Tribune Corp today filed for bankrupty, citing its irrelevance cash flow problems, and strangely enough I received a free copy of today’s Chicago Tribune on my stoop this morning, whether by error, human design or divinely-inspired serendipity I cannot say. It went right in the trash, after a brief glances at the headline revealed one article bemoaning the lack of Hispanics in Obama’s Cabinet (apparently the nation isn’t past obsessing over race just yet), one noting that parking rates in the People’s Republic of Chicago will soon quadruple,  and another breathlessly counting down to Inauguration Day (42 days to the White House!), an event I’m fairly certain they did not herald with such enthusiasm eight years ago.Â
While I grew up reading the Trib (remember that strange and distant age when you couldn’t get news from ubiquitous computers?), I can’t help enjoying a bit of schadenfreude that even as they celebrate the election of the man they worked so hard to put into the Oval Office their entire business paradigm is being obsolesced.Â
Meh. I really only miss the sports page.
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Next: the New York Times.
Nah, we’ll probably always have a New York Times. It’s too good a paper, as often as it’s disgusted me the last few years. I still will rarely intentionally link one of their articles, but I know one day they’ll get competent management one way or the other.
In the meantime I’m a little sad to see the Chicago Tribune go, as it’s the better of Chicago’s big papers. But as I see it, the rise of the digital age basically means what we need are probably a dozen or so news sources that cover things nationally and internationally on the old school model. And by "new sources" I mean television, radio, and text all; maybe a dozen or sources to do that. Regionalized and specialized news will otherwise be where the game is.
It’s still a few years away, but not too many; deadtree is a dead format.
The Chicago Tribune has stood for little more than nothing since the death of Colonel Robert R McCormick, its long-time and most important controlling influence, in 1955. Along with all of Chicagoland, I grew through childhood and the coming of adulthood in the shadow of that man’s thunderous and rigid spirit.
Hard-core right winger? Dedicated isolationist? Idiosyncratic to his very core? He was all of that and much more. But above all, he stood for immutable principles of governance, economy and civic affairs.
Did most of us Chicagoans of that era disagree with some of this stances, including some that — seen in retrospect — where not so outrageous as the conventional wisdom then held as truth? Yes, indeed.
But Colonel McCormick and the Chicago Tribune were seen even by people who feared and hated him and his newspaper as the rockbed of an unshakeable set of core values that truly bespoke the upper Middle Western states.
Along with the rest of America, I laughed along with Harry Truman that morning the HST held up a copy to the Chicago Tribune, with its banner headline proclaiming, after the 1948 presidential election counts were in:Â
"DEWEY BEATSÂ Â TRUMAN"
Because we all do wishful thinking, and in that respect, the legendary publisher of the Trib was no different from the rest of us mortals.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
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