Freelancers Chip Away at the Stone
Those freelance contracts the Tribune wants everyone to sign cost travel editor Randy Curwen just one writer. But she was his favorite. And her reasons for leaving could have been fixed in a second with a pencil.
“I’ve been in this business four and a half years as travel editor, and four and a half years ago you didn’t even have contracts,” Curwen told me. (The first contract cost him two writers.) “In the old days the Tribune was microfilmed, and that was accepted procedure. Now, when you put it on the Internet, in databases, I can understand why some sort of agreement is needed. But I think every travel editor I know of feels that these standardized forms are usually drawn up by somebody who doesn’t understand what’s going on in the marketplace.”
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To dozens of freelancers this contract turned a partnership into peonage. What further perplexed them was a new indemnification clause that read like a Tribune threat to sue writers over factual mistakes. A “Tribune Independent Writers’ Association” was organized, a counterproposal was drafted, the National Writers Union was notified, and late last year an inky variant of the “blue flu” struck suburban bureaus.
McCready had hoped for more. He suggested to Cohen that the Tribune pay a token extra for the electronic rights it was commandeering, so that when the day dawned that those rights became a source of serious profit the writers would be in a position to share it.
One freelancer I talked to received both contracts. He signed the travel contract without hesitation and told me, “This shows the Tribune can demonstrate some level of fairness with writers when they want to.” The other contract was a stick in the eye. Even so, he admitted he was “secretly planning” to sign it Monday morning before he lost his suburban beats.
Some days reading only one paper simply will not do. This was one of them. While the Tribune took its turn reporting stormy weather, the Sun-Times spotted the rainbow: “Conciliatory statements from the mayor and governor on Wednesday appeared to set the stage for a possible legislative compromise when lame-duck lawmakers reconvene in Springfield in early January.”
Showing more graceful disdain for an opponent than either politician, the Tribune hinted that overblown journalism had threatened statesmanship. As the paper’s day-two story had put it: “The fact that aides to Edgar and Daley had been talking privately was no secret.” But a careful reader spotted this sentence toward the bottom of the story and scratched his head. Then he called me.
