Gutted by Money Men, Chicago Newspapers Circle the Drain
By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet. Posted February 20, 2008.
Buyouts, incompetent leadership, and a lack of reader support have all but destroyed Chicago's newspaper industry. In Mike Royko's town, it's been a while since you boarded a bus or train at rush hour and met the "newsprint curtain." In its day, the wall of newspapers spread-eagled in front of intent readers was such an institution that poet Allen Ginsberg satirized it by poking a hole in his paper and peering through.
Nor do most Chicagoans wake up anymore to the Chicago Tribune or Chicago Sun-Times with their cornflakes. Or end the day with the Chicago Daily News and a martini in their easy chair. (Who remembers easy chairs? Martinis?)
With its tail between its legs, the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, other newspapers, WGN television and the Chicago Cubs, went private after a $8.2 billion buyout engineered by local real estate tycoon Sam Zell.
Bedeviled by a $1 billion tax bill from buying the Times Mirror and the Los Angeles Times in 2000 -- it was a taxable sale rather than a restructuring says the IRS -- the Tribune Company is now owned by an S-corp ESOP employee stock ownership plan which makes "selling for parts" difficult in the near future since it pays no corporate taxes.
Not that anyone's happy. This month the Los Angeles Times lost its third editor since the sale, James O'Shea, a Tribune Company lifer. It has also lost publisher Jeffrey Johnson and two editorial page editors since the Tribune takeover. .....(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/77102/