Mary Schmich and Steve Chapman are gone as well. I’ve been a subscriber to the Trib since the late 80s, although I went down to Sunday only last year (digital the rest of the week). I’m done now. It’s like when a restaurant starts hurting for business - you can improve the food and keep the regulars and hope to grow based on quality or you can go with cheaper ingredients and wonder why nobody comes anymore. They didn’t even reduce the cost in an attempt to offset the reduced value. I hate to see them go down this way but they’ve dug their own grave.

Edit: I don’t normally read her column but Heidi Stevens as well.

_________________
“How do you get to be president and you’re stupid?” Donald J Trump - 4/10/25
When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace turns into a circus. - Turkish Proverb

Was great when writing about Chicago corruption. Should have stayed with that instead of trying more national stuff.

_________________

They've been bottoming out for at least the last twenty years and I don't think they're done. It's quickly getting to the point where there will be the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and a bunch of "newspapers" that are about the size of a restaurant menu.

Yeah, these losses are tough. Tribune still breaks a lot of stories with their investigations, but who knows how much longer those will be funded.

I’ll probably hang on to my subscription till Paul Sullivan retires, but after that, all bets are off.

I have been a DH subscriber since I left the nest 25 years ago. I delivered it for five years as a youngster.

I went digital only two years ago. The physical paper either came late or not at all. Their digital addition technology is solid. But the paper is crap. I am lucky to find two articles worth reading on a daily basis.

In any case, I started getting these “please come back” subscriber postcards last December. That was the one year anniversary of moving to all digital. I realized the paper never charged by debit card for another year, and they cut staff so far, that there is no one left to eliminate my daily access. So I get the digital addition for free now. And while I feel bad, the paper is not worth much more than zero.

_________________
Hawaii (fuck) You

It's hilarious how easy the Chicago papers made it to get around their pay walls.

_________________
“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

The Herald used to be like $20/month delivered. It was up to about $80 when I went all digital for $99/month. But the quality was in perpetual decline. I do not even know who are the beat writers for the baseball teams anymore. It is a different guy every day.

_________________
Hawaii (fuck) You

Rosenthal is leaving as well:

https://twitter.com/phil_rosenthal/stat ... 13184?s=21

_________________
Not a mult.

The Sun-Times is going to outlast the Tribune. Didn't see that one coming.

_________________

In name only. They sold their soul years ago.

_________________
“How do you get to be president and you’re stupid?” Donald J Trump - 4/10/25
When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace turns into a circus. - Turkish Proverb

I don’t understand why they’re all leaving. Was the buyout offer super generous? We keep hearing how these jobs are tough to come by.

_________________

John Kass was the issue. So the Tribune should be fine now.

_________________
Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

Betting some of these people are delusional enough to think they can take some cash upfront to walk away from their job and start a podcast or newsletter where they can really give the straight dope the People On Twitter are clamoring for and come out on top.

The consistent theme was that the Tribune was purchased by a hedge fund who is notorious for cost cutting. I’m sure the thought was better to take the money and run rather than dealing with lower salaries and a poor work environment.

_________________
“How do you get to be president and you’re stupid?” Donald J Trump - 4/10/25
When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace turns into a circus. - Turkish Proverb

The buyout terms were very generous. Somebody like Zorn will get close to a year of salary and still be able to write freelance somewhere. Heidi Stevens hinted that she may still get published in the Tribune occasionally, but as a freelancer. Different cost center for the Alden number crunchers.

The best buyout offer I ever saw was when IBM's stock price got cut in third back around 1993. They offered people:
- 2 weeks salary per year of service
- 5 years of extra service time towards their pension, which at 30 years was 100% of their final salary plus 100% of their health benefits.

They were a client of ours, we were helping build a two day education course they could give for free to their best customers in a particular vertical market. I happened to be at one of their facilities for a three day trip when it kicked in. Day 1, everybody was there as an employee. Day 2, 40% of the floor was gone. Day 3, they were all back again as contractors making 2x per day because they were not getting benefits. Except they were getting their pension (1x salary plus insurance) and their buyout (1x salary). These fuckers were making 4x salary for that year. And Wall Street loved it.

