The Second City doesn’t heart CL
July 31, 2007 at 8:51 am by Wayne GarciaLast week we reported how our parent company, Creative Loafing Inc., purchased two of the biggest names in the alt-weekly industry, the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper. I already reported on the immediate fallout, but wanted to add that while the Washington audience and staff seems (for the most part) to be coping with the big change in ownership, the good people of Chicago are freaking the fuck out. Check out their comments on Michael Miner’s “News Bites” blog.
Our growing newspaper chain is alternately portrayed as competent or dullard, progressive or bumbling, saving the Reader or just plain evil and intent on burying good journalism. Tampa comes off worse. One commenter, however, calls The Political Whore “not bad at all.” Huzzah!
July 31st, 2007 at 11:18 am
Many others have posted on the Reader blog about a fact that you seem intent on ignoring–one that has everything to do with the reason the *staff* at the Reader is, as you so sympathetically put it, “freaking the fuck out,” and given us ample cause to see the CL management as bumbling. Our production and art departments found out they were losing their jobs by reading about it on the internet. On deadline. A massive fuck up on the part of Eason and co. that, so far’s I know, hasn’t been acknowleged publicly by them–at least to the rank and file.
So cut us some freakin’ slack dude. So far, we are unimpressed.
July 31st, 2007 at 12:01 pm
I can’t speak for Ben or corporate management, but as for my opinion, yes, it was poorly handled and nobody deserves to lose their job like that. Our Atlanta senior editor John Sugg writes the same thing in a story that we’re publishing tomorrow about the acquisition. The language in Eason’s news release about the purchase was corporate-marketing-sloganeering as well, something we don’t hear a lot in our newsroom from our bosses and so it rang just as wrong here as it did there.
Didn’t mean my post to come off so harsh, as I fully understand the concern among the staff. I also understand how strongly the Reader’s readers are invested in the paper. Their passion shows. Let’s face it; only time will prove whether CL can run the papers well and maintain the high level of journalism and reader involvement at both newspapers.
I’m not going to try to cheerlead for CL or assuage your concerns for the future, because it wouldn’t work anyway. All I will say is that I’ve worked in this biz for 25 years and this company’s editorial dept is as experienced and as sharp (if not more so) than anywhere I worked at the big dailies (except for the St Pete Times, which is a unique gem in the biz). The editorial philosophy is the best of any publication I’ve worked for, the Times included. The problem we face, and you face, and everybody in what’s left of this biz faces, is how to best do our important work in the face of shrinking resources, changing technologies, the flow of advertising to infotainment and MNC’s who want to dominate media and audience apathy.
July 31st, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Thanks–I’ll look for that story tomorrow.