Save the Trib

I’ve been reading the Chicago Tribune since 1951 when I learned to read. Started slowly, migrating from ‘See Spot run’ to comics, then sports before venturing into the serious issues of Korea and McCarthy. In my news obsessed household I also perused the Sun Times, Daily News and Herald American; the latter two now long gone to Newsprint Heaven. Tho I’ve issues with Trib editorial policy, I still subscribe to it as well as the Sun Times. While the Trib once billed itself as ‘The World’s Greatest Newspaper’, the Sun Times still self describes as ‘The Hardest Working Paper in America’. Hyperbole for sure but both still deserving of my newspaper loving support.

That’s why I’m saddened to learn of the Trib’s takeover by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund famous for buying great newspapers and them gutting them. Check out their evisceration of the Denver Post as Exhibit A. Alden’s 75% staffing reductions at papers they’ve acquired are three times the rate of job cuts at non Alden papers, including the Trib till Alden gobbled it up for a trip to the chopping block like a Thanksgiving turkey. A couple of gutsy Trib reporters with sixty, yes sixty years of experience, recently penned a NY Times op ed on the crisis at the Tribune and appeared on ‘Chicago Tonight’ public television to lay out the troubling saga Trib staffers face from vulture capitalist Alden, which was asked but declined to participate.

Back in the run up to Pearl Harbor, American interventionists slammed isolationist Trib publisher Robert McCormick for his ferocious opposition to any help for the Nazi beleaguered Brits. Their rallying cry was “Millions for defense…but not two cents for the Tribune”. If Alden directors were riffing on that slogan today it would be “Millions for the Vulture Capitalists…but not two cents for the Public Good”.