDITOR’S NOTE: How many people got their snoozefest, so to speak, at the reports about how newspapers across Illinois ran editorials Wednesday lambasting all state government officials for the fact that we’re about to begin Fiscal Year Two without a balanced budget for the state? Yeah, Selena’s gams were much more intriguing.

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.

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-

What will be lacking in Internet-only newsgathering organizations is news

I don’t know much about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a daily newspaper that died Tuesday. It has been more than two decades since I read a copy, and even then only because I briefly roomed with someone in college who was from Washington state and who read the paper religiously, preferring it to the top-selling Seattle Times.

But the Post-Intelligencer could very well be at the head of the latest “trend” in news organizations wishing to have a life.

THE POST-INTELLIGENCER will cease to exist, but a website at http://www.seattlepi.com/ is going to continue. Although it is going to be a far cry from the website that currently exists.

Of the roughly 150 editorial staffers who worked for the Post-Intelligencer until now, about 20 will still have jobs producing a website that attempts to provide copy about public affairs and other issues – and will carry on the image and try to be a link to the history of the newspaper.

Some have speculated that Hearst Newspapers (the outfit that long-ago ran the Herald Examiner in Chicago) is using Seattle as a guinea pig of sorts. If they can successfully create an Internet-based newsgathering organization for that Northwest U.S. city, they could try to convert their other papers in cities such as San Francisco and San Antonio into web-only operations.

And if Hearst could pull off such a change in corporate culture, could we soon see other companies trying to do the same thing?

ARE WE DESTINED sometime in the next year or two to see http://www.suntimes.com/ be turned from a website that publishes the content of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper to a website that publishes its own staff’s content?

Is Lynn Sweet destined to become the national political pundit based with a website, rather than a Chicago newspaper?

Or is she, along with many other experienced reporter-types, destined to become high-priced “talent” who are a drain on a fledgling web site’s profitability?

Heck, a part of me realizes that my long-term future in the news business depends on whether I can convert this website (and its sister site, The South Chicagoan) into a moneymaking operation – a long-shot concept, at best.

IN THEORY, IT wouldn’t bother me too much to write primarily for my two websites, or to have reporter-types writing for a web site – rather than for a newspaper. Although I personally prefer reading copy on the printed page (rather than getting a headache reading off a computer screen while also having to click from part 1 to part 2 to part 3 and so on for a story of any length), I have come to enjoy the larger potential audience of readers from more than just those who live in the circulation area who can access a newspaper’s copy off of the website.

The problem with this vision is if these operations are never able to get themselves beyond the level of small-scale outfits that can come up with a couple of stories per day – rather than the dozens of stories on many different subjects that newspapers in significant-sized cities come up with every day.

In short, the reason that large city newspapers come off as more impressive than small city publications is because of the staffing level, and the ability to swamp all over a story of any significance with a thorough staff.

A small paper with a small staff often looks cheap, either because they only come up with a couple of stories at a time or because they demand so much copy from each staffer. The mark of a cheap newspaper is one where there are five stories published on a page – and four of them will carry the same reporter’s byline.

THAT IS WHAT I fear will become of some of these web-only news operations. Will seattlepi.com truly be able to carry on the same legacy as the Post-Intelligencer with a staff barely bigger than some of the most isolated country daily papers?

And to me, part of the thrill of some of the newsgathering organizations that are withering away these days is that they could cover stories on so many different topics. Too many of the websites that do manage to attract any kind of significant readership are focused solely on one subject area.

That’s fine if you’re looking for the news of that one subject. But there are going to be some of the most significant beats that don’t carry over because few people will want to create a website devoted exclusively to that subject.

Even some of the subjects that do attract readership will suffer some. Take sports.

MOST OF THE sports-related websites I see these days give people a chance to rant and rage about how their local papers don’t bother to pay the ballplayers the proper respect. (How dare they actually look for news and refuse to defer to the athletes in question).

It is the newspapers (not even the television newscasts) that actually have the daily beat writers who travel with the teams. I could picture the sports scene in Seattle needing enough people that it would eat up the bulk of that staffing level of “20” that is destined to be the overall staff of seattlepi.com.

For those people who think that devoting less effort to sports is an improvement, I’d argue it is a drawback because it is an element that often drew people into the newspaper as a whole – and in its own way provides a cultural amenity to a city.

Be honest. When the White Sox won the World Series four years ago, it was a moment that will be remembered (fondly by Sox fans and with disgust by those people deluded enough to root for the Cubs) as a moment in Chicago history.

AND THERE ARE people to whom the Chicago Bears are more important to the city image than the Chicago Symphony Orchestra or the Art Institute of Chicago (some of the same people who will more than willingly pay $68 for the crummiest seat in Soldier Field for a Bears game are complaining about the Art Institute’s $14 admission fee).

In its own way, even a newspaper manages to become a cultural perk of a city. People like my one-time roommate (whom I haven’t heard from in more than 20 years) were willing to think of papers like the Post-Intelligencer as a part of their personal character in a way I can’t envision anyone caring about a particular news-oriented website.

Now I will be the first to admit that many of the newspaper industry’s financial problems are self-inflicted. Their desire to be monopolies and control so many markets with so few companies means that many took on debt that left them vulnerable to the economic troubles this country now faces.

So there may be some accuracy in the belief that the newspapers have no one but themselves to blame for their troubles. But that doesn’t mean the lesser level of thorough news coverage that we will have access to (and which no website will ever replicate) won’t be missed – even though most of us won’t realize what we have lost until it is too late to save it.

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