Tribune Discovers Columbia Journalism Review

A front-page story in the Chicago Tribune today quotes the Columbia Journalism Review, a publication the Tribune has been pretending doesn't exist for about six months. Michael Oneal, who covers Tribune for the Tribune, quotes CJR executive editor Michael Hoyt in a front-page story announcing that the Tribune will start running ads on its front page. Hoyt, like most journalists, thinks that's a real bad idea.

But Hoyt couldn't get his name in the paper for the life of him six months ago, when CJR ran an editorial urging Tribune to get out of the newspaper business entirely because it "isn't doing much public good."

America's leading journal of journalism accused Chicago's largest media company of doing no public good, and not one word about it appeared in a Tribune publication.

What emerges in this little contradiction is a telling glimpse of Tribune ethics. If Tribune putting ads on the front page is newsworthy enough to quote Hoyt, then certainly Tribune doing no public good is NEWSWORTHY ENOUGH TO QUOTE HOYT.

Apparently there's an upper ceiling to newsworthiness, too. That last item was perhaps just a little too newsworthy for the tender eyes of Chicagoans. So your Tribune withheld it from you.

Tribune Toots a Lonely Horn

This much is certain: if the Tribune doesn't toot it's own horn, no one else will.

The Chicago Tribune is disregarded by most people in its own city and despised by many. It's distrusted nationwide. Its management has been urged out of the newspaper business by the leading journal of the newspaper business. Its business model of journalistic compromise and advertorial synergy has led the whole Tribune corporation to the guillotine, and yet it continues to receive lavish praise from a single source: the Chicago Tribune.

The latest dose comes from Tribune correspondent Charles Madigan, a good company man who wrote this about his officemates in their Tribune Tower cub-icles: "They are great colleagues and very serious about journalism.... The Tribune is an info-pimp free zone, from its snappy bloggers to boring old me."

Very serious about journalism? Did someone say they weren't? The Tribune whitewashed the Columbia Journalism Review's editorial indictment of the Tribune. The nation's leading newspaper journal called for Chicago's largest media corporation to get out of the newspaper business, and Chicago's largest newspaper printed not a word about it. Pretended it never happened. But from quotes like Madigan's, we can see that some in the tower do read CJR, and it makes them a little insecure.

"Info-pimp" is Madigan's term for "people who pick up questionable things and present them as real." Is the Tribune really an info-pimp free zone? Let's see:

1. Tribune repeats Tribune-owned Careerbuilder's advertising slogan -- "the nation's largest online job site" -- in the lede of a news story without scrutinizing or explaining what it means by "largest." The story does not mention that in reality, far more people use Monster.com. Largeness: Questionable thing presented as real.

2. Similarly, Tribune declares Tribune-owned Cubs are still Chicago's biggest baseball team, with no substantiation... the day after 1.75 million White Sox fans appear on the streets of Chicago. Have you ever seen more than 1.75 million Cubs fans? Bigness: Questionable thing presented as real.

3. Tribune sportswriter David Haugh writes that the Cubs are Chicago's most lovable baseball team... while reporting on a popularity poll that shows the White Sox and Cubs in a statistical dead heat. The Sox have since passed the Cubs in that poll. Lovability: Questionable thing presented as real.

4. Tribune reports that the White Sox will not re-sign Mark Buerhle, then invents a controversy when that report turns out to be false. Williams-Buerhle controversy: Questionable thing presented as real.

5. Tribune values Tribune-owned Cubs at $600 million without attribution, ignoring a more widely-circulated Forbes valuation of $450 million. Tribune reporters also forget to mention the Tribune stock in their benefits package. $600 million: Questionable thing presented as real.

To mention just a few.

As Madigan says, "It's better to hang with people who at least have a passion about checking things out." So I guess we should subscribe to The New York Times.

Beleagured Tribune Lashes Out at Internet

Madigan's column closely resembles a Jan. 27 Tribune editorial. Madigan compares reading the Tribune to sleeping with someone you know (if only it were that enjoyable), while the less-sexy editorial asks, "Do you know who's giving you your news?"

The editorial assumes we know who's giving us our news when we read the Tribune, as if the Tower is full of old friends who often meet us for lunch rather than arrogant suits who routinely ignore public concerns about their dubious investments and ethical compromises.

Both the editorial and Madigan's column were inspired by the heinous false report about Barack Obama's education that first appeared in Insight, a Washington Times-owned internet magazine. Since Insight appears on the internet, Madigan and the rest of the editorial board seized the opportunity to malign all new media with a broad brush and assert the reliability of mainstream print media like, um, themselves. From the editorial:

It also is a sign of the growing indifference Internet "journalism" presents on the question of truth. Rumor is good enough. Bibles of blogging are created based on nothing more than rumor.

But Insight and Tribune have a lot in common: both are conservative publications that advance a self-serving political and economic agenda, compromise ethics, pick up questionable things and present them as real. And while Insight appears on the internet, it is published by a print newspaper much like the Tribune. So maybe paper vs. pixels isn't the real issue.

And while the Tribune excoriates bloggers and other pixelated sources of information, former Tribune managing editor James O'Shea is trying to move the Tribune-owned LA Times to the Internet. According to the LA Times, "O'Shea employed dire statistics on declining print advertising revenue to urge The Times' 940 journalists to throw off a 'bunker mentality' and view latimes.com as the paper's primary vehicle for delivering news."

It's all so discordant, isn't it? A bunker mentality is bad... except when the bunker looks like a tower. Bloggers are bad... except for those "snappy" Tribune bloggers. Lying to readers is bad... except when the Tribune does it.

We think the tooters need to work on their harmony.

Tribune's Flaccid Reply to CJR

Some ladder-climbing suit in the tower has crafted a thoroughly bureaucratic response to the Columbia Journalism Review's indictment of the Tribune, a response so phlegmatic, predictable, and tiresome that almost no one has bothered to comment upon it (except Miami media critic Bob Norman, who called it "rather lame"). And I tell you, it wasn't fun reading for us either. It reads like Fred Mitchell on Xanax. But we downed another pot of coffee in the public interest, and waded diligently through the doublespeak. Here's what we find notable:

The suit goes by the name of Gerould W. Kern. He may have been a reporter once but now the etching on his brass nameplate says "vice president for editorial," which is exactly the kind of title you get when you sign a contract in your own blood and hand it to a guy with a pointy red tail.

Gerould offers very little evidence to defend Tribune from CJR's charge that the company's resources "aren't doing much public good." He lists five stories that Tribune newspapers have published that he says represent public-interest journalism. It hardly matters what the stories are. What matters is the number: five.

Last time we checked, Tribune owned 11-15 daily newspapers (depending on what you consider to be a newspaper. Redeye, for example?), 23 television stations, two news syndicates, one radio station, at least one magazine, a last-place baseball team, and a whole bunch of other crap, and Gerould thinks he can prove it's all doing public good by mentioning five stories? I'm not very old but I remember a day when ALL newspaper stories were supposed to contribute to the public good. In other words, there ought to be five of them on the front page of the Tribune every day.

Gerould, being well versed in what matters most in the tower, also attempts to quantify public good through monetary expenditure. Listen to this: "We spend $400 million annually on our newspaper newsrooms and employ 3,700 journalists, both figures ranking near the top of the industry."

Wow. $400 million. That sounds like a ton of money, right? Well, sure it does until you consider that Tribune just gave $136 million to a single guy, Alfonso Soriano, who runs, catches balls, and swings a stick for a living in toothpaste-blue pajamas with a little cap on his head. Soriano's $17 million annual salary rivals what the Tribune spends annually on some of those newsrooms. It's amazing what a little context does to Gerould's argument.

Gerould also thinks we'll be impressed that Tribune opened a new $10 million media center in Washington D.C. last year. Huh, that must be right around the time that Tribune's new $13.5 million bleachers opened in Chicago. Let's see: $10 million for American democracy, $13.5 million for a bunch of drunks. We see where your priorities are.

Finally, Gerould seems to think it favors Tribune that, "in each of our markets, Tribune puts more journalists on the streets to report on public affairs than anyone else by a wide margin."

Well, what do you think, Sox fans? You're Chicagoans. Would you rather have more Tribune reporters covering Chicago or would you rather have more reporters from some other newspaper?

Yeah, me, too. But we've got no choice in the matter. Tribune puts more reporters on the streets in its "markets" precisely because it considers them to be "markets." It's hotly in pursuit of multi-media monopoly in each. And we're pretty sure it's not chasing monopoly for the public good. We think it might just be chasing monopoly so it can liberate more money from the public wallet through its vile "synergies" between editorial and advertising and between television and newspapers.

Gerould really steps in his own poubelle with that comment - "in each of our markets" - because that's precisely the attitude that CJR wants to see banished from journalism. CJR calls for Tribune suits to be replaced by new newspaper owners who "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."

Cities, Gerould, not markets. Cities.

It's sad really. Because somewhere inside Gerould is a shriveled remnant of a young reporter who must have had a facility for sentences and an aspiration to do public good. Because that's what journalists are made of. But like so many who smell the money in that dark tower, the little fella took a terribly wrong turn.

Or a right turn, if it's really just all about the money.

Tribune Staff Hides in Les Nessman's Office

Chicago Tribune employees apparently have convinced themselves that a Columbia Journalism Review editorial calling for the Tribune to get out of the newspaper business because it isn't "doing much public good" does not apply to them. Cubune Watcher Patrick Sheehan tells us Tribune staffers have told him the CJR editorial only applies to "Tribune" and not to "The Tribune."

Patrick wonders if there's tape on the floor in the Tribune Tower where Tribune ends and The Tribune begins, because we can't help but think of Les Nessman, news anchor for WKRP in Cincinatti. According to Wikipedia: "Before approaching (Nessman's) desk, one has to 'knock' on the nonexistent door, attached to the nonexistent walls of the nonexistent office he feels he deserves; those who don't face his ineffectual wrath."

There are many reasons why the wall between Tribune and The Tribune is a fictitious wall, not the least of which involves the Tribune stock in the benefits package that The Tribune reporters receive in return for their souls. In today's Tribune, columnist Phil Rogers confesses to checking his stock prices while sitting in the press box during games. Just what you want in a sportswriter.

There's also that question of "public good." If Tribune isn't doing much public good, doesn't it necessarily follow that The Tribune isn't either? After all, were Tribune to do some public good it would have to do so through institutions it owns, like The Tribune, that interact with the public.

And then there's this: when Tribune fired LA Times editor Dean Baquet, they replaced him with Chicago Tribune managing editor James O'Shea. Notice: Tribune sends Chicago Tribune editor to Los Angeles as an agent for the suppression of journalism.

That's not all. When Tribune fired LA Times publisher Jeffrey Johnson, they replaced him with former Chicago Tribune publisher David Hiller. Tribune sends Chicago Tribune publisher to Los Angeles as an agent for the suppression of journalism.

Ken Reich, a retired 39-year LA Times reporter who blogs on this catastrophe, doesn't see any wall between O'Shea, Hiller, and Tribune CEO Dennis Fitzsimmons. He refers to the three of them as the "axis of stupidity." If there's obviously no wall in Los Angeles, do you really expect us to believe there's a wall in Chicago? I guess so.

So let's just make this perfectly clear: if you walk from one end of the axis of stupidity to the other, you'd better knock on the invisible door in the invisible wall that's somewhere in between.

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.