Out-of-Towners Out of Touch
So I called Smith and asked him to go on. “In a way the Sun-Times could become more trashy,” he mused. “But they should become many other things too. Bolder, taking more risks. Not dumbing down, but respecting where readers are and what readers’ concerns are.” Smith wants Cooke and Cruickshank to take the paper back to its roots. “I believe that the Sun-Times would best be served by creating a paper for and about people who love Chicago,” he said. “There were flashes of brilliance in the history of the Sun-Times that I think are perfect models. Strong investigations–I still have in my archives the [1978] Mirage series. The voices represented in the Sun-Times do not necessarily reflect the people they want to attract as readers–young urban professionals, young people in particular, young urban African-Americans and Hispanics. The day I was interviewed I counted 22 columns in the Sun-Times cover to cover. There are many more voices, but they’re still all saying the same thing. I’m challenging them to find the next generation of Bob Greenes and Roger Eberts. If they want to attract 26-year-old working mothers, they have to find somebody who understands them. Judy Markey [no longer with the paper] doesn’t do it.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Marshall Field controlled the Sun-Times in that era, and Jim Hoge ran it. Both were in their 30s. Hoge believed, as Smith seems to, that a metropolitan daily wears many hats, some of them outrageous. But Hoge and Field both took off in 1984, and successors have come and gone like CTA trains at Howard Street. “I think it’s difficult for any leader to come in,” Smith told me, “because there have been so many people through the door–it’s the ‘same circus, different clowns’ syndrome. We’ve done a considerable amount of research on news culture in the last year and a half, and it sort of reaffirms that there’s a real passive-aggressive culture in most newsrooms. Newspaper culture is extremely strong and extremely resistant to change. And at newspapers I’ve seen that have been through lots of leadership and ownership changes, it’s much more difficult to get things done. When you’ve been through a lot you sort of scar over.”
“All I know,” said Smith, “is that when I talk to people, especially African-Americans, about the Sun-Times, they feel abandoned by it. When it endorsed George W. Bush, people felt they didn’t have an option. They knew the Tribune was going to do that.”
“He said he needed some help,” Longworth told me this week. “Could I help get some of the former staffers, the suspended staffers, to return? I said I’d try, and it worked out. They went back in with none of the issues settled and no attempt to settle them. It was just a one-shot thing to get the paper out.”
Gomez said that when the executive committee heard this “some seemed really appalled, except for the board president, who seemed on Anthony Oliver’s side.”
Since Longworth had said he was talking quietly with both sides, I asked Oliver for his thoughts on Longworth in the role of honest broker. “I don’t know how I feel about that,” Oliver replied. “Dick has been a very strong supporter of StreetWise over the years and a good friend. I think right now, though, this situation has to be handled by StreetWise internally.”
