In 20+ years at the Trib, I’ve watched the hubris and greed of multiple generations of ownership make bad decisions without consequences and then line their pockets with the money our credibility earned them as they walked away from the wreckage. 1/ chicagotribune.com/business/ct-bi…
First, we had the North Shore crowd who ran a near monopoly that printed money. They ignored newsroom innovators who told them about a thing called the internet, instead recklessly bought an even bigger newspaper co.—Times/Mirror—with a culture completely different from ours. 2/
When that gambit failed, the old guard told us we’d be saved by the billions of a pirate named Sam Zell. This ushered in an era newspapers and American journalism being treated as nothing more than a financial instrument for corporate raiders and hedge funds to play with. 3/
With the help of Wall Street, the Old Boys made a deal that gave them all 8-figure parachutes and left us with Zell’s utterly upside-down leveraged buyout farce, his crew of geriatric frat-boy slobs, and some new vocabulary words: fraudulent conveyance. 4/
We were bankrupt in a year. Hundreds lost their jobs, Zell walked away from a minefield of litigation having put no skin in the game. The national and foreign bureaus closed. 5/
But the newsrooms soldiered on, doing more with less. Then came the Peter Liguori era and a restructuring that took all of our real estate and cash and gave it to an ill-conceived broadcast spinoff. The deal that would kick us out of Tribune Tower. 6/
That brought us Michael Ferro, an interloper who blurred the lines between biz & journalism, tried to politicize the coverage of his powerful friends, and cut more until revelations he liked tell women entrepreneurs he’d invest in their ideas if they’d remove their clothes. 7/
In a predictably vindictive move, he sold his stake to Alden. And here we are. In all that time, with fewer resources and fewer safeguards (COPY EDITORS) the newsroom has continued to do remarkable work without libel or other major errors. 8/
We’re not the problem. So, when ownership tells us what’s necessary for the good of the company, pardon us if we can’t hear them because our bullshit detectors are exploding. end/
