As a rule, you’re not supposed to draw attention to what isn’t in the newspaper. The idea is, you’ve got everything right here, in your hands. All the news you need to know today, plus a horoscope, comics and tomorrow’s weather. Anything that isn’t here doesn’t matter.
But the key rule about newspapers is: There is no rule that can’t be scrapped as circumstances dictate. Sometimes the stylebook gets set aside. Sometimes the loss is too big to ignore. When iconic movie reviewer Roger Ebert died in 2013, we didn’t go back to running reviews that were bare synopses under jokey pseudonyms like Mae Tinee.
We honored the man, recognized the loss, then moved forward, as best we could. The 35 staffers — including 23 in the Sun-Times newsroom — who took the Chicago Public Media buyout and are mostly leaving Friday are too important for the paper to cough into its fist and hope you don’t notice. First, because they made a sacrifice, saving $4.2 million a year in costs to help the newspaper survive. That’s news, and our job is to report the news. Second, you will notice. Their loss will be felt.
I’m feeling it now. For me, it’s personal, starting with John O’Neill, who has been the primary editor on this column. He’s saved me from a thousand gaffes and probably a few career-ending misfires. He’s my friend, as is his wife, Suzanne McBride, who often edits this on Sundays. I’ve been to their house, and they to mine. They were at my younger son’s wedding, and I know their children, Jack and Grace.
Richard Roeper is the biggest name to go. He is a star in his own right, holding his own with Ebert after he replaced Gene Siskel on his TV show in 2000. The author of seven books, Richard is a fearsome poker player and — what mattered to me most — a really good writer. We were good friends in our salad days — he was at my wedding — before I disappeared into marriage and parenthood, two snares that Richard neatly sidestepped.
I will miss another friend in Rick Telander, who was the king at Sports Illustrated when the paper snagged him. He played football for Northwestern, and when he was drafted by Kansas City, Rick and a buddy drove straight north until they hit Lake Superior, where he bought 30 acres of land. Eight autumns have been highlighted with visits to his compound, to breathe the crisp air, smoke cigars, eat big steaks and plunge from the sauna into the gelid cold lake. He let me hang around even though I sometimes admit that I don’t follow sports. While he played one-on-one with Michael Jordan, I once almost asked Jordan his name, because to me he was just another player in the Bulls locker room. Yet somehow Rick and I got along.
Rick Morrissey is another vital sports columnist who is going, plus Bears beat writer Mark Potash and White Sox writer Daryl Van Schouwen. When I heard Annie Costabile is leaving too, I went looking for a text she sent me years ago. I had written something rounding up Chicago sports, and at the last minute cut out the Sky, for space — “how could I?” she demanded. She cared deeply about what she did — a defining characteristic of people who work at the Sun-Times, and was sincerely indignant, as befits someone who changed the way Chicagoans view the WNBA and women’s sports.
We lost most of our editorial board, and the future of editorials at the paper is uncertain. Lorraine Forte headed the board, running a staff not half as large as what was required to do the same job at the Tribune. Tom Frisbie left —soft-spoken, he edited my work when I joined the Sun-Times school guide as a freelancer in 1984, his quiet calm a counterpoint to my frantic, gerbil-on-a-wheel ambition. Back when we did endorsements, every trustee from every small town from Addison to Zion traipsed through the editorial board room, a process that was saved from devolving into pure confusion by the organizational skill and good cheer of Marlen Garcia.
Our features department was mostly Miriam Di Nunzio and Darel Jevens, who edited Roeper and whose clever headlines for Dear Abby have been seen by millions of readers. With them leaving (although we are grateful Di Nunzio has agreed to stick around for a few months), I don’t know who’s going to try to step into their shoes, but I’m sure glad it won’t be me. They did yeoman’s work.
Every election night about 5 p.m. the staff would gather in the newsroom to hammer out a game plan. We were looking at a long seven hours of pinballing around the city until drinks at the Billy Goat, and we all took our marching orders from Scott Fornek, decked out in the election night sweater vest he wore for luck. He had joined the Sun-Times when the Chicago Daily News folded in 1978, and carried that special cachet that Daily News alumni enjoyed, having worked at the same paper as Carl Sandburg and Ben Hecht.
Chicago Sun-Times staff was a lot larger in 2004. This is only some of them, gathered for a photo across the Chicago River from their old building, which had been sold to made way for a skyscraper. Many in this photo left years ago, some only now are leaving, and others will still remain.
