By Michael Miner
Just about everybody you employed at Windy City Times has quit to start a newspaper of their own, I said.
Feld wasn’t the only one discontented. Most of the Windy City staff had been stewing for a long time and for a lot of reasons, some of them personal, some philosophical. They complained about paychecks that arrived late. They complained that McCourt, the editor and publisher, was marketing his paper for a narrow, upscale gay market when the community it ought to serve was far broader. They didn’t complain about McCourt’s salary scale, but that was their only solace. Atwood, says former classifieds manager Jeff McBride, raised their sights from “wishing and dreaming by disgruntled staffers” to careful planning. Through intermediaries they sent out feelers, testing McCourt’s interest in selling the paper, something he’d been talking about for years. They concluded it wasn’t going to happen. They courted investors and located the essential backer in Jerry Matustik, an Oak Brook insurance executive. Several weeks ago they quietly incorporated.
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Chicago Free Press will be printed by Newsweb, which used to be McCourt’s printer. Its president, Fred Eychaner, is a prominent benefactor of gay causes and someone it was foolish to alienate. Nevertheless, McCourt managed to do it. A couple of years ago unpaid bills prompted Eychaner to file suit and drop the account. Windy City Times eventually settled out of court.
O’Shea made two modest mistakes. Yes, Tribune Properties had been spun off–but then it had been reabsorbed. And the R.E.M. contract at the Tower didn’t have a damn thing to do with the story–but the Tribune needed to mention it anyway. The contract was sure to become public later, and Daley’s friends would cluck, “Shoulda been sooner.”
The letter makes the Tribune look a little silly. Speaking to me through a Tribune publicist, Gramzinski insists that he wrote Stratton having no idea what the newsroom was up to–he’d decided to cancel R.E.M. because he was running out of work for it to do. However, the day he sent the letter to R.E.M. was the day the newsroom filled him in on its plans, and he doesn’t recall whether it went out while he was still ignorant or finally in the know. And O’Shea insists that while the Duff story was being reported he had no idea that R.E.M.’s nose was inside the Tribune tent. “It’s not untypical around here for an editor in the editorial department not to be speaking to a lot of the other business units,” he says.
