By Michael Miner
New City News is an arrangement the Tribune pulled out of its hat at pretty much the last minute. Execs of the four Tribune Company “partners”–that is, the Tribune, WGN radio, WGN TV, and CLTV–met on February 4, and the topic was, what do we do when the CNB wire is gone? Joe Leonard, a Tribune associate editor and president of the CNB board, says he proposed a bare-bones, low-overhead version of CNB located in the Tower. He figured the company could sell its service to enough outside clients–aka “associates”–to break even. “I asked our broadcast partners, ‘Gee, if we asked some other people, would you have a problem?’ They didn’t. Print competitors are deadly, but they said, ‘In broadcasting, ten minutes after we put it on the air everyone has it anyway.’ I said, ‘I’m not in your business. I didn’t understand this.’”
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Well, it doesn’t. “We are not going to consult with our direct competitors, and some of our direct competitors didn’t consult with us when they went and cut direct deals,” Leonard said. By direct deals, he meant that the Sun-Times had already looked to its own future by picking up the student-staffed Medill News Service and by agreeing to swap city stories for suburban stories with the Daily Herald.
Now it looks as if the Sun-Times will have to make do with just Medill, which has no daybook of its own and in a few days will lose its access to CNB’s. (“They’re going to discover they did pretty good because they knew where to go,” a CNB veteran predicts.) Medill operates three days a week and only when school’s in session. It’s really cheap, just $750 a quarter, but despite editor Nigel Wade’s glowing endorsement, the future he faces with it isn’t what he had in mind. “There is no threat to the reputation of this paper in adding the worthy Medill News Service to our array of news wires,” he insisted in a mid-January memo to his staff. “That Medill copy is fit to go straight into the paper, subject to normal editing, demonstrates the quality of that service–compared with the poor standards to which some City News Bureau copy has sunk.”
It wasn’t a board meeting, but no matter.
Faigin won’t comment, and neither will Larry Green or Joycelyn Winnecke, Sun-Times editors on the CNB board that Joe Leonard presides over. But it was probably a Sun-Times contract that Faigin had in hand. A classic competition was brewing–New City News servicing the Tribune and the electronic media of greater Chicago, while Faigin sold his wire to the Sun-Times, the Southtown, the Daily Herald, and any other newspaper that wanted it. The Associated Press and Medill were other likely clients–to keep the daybook away from the Sun-Times, New City News wasn’t going to be available to either.
And you’ll hire entirely from your present staff? I asked.
