By Michael Miner
Green wanted his staff to stay on their toes. When retailers were being quoted and photographed for roundup articles the paper should favor its advertisers. A Crate & Barrel didn’t deserve the attention paid to a Marshall Field’s.
Everyone had a point. In journalism, events normally drive coverage. But survey articles such as Podmolik’s do present choices, and it’s hard to blame the bosses of a paper at a competitive disadvantage for wanting to choose stores that have chosen the Sun-Times. Even so, the Green-Duke exchange left journalists at that paper troubled. My account of it comes from various sources who heard about the confrontation and placed it in a larger context. It doesn’t come from Duke, who refused to answer my questions, or from Green, who wouldn’t return my phone calls or respond to my E-mail, or from Wade, who didn’t call me back.
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An appointment, a blowup, a speech–they’d mean little if there were countervailing evidence of Hollinger’s commitment to the editorial product. Hiring a few reporters to fill out the newsroom is a gesture that would impress the skeptics. The skeptics aren’t holding their breath.
Making Sense of the Senseless
“When I was 20, I thought there were laws that you could follow, that there was cause and effect for everything,” says a friend examining her battered house after a hurricane. (Her house was located on an island sitting like a bull’s-eye off the South Carolina coast. Perhaps climatic cause and effect were what she had to ignore in order to live there.) “I don’t experience life to be that way anymore.” A few years earlier her husband had died in a fire.
