By Michael Miner
“Nigel was very decent about it,” Jackson told me. “He said it was not totally final–there was some negotiating process to go through with the guild. But I wanted for the record for him to consider the moral consequence, the precedent. Honor has to count. Morality has to count. Longevity has to count. And I think the broader community should realize that in some sense none of us are secure if the best years of our lives are thrown away with the mark of a pen.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Alton Miller, who was Harold Washington’s last press secretary and is still active in independent Democratic politics, was astonished by the news. “This is the institutional memory of Chicago politics over the last 30 years,” Miller says. “It’s just amazing to me to think the Sun-Times would willingly break up a matched set between Steve Neal and [Washington bureau chief] Lynn Sweet and Basil Talbott. They have a machine there to cover politics in all its dimensions, and taking Basil out is like breaking up a set of dueling pistols.
For more on the decisions being made by the company that owns the Sun-Times, consult last Sunday’s Tribune business section. Media writer Tim Jones reported that Hollinger International, headquartered in the Sun-Times Building, has become the world’s third-largest newspaper company, and “strict adherence to profit goals is the guiding principle.” Noting that Hollinger cut the workforce by a fifth when it bought the Sun-Times in 1994, Jones observed that “companywide cuts of those magnitudes contribute to one of the largest profit margins in the newspaper industry–about 30 percent, nearly twice the industry average.”
The contract between the Chicago Newspaper Guild and the Sun-Times guarantees that an employee laid off to cut the budget will get two weeks’ notice. And before he’s formally notified, the guild is allowed two weeks to suggest alternatives. Once Wade told Talbott last week that he was being let go, Talbott and the guild had four weeks to fight for his job. The guild promptly told management to read the contract.
“They didn’t think much of the idea.”
Black was a frequent Reader contributor back when he was a Chicagoan, and he’s an occasional one now that he lives in Maryland (as it happens, he’s got a piece in this issue). “I spent five years on the first book, traveling to archives all across Israel, Europe, and the United States,” he says. “I didn’t have a family back then. I indentured my life. I indentured my career. And by the way, that was before computers. My manuscript–a 400-page manuscript–was retyped 40 times. Today, I admit, I could write that same book in two or three years.”
