An interesting column

I thought this might be an appropriate column to post, since we discussed the Tribune's sale in class yesterday. It's written by the Tribune's John Kass.

News about us is just part of the news

Published April 3, 2007

A.fter a week of a relaxing family vacation, watching the cherry blossoms pop in Washington, D.C., I came back to work to the news that Tribune Co. had been sold and the Cubs are up for sale.

As I wandered through the newsroom Monday morning, a colleague stopped me with a question. I figured it would have something to do with anxiety and all the other emotions running through all of us employed by an organization where big news was made about some awfully big changes around here.

She was uncertain, but not about all that stuff.

"Have you talked to [Mr. So-and-So] about the lawsuit?" she asked, meaning a lawsuit involving someone close to a powerful local politician.

The Cubs are on the block, Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune, had been purchased, but what she was interested in was Mr. So-and-So (not his real name, because if I printed his real name while she's still working on the story, she'd have good reason to kill me).

"Well," she asked. "Have you talked to Mr. So-and-So? Are you going to speak to him?"

Her desk was piled with documents and other papers, and bits of notes and scraps of ideas and old phone numbers written in margins, and electronic nuggets of information on the computer screen before her.

She wasn't intent on Tribune Co. news, or the Cubs, or Sam Zell, the Chicago business tycoon who put the Tribune deal together to take the company private. She wasn't consumed by any of that, but by something else: reporting a story about powerful people.

The reason I'm telling you about this exchange -- one of hundreds like it around here every day -- is because that's what we've been doing for more than a century. The Chicago Tribune tells other stories exceedingly well, but we don't tell our own story very well at all.

Here's what we do: report and analyze and confront the powerful who don't like being confronted. We write about what we've learned, and sometimes we hope to entertain you along the way. We're compelled to do this, as all reporters everywhere are compelled, to find out the what and the how and the why of things.

So the reporter isn't going to lower the demands she places on herself, and neither will others, no matter what changes are made on the business side. Whether this deal with Zell makes business sense is something I can't judge. I'm not in business. In the short term, the deal ends the anxiety in the newsroom and the gloominess that comes with uncertainty over possibly being purchased by people who don't understand Chicago.

Now, things are certain: A Chicago guy has bought himself a media company that puts out the Chicago Tribune.

The other news is that they'll sell the Cubs, which, as a White Sox fan, doesn't bother me much. I've already had my revenge on the Cubs fans around here when the White Sox lent me their 2005 World Series trophy and I took it upstairs to the boardroom and dared the executives to touch it, and they prudently refused to tempt the fates.

But the baseball team's sale