Nov 19 2008
Relocated: Chicago Media
Monday, January 7, 2008
Chicago Media
So, the other day I was getting some food, and the restaurant had WGN news on. WGN, as in owned by the Chicago Tribune WGN. They made a big deal out of the Sun Times trying to cut $50 million of its operating costs in 2008. They, of course, stressed the 30-something layoffs of editorial staff alone. I’ve always been more of a Trib fan than a Times reader. Because they have better journalism, from a technical standpoint, than the Times, in my humble opinion. Now, I know that television is a different medium. The main difference between TV and print news, however, is that there is less space for content in television. So why make a big fuss about a competitor’s layoff?
Now, I thought that was pretty absurd, but then, I opened Saturday’s Sun Times to the business page, and there is a paragraph (but, in true Time style, the paragraph is more like a book paragraph than a journalistic paragraph, at 19 lines) brief about the Trib CEO’s severence package. Right above a brief on potential airline hikes. Really? Is that newsworthy?
Is the trib CEO the only CEO in the country with outrageous benefits and/or severence package? I don’t think so.
In all fairness, to put my Trib bias aside for a minute, the Sun Times does have a story run on its own troubles.
This brings to mind two things for me. First, the WGN coverage of the Sun Times article (where, by the way, they failed to mention that their station was owned by the same company as the Sun Times’ only real competition) made me understand why there was ever a ban on multiple-media outlet ownership. IT was absurd.
Second, I know that newspaper is losing readers (admittedly including myself) to the internet. I also know that with the Journal and NY Times being available online, the readership loss is probably especially hard on other big-city papers. But do they really need to get this petty? Isn’t there real news to print? Or, instead of bashing their competition, couldn’t that space have been used for another ad, which would have generated more revenue?
Posted by Zach at 3:38 AM 0 comments Links to this post 
Labels: Chicago Sun Times, Chicago Tribune, media, newspaper