_________________
"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

Sounds similar Chet to what i saw at Ameritech in the late 90's on a smaller scale.

_________________

- 2 weeks salary per year of service is still pretty standard. That is what I received when I get whacked last year.
- Pension bridging or and kind of bonuses are long gone and that's no longer done. Most companies are long done with pensions as it is, but it's pretty uncommon to add anything there these days.

_________________

People at Ameritech were getting launched on Friday with up to 2 years of free everything, and coming back on Monday with 18 month consulting gigs at $75 to $110 per hour.

It was sheer lunacy on the part of SBC

_________________

_________________

Growing up I always got both papers. Sun Times I was with politically, liked Trib Sports better.

Like most of America, I havent bought or even read a paper outside of stories on Wash Post and NYT.

They have kinda dominated. Was not a fan of Kass, seemed predictable with his far right wing opinions.

To be fair, seems on twitter only person I see on the Trib is a guy named Rex Huppe? Seems like a very left clown.

Any moderates in Chicago? I mean any?

i always felt the sun-times was apolitical, the tribune was a republican bastion.

times have changed. sun-times masquerades as a newspaper and the tribune has definitely got caught up in identity politics. the internet destroyed print media. i sold hundreds of sunday papers on the weekends in the early 80s. no other way to get news, coupons and t.v. guides.

i had always preferred the sun-times sports. of course, i'm talking 80's-90s'. i remember when the national made it's debut...the gamblers felt reading it gave them extra insight. regardless, the national folded fairly quickly. the best barometer that tells us readers want local, not national.

if you found kass' columns predictable, what do you think of wash post and n.y. times stories?

it's a paradox that the general population is less informed since local reporting moved to the more widely available medium of the internet

_________________
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

I don't mind that Rex Huppke is a liberal. Roger Simon is a liberal and his column was good. The problem with Rex Huppke is that he sucks.

_________________
The Court will accord substantial deference to the government's immigration policies, particularly those that implicate matters of national security.

Yes

_________________

compared to the early 80s?

the public is much more informed about developments in the gay, trans and illegal immigrant world. the media is also flushing out all of the racists. nobody needs a t.v. guide anymore. you couldn't view the kardashian sex tapes on page 6 of the tribune. the internet has brought pluralism and multi-culturalism to the heartland.

It just occurred to me how important the Sunday paper was, starting with the t.v. prevue (?). Which never got out of the family room, unless my mom wanted it.

_________________
There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

Hell had no fury like my dad if that guide was lost.

absolutely. i had a newspaper stand. i couldn't keep up with the amount of senior citizen liars.

back then the trib and sun-times played some type of bingo game with numbers and letters on your t.v. guide. this opened up a manic demand for more t.v. guides, to increase your chances of winning. i'd stuff the papers myself and make sure each paper had a t.v. guide.

"hey kid, i bought a paper from you and there was no t.v. guide in it".

back when i worked in a convenience store, the early edition sunday paper that came out on saturday was always nearly fought over by the older customers. no real news was included in the early edition, mind you. And sundays was no different, just updated scores and weather.

and no one ever, EVER bought the last one available, or the paper on top. avoided like the plague

_________________
'Your AT&T Universal Card has arrived'? Oh God, Kick-fucking-ass, I got a Master Card! I don't believe it, man. Life is kinda cool sometimes.

My first job in high school was stuffing Sunday papers. We’d start at midnight and stuff the first edition and then go to Mr Sub or Dunkin Donuts for a bit until the final edition came and finish up around 6AM. All for the princely sum of $3 an hour and all the Sunday papers you could take home. We were the opposite with TV guides, we’d skip adding them because we knew people would complain. That was when Deford was publishing the National, which was a pretty cool sports paper, but no weekend edition.