CJR Calls for Tribune to Quit Journalism

The Columbia Journalism Review is the nation's leading journal covering the Fourth Estate. In its editorial this month, CJR calls upon Tribune to get out of the newspaper business:

Tribune has great resources, but those resources aren’t doing much public good. The company seems less than the sum of its parts. And so, like Rumsfeld, it should go. We’ll take our chances with the gaggle of billionaires who are lining up to buy those newspapers. Some of them may turn out to be pirates (see Santa Barbara). But others will be citizens who understand that those dailies are not mere pieces of an economic puzzle but great living institutions rooted in the lives of their cities.

This is no small kick in the chops. In a profession with no institutionalized accountability, CJR has emerged as journalism's leading voice, moderate and serious, anything but radical. This is equivalent to the Chronicle of Higher Education calling for the closure of a university on the grounds that it no longer serves its students. Think how low a university would have to sink for that to happen: that's how low Tribune has sunk in the world of journalism.

CJR mentions the Tribune's failed strategy to "use its print-TV overlaps to create editorial and advertising synergies." That's reporter code language for the kind of sleaze we've been telling you about. And the endless grievances of White Sox fans prove that even and especially in Chicago the Tribune has failed to be "a great living institution rooted in the life of its city."

Happy New Year, Sox fans. May we end 2007 with another trophy and a newspaper in our city that greets our championship with sincere celebration rather than token celebration that soon turns to envy and denial. And may we begin 2008 with a reformed Tribune or no Tribune. Either will do.