Back to the Previous Tempo
Two weeks later Tempo carried Schoenberg’s gripping yarn under the headline “The Son Also Falls: From elephant hunter to bejeweled exhibitionist, the tortured life of Gregory Hemingway.” It was a classic Tempo feature from another era–the brief period a decade ago when Warren edited Tempo.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But after Warren left, Tyner took a second look at Tempo and thought he saw a potential problem: a handful of graying writers with sinecures who turned in stories when the occasion moved them. “It needed new blood,” Tyner recalls. So in 1994 the Tribune reassigned 7 of Tempo’s 12 staff writers (Tyner wanted to replace them all). The new plan was to rotate fresh writers through Tempo every four months to keep the section vital.
In other words, it was a daily section of a daily paper whose readers saw no daily reason to read it. You can’t be much more damning than that. Warren had no hard research to point to, but conversations and his own “gut feeling” told him Tempo needed to change. He could see that “people weren’t having fun” producing it. “Life’s too short,” he says.
Keller used to write lovely essays on American culture for page one, and you knew she was a columnist because her picture ran with her stories. She’ll still write on culture, but the picture’s gone. Steve Johnson’s still on page one writing about TV, but his picture’s gone too. Those head shots matter to a newspaper person–they prove you’re a columnist instead of a feature writer. “Every bit of brand ID helps,” says Johnson, who E-mailed me his thoughts. “I’m not going to pretend I didn’t love writing the column or that I won’t miss it, but I suspect that there will be other such opportunities. And there’s absolutely no comedown to having wide latitude in TV criticism, which I consider to be, hands down, the best critic’s job at the paper.”
Now under new ownership, the Chicago Free Press will keep publishing. Its president and CEO is David Costanzo, a former mergers-and-acquisitions specialist with Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette. “He has a keen sense of business,” says managing editor Lisa Neff, “and he’s really going to shape us up.”
