Chicago Sun-Times devotes entire front page to begging for a new owner

Here's the editorial:

Sun-Times editor: Our independent, award-winning journalism lives on

This has to be merely a publicity stunt, right?

 

I can't imagine anybody would want to own a paper where Jay Mariotti gets to be a columnist

 

Mariotti hasn't written a column for this paper since 2008.

I have no issue with this sort of disclosure. Maybe it would have been better as an inside page, but this seems like more of an explanation than begging.

All of that aside, Chicago will be a one-newspaper town within 18 months.

 

I can't imagine anybody would want to own a paper where Mike Royko gets to be a columnist.

 

So, does "tronc" want to buy it just to kill it?

 

Of course.

 

Have family in Chicago. They get the Tribune all the time. Only buy the Sun-Times off big events to send me the covers.

 

Which is a shame, although it's a bit of surprise the Sun-Times has managed to hold on this long.

Don't know what it's like now, but the Sun-Times' coverage of the city itself generally was superior to the Tribune's back when I was a regular reader of both papers (with the Trib dominating in the suburbs).

And yeah, Mariotti's presence there left a stench, but the sports section also employed terrific reporters and columnists over the years and covered Chicago sports aggressively.

One sentence in that front-page story caught my eye: "We believe an organization that can bring substantial digital resources can help and is the best path for the Sun-Times to succeed long-term." Did Jim Kirk actually watch that train wreck of a video featuring tronc's digital gurus last year? And have those gurus actually done anything productive in the 11 months since that much-lampooned video appeared?

 

People thought the same thing about the Philadelphia Daily News when it was taken over by the Inquirer's parent company.

 

The Sun-Times is a shell with a flag on top. The interior is made up of USA Today pages and content.

Maybe there is some way it stays alive in a tronc acquisition, but I cannot imagine what that way would be.

 

When I was in college, I came back to Chicagoland to work for a couple summers and lived with my grandparents (my folks had moved).

My grandpa would send me to the 7-Eleven to get Lotto tickets and a Sun-Times. A union guy until the end, he hated the Tribune because it was a "businessman's and banker's paper."

Now the Sun-Times and Tribune combined don't have the circulation either of them had individually in the 1990s.

 

That's terrible. what about the childre....

Oh, I'm sorry. I misread the thread title as "pegging."

Never mind.