Associated Press
Dan Haar, who runs our public safety desk and has trained legions of reporters both here and at the, ahem, Tribune, is one of those rock solid editors whose mere presence was reassuring. Bill Ruminski wouldn’t want his name in this story — that’s tough Bill, you shouldn’t have taken the buyout if you wanted to keep plucking the unnecessary out of my column. He was exactly as sourly unimpressed as you want an editor to be. I’d cringe in anticipation of the blow when he edited my column, because I knew he’d have a blizzard of adjustments, all of them valid. But when I made him laugh, I knew I’d really achieved something.
Mike Sneed broke stories the way chefs crack eggs. Back when I was writing a lot of celebrity profiles, I would feed her tidbits — do you know the walls of Arnold Palmer’s office are leather? She once bought me dinner at L.A.’s chic Le Dome so I could chat up a source of hers. I would also stop by her office to complain, and she always lent me an attentive ear and a sympathetic nod and the attention I craved.
There’s more, but that will have to do. That’s journalism, especially at the Sun-Times. Never enough time, never enough space, never enough people.
When I joined the paper, we had a jazz critic and a rock critic, a theater critic and an opera critic, a book editor and an assistant book editor, a medical writer and a travel editor. We had a society editor. Five full-time librarians. Or was it seven? You got a lot for your quarter, and it went to 400,000 readers every morning. There were 500 people on staff. Now the buyouts will leave the newsroom at around 85 and the print run is closer to 45,000. I considered taking the buyout because I didn’t know if I still have what it takes, at 64, to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who remain and fight the good fight every day, outnumbered, in a country veering toward chaos and disaster. I wasn’t sure I could do it. I’m still not, but we’ll give it a try. Because we still have a lot going for us.
Fran Spielman will still be grilling the politicians at City Hall (I won’t be using the lede I came up with when I thought she might retire: “Christmas came early for Brandon Johnson…”). Lynn Sweet is in Washington, exploring new ways to benefit the paper. Jon Seidel is at the federal courts. Tom Schuba on crime. Nader Issa and Sarah Karp have education — the latter from WBEZ, whose staff will more completely merge with ours. Frank Main and his Pulitzer Prize are still riding herd on the police. Tina Sfondeles will be drilling down into politics.
I’m biased, but any newspaper that has Ashlee Rezin as a photo editor will always be worth buying. Stefano Esposito will continue to shine his unique brand of whimsy on unexpected corners of the city.
We’ll still have the best sports reporting in the city — Maddie Lee was in Tokyo this week, reporting on the special season opener series between the Cubs and the Dodgers. The Sun-Times staff skews much younger now, and I don’t want to shortchange any of them. These kids will surprise you. When Violet Miller was tear-gassed at a protest, and I called her to check that she was OK, she said, “I’ve been tear-gassed before.” These young folk have been around, know their stuff, and get better every day.
The Sun-Times has published daily since 1948, and has, I believe, good years ahead. We aren’t the same. But change is one sign that you are still alive. When Roger Ebert was fighting cancer, he posed for a full-face portrait in Esquire with part of his jaw removed. As if to say, “This is what I look like now.” He didn’t flinch, and he didn’t hide. He kept on writing — my God, he wrote a book on cooking rice, even though he could not himself eat food. He kept working until he died.
That’s rare courage. And a plan. The Sun-Times kept going after Roger left us, inspired by his spirit. Just as we will keep going now. It mattered that he had been here, just as all the people I’ve mentioned — and those I was unable to mention — mattered. They cared about Chicago, and the Sun-Times, and were cared about in turn. They matter still. We mark their loss today, but there will be a paper tomorrow, and another on Sunday. Each day is an opportunity to get it right. My column about an important issue with an unexpected Chicago connection, one that I battered the Illinois Attorney General’s office about for weeks, trying to extract a statistic while they dragged their feet, mum, was supposed to run today. But plans changed, and now it will run Monday.
Unless something else happens over the weekend to change that. There are no rules that can’t be broken, no plans that can’t shift. Stuff happens, and we cover that stuff with a fierce intensity and roll with the changes. The Sun-Times has always been the scrappy underdog, doing more with less. That part won’t change. Someone asked me my goal for this new era, and I said, “I plan to shine brightly until the end and go out with my head held high.”
I think we all do.