News from Chicago

Skip is one of the best people I met in this business. I hope and expect he'll find something he wants to do-even it's pretty much nothing, very soon.

 

Skip is probably the best friend I ever made in this business. He'll be fine because he's Skip. Or as the kid in Cuba called him "Senor Skip".

Mike DeArmond
The Kansas City Star

 

Ah, Havana 1991. "Una mas Hatuey, por favor." Skip was in good form there, too . . . Good times. 8)

 

To Moddy and others making the distinction between buyouts and layoffs, between voluntary departures and involuntary departures:

I know you're doing it to calm those worried about the people whose names have come out. I know that involuntary always is worse (unless maybe it's a wake-up call to someone with modest experience who hasn't completely dug into this career, with time to switch to something better.)

Still, with all due respect, to me it's the difference between miserable and horrible. I've said it before in these parts, the velvet envelope you get in a buyout often is delivered by an iron nudge, with either the threat of layoff (non-union shop) or the hint of really unwelcome duty (union shop).

Ten, 15 or 20 years ago, none of these people would have walked out the door, even with the parting check, before their times. The state of the business and the devolution of ownership from newspaper folks to corporations to private equity to profane, disrespectful lunatics like Zell and his Clear Channel boys has made accepting a buyout the lesser of two really sinister evils.

Sticking around for a retirement lunch, when you leave on your own timeline without the extra pay, always was preferable to this crap.

So I feel bad for all of them.

 

The state of the business has provided this irony:

There really is no dishonor in being fired.

 

apparently, word went out at The Trib that buyouts and severence packages after this round were a thing of the past.

 

So no more golf or college basketball coverage in the Trib? My dad almost blew a gasket when they ran an AP story from the NBA Finals. I imagine this'll be the straw that pushes him over the edge to canceling the paper.

 

Half a dozen family members have gone to Sundays only or no paper at all. Nice job by the town's franchise paper.

 

I was forced to go to no Trib at all (now having to read it online) when they quit delivering around the Midwest.

Read it when I was in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. I miss picking it up in the morning, but now that all of the big names are going, I doubt if I'll read it online, either.

With the Trib buyouts, and the Sun-Times being a shell of its former self, it continues to be a sad time for Chicago newspapers.

 

Another in a long line of corporate suits cutting off their faces to spite their noses.

 

A few more names have popped up in an updated list.

No sports names added. One of the news names I saw was Kirsten Scharnberg, who did some outstanding stuff from Iraq in the first year of the war, and was one of their national correspondents.

Again, explain how buying out talent makes you a better newspaper.

 

The Tribune, in the wake of these and previous buyouts, will be a lesser paper in the most important ways. And since they aren't renegotiating their rates downward -- for readers and, I presume, for advertisers -- they are unilaterally changing the terms of customers' deals with them.

If their only competition for eyeballs was the Sun-Times, they might be able to get away with it. But with the interwebs, cable TV and all the rest, there is no reason for people to put up with this less-with-less nonsense.

Most incredible thing about buyouts is, these papers spend years and decades cultivating and occasionally hyping these people as experts. Then they shed them and expect readers to not notice the loss.