You won’t find a copy of the Windy City Times at Howard Brown Health Center (HBHC) or any of the organization’s venues beginning this week because the agency is boycotting the publication. more ›

The Tribune and Sun-Times have reached an agreement in which the Trib will begin printing the Sun-Times and seven sister publications in September. more ›

Trust us, a redesign can be a bit cathartic. The Chicago Reader launches an all new redesign of its print edition, with several events across the city to celebrate the relaunch. It's a marked facelift from the tabloid format in which it's lingered in recent years. The glossy covers and stapled pages suggests more of a magazine than a newspaper, which Creative Loafing chief sales officer Alison Draper told Tribune media columnist Phil Rosenthal is intended to make the Reader less disposable than in the days where folks would pick up copies of "The Old Gray Doorstop" and pocket the music section as a reference guide. In addition to the redesign, including two glossy covers, column names have been dropped in favor of the columnists names and the music section, long one of the Reader's strengths, has been expanded and re-branded. Now known as the "B-Side," Editor Mara Shalhoup told us that the expanded music coverage is one of many links between the paper's past, present and future. more ›

Reader editor Kiki Yablon worked her final day at the paper yesterday and Michael Miner, who has detailed the struggles and shrinking resources of the paper for years, captures his final moments in dealing with her. Miner writes that Reader publisher Alison Draper called Yablon's resignation "bittersweet" and that she expects a new editor to be named by mid-February. Miner's peeks behind the curtain at the Reader have been engaging reads, both in print and on the blog. As more staff has left the paper, we've long viewed Miner's dispatches as keeping the flame of the paper's past alive, and Miner himself as the canary in the coal mine: if he goes, all bets are off. more ›

The editorial board at the Southern Illinoisian is quite dismayed at Bill Brady’s loss to Pat Quinn this election. So much so, they penned some scathing commentary calling for an end to Chicago’s “choke hold” on state politics by developing an electoral college. As Rich Miller from Capitol Fax points out, the Southern Illinoisian’s editoral board has lost its collective mind. They’re not the only ones either. On a Champaign radio station, a Brady supporter called in to say “I wish Cook County would just secede from Illinois” and Brady also said in a debate that voters should want Illinois to look more like Indiana or Tennessee. more ›

"Chicago Tribune reporters work in difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions. They do not blog from mommy's basement, cutting and pasting what others have reported, while putting it under a cute pen name on the Internet." more ›

The Tribune Company - which includes the L.A. Times, the Baltimore Sun, and our own beloved Chicago Tribune - is preparing for a potential separation from the Associated Press by sleeping on the couch and (for the most part) going without AP content for a week starting this Sunday, November 8. The AP itself is still shaking out how it'll charge for content, including possibly offering stories to some outlets earlier than others for a higher price. The TribCo gave the AP a head's up last October that come October 2010, they may ditch the AP completely. Next week's trial separation will give the company an idea of how life without the AP might be. Of course, the separation won't be complete. The Trib's Phil Rosenthal reports that there will still be a bit of AP content, limited to sports stats and the occasion when the AP is the only source of a "vital" story. Also, TribCo TV station and newspaper websites won't be affected by the trial separation. more ›

Crain's Chicago reported today that two more names have emerged as investors in the yet-to-be-finalized purchase of the Sun-Times. Businessmen Kevin Flynn (casino owner and CEO of Emerald Ventures, Inc.) and William Parrillo, Sr. (chairman of Safeway Insurance Co.) are reported to be among the group that has served up as much as $5 million in an attempt to revive the struggling newspaper. more ›

On Tuesday, I did something unusual for a 23-year-old journalist two weeks out of grad school: I book-ended my career. I started at Chitown Daily News, the nonprofit public affairs reporting site funded by the Knight Foundation for a few years’ experimentation, in June 2007, just as editor and CEO Geoff Dougherty opened his first office in Andersonville. more ›

We were astounded late Thursday night to read Phil Rosenthal's article about a recent breach of the traditional, and cherished, editorial-advertising wall at the newspaper. Not only did a survey sent out to readers share actual story tops and pitches from stories-in-progress with readers and former subscribers, but it revealed information that reporters felt might compromise additional reporting and was apparently done without the knowledge of editor Gerould Kern. more ›

We've just heard that StreetWise, the venerated Chicago publication that provides jobs for many of the city's homeless people, may be going under. The publication, which has been around in Chicago for the past 17 years, depends on an unusual mixture of advertising, grants and vendor fees to support itself. We talked to the magazine's executive director Bruce Crane who said his magazine has been hit in every single revenue stream. "We're receiving lovely letters from organizations that usually fund us," he said. "All of them say 'due to the changes in the financial market...'" more ›

In a letter to shareholders yesterday, the Sun-Times Media Group painted a pretty grim picture of the paper's state of affairs. more ›

The Tribune is reporting that longtime newspaperman, historian, Baseball Hall-of-Famer and Chicago native Jerome Holtzman has passed away over the weekend from a major stroke at the age of 82. more ›

The weather forecast calls for a lot of "brass bra cold" this weekend. It won't stop people from going out and enjoying their weekend, although some serious consideration should be given to hibernating on the couch with movies, a bottle of wine, and a comforter. more ›

We had a nice spit take while drinking our morning coffee and reading the front-page headline of the Sun-Times. The headline accompanying Fran Spielman's story about His Elective Majesty's advice to Senator Barack Obama in the wake of his win in the Iowa Caucuses was to "always be the underdog." more ›