Mike Downey leaving Trib

. . . selling their birthright, for a mess of pottage.

Of course, one could say they did that, when they flipped the pub over to Sam the Sham and the Oh-Nos.

 

That's a nice, but awfully strange, note from McGrath.
It sounds like Downey's ill or something, no?

 

Don't think it's been made clear here just why or how Downey is leaving. But this quote sure seems to:

Downey and out: Mike Downey, who returned home to Chicago in 2003 as a Tribune sports columnist, is leaving the paper. "The Tribune was generous enough to make me one of the best-paid sportswriters in the history of this business, so I certainly can't fault the paper for doing this now that times are hard," Downey said Thursday.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/chi-fri_phil_rosenthal_21nov21,0,5351446.column

Sounds like it was management that cut this cord, declined to renew a contract or some such.

 

But saying he "can't fault" the paper for "doing this now" makes it sound like it was, instead, a layoff with an extremely generous severance check. In other words, sounds like Downey wasn't the decider here.

 

Can we agree that it was a bad job of letting an ambiguous quote hang there by the reporter?

Obviously the details will come out soon enough, probably somewhere like the Chicago Reader or the Sun-Times.

 

Yeah, it reads like something Downey said and the reporter didn't pick up on until he listened to the tape.

A friend of mine said he got more than a year's pay in severance.

 

Good work if you can get it.

 

Yeah, a year's pay isn't completely unusual in the world of buyouts and layoffs. But a year's pay at Mr. Downey's salary would sustain most of us for much, much longer. Good for him -- better in his pocket than Sam Zell's.

 

Apparently, the reports I was hearing on the size of the buyout are wrong.

 

I liked Downey's columns, but, yeah, it always felt like he was out of place in Chicago.

Ran into him a few times on the Big Ten circuit during Illinois' run to the Final Four a couple of years back. Seemed like a nice guy, especially when I let him use my Internet connection after one game (the arena only had ethernet).

I continue to be disappointed by the Trib's direction. Grew up reading the Midwest edition, didn't stop reading it until they cut off delivery here last spring. Picked up an edition a few weeks ago when I was in Chicago, it took me about five minutes to breeze through it.

 

Haven't read Mike a lot in the past few (retirement) years in Texas, but from years of sharing an office with him at the Free Press -- before being 1/2 of his replacement when he went to LA -- I can guarantee any of you who have not met him that he is one of the best men to ever work in the business. Since I haven't read much of his stuff recently, I find it odd that so many say he seemed out of place in Chicago, since that is where I first met him, when he was on the Bulls beat in the late 70s or early 80s. I always thought of him as a Chicagoan...

 

Great meeting preceding the hire I'm sure. Beancounter: Give me a list of our highest paid people. OK, this one's easy. Downey is gone. Editor: But he's one of our best. Beancounter: So?