Media Writers Argue Over Fantasy Business Plans For The Sun-Times And Reader

By Mae Rice in News on Feb 11, 2016 10:29PM

The people who make Chicago media don’t control the Chicago media landscape—but that does not keep us from declaiming about it in our publications!

Today in said declaiming: The Reader fired back at the publisher of New City, who recently wrote a “hypothetical” plan for saving the Sun-Times—one that involves the Reader getting folded into the Sun-Times.

“The Reader thrived as an alternative to the Sun-Times; no one at the Reader can calmly think of it as an insert,” the Reader's Michael Miner wrote in a piece called “The Reader Will Not Be Consumed.”

This totally hypothetical argument started last week, when the Sun-Times and the Tribune came under the financial control of the same kabillionaire: Michael Ferro. This almost definitely spells trouble for the Sun-Times—and for Chicago’s status as a two-paper town—though last week Bruce Sagan, new chairman of Sun-Times Holdings, unconvincingly told the staff that the paper's doing fine.

On Wednesday, New City’s Brian Hieggelke took on this issue with a piece on “how, hypothetically, I would save the Sun-Times.”

This is a pretty self-indulgent topic, which is perhaps why the lede is an elaborate justification of the piece existing. (Many people encouraged him to write this, guys!)

Ultimately, Hieggelke’s plan features 11 core steps. They range from concrete and actionable (“Sink Splash”) to all over the place (“Consider going free. Or charging more”) to the one Miner reacted to (“Merge the Reader into the mothership”).

Hieggelke wrote:

The Sun-Times and the Chicago Reader have terrific histories yet both are generally seen to be in a late state of decline. There was a time, a couple years back, when scuttlebutt said that the Reader was the only profitable enterprise in the Wrapports realm, but even that notion seemed to be more a manifestation of artful cost accounting than real P&L. And the recent “redesigns,” which downgraded paper stock and made it easier for the publication to drop to total page counts that not long ago would have been just one section of four, make it pretty obvious to anyone paying attention what is going on. Time to circle the wagons.

Here’s the rationale. One, the Sun-Times is strapped for resources and content. This has led you to strike a deal to print several pages of the USA Today to fill out the paper and give it substance. Though derided by some, I am a fan of that deal (both as a reader and for business reasons). It adds heft and breadth to what would otherwise be an unfathomably thin publication, with content that, let’s face it, no one sees unless you’re traveling and staying in a hotel. And it’s not really that different than using wire copy, which has long been a tradition for newspapers.

Miner countered:

The problem with this is that the Reader no more considers the Sun-Times the "mothership" than Latvia did the Soviet Union. We'd be about as digestible as the Letts were. The editorial staff's response to life in Ferro's corporate sphere of influence was to organize as a unit of the Chicago Newspaper Guild and parent Communication Workers of America. This step was taken on behalf of the staff's jobs, values, and dignity—unionization had never been seriously considered during the 40 years of the Reader's independent existence.

Hieggelke has been around the block too many times to assume there's any particular comity between the Reader and the investment group that now owns us. But when he proposes a merger he sounds naïve. It would happen under duress, and it would install at the Sun-Times a hive of seething irredentists.

Ultimately, this feels like writers trying to control the narrative around their publications, because they have no control over... their actual publications. As long as capitalism endures, writers have to live and die and write based on the whims of rich non-writers.

Non-writers funded the publication of Miner's piece, frankly, and they probably did it with light hearts. (Though Hieggelke co-owns New City, his piece got funding from non-writers too—New City's business hinges on advertising.) At the end of the day, writing about media politics may be writers' best mode of resistance, but usually it's a poor weapon against fat stacks of cash.

Correction, Feb. 12: In our original post, we said "Non-writer financial backers funded the publication of both Hieggelke and Miner's pieces," which incorrectly implied that new city has investors. In fact, New City is independently owned, and gets money through advertising and custom publishing, according to Hieggelke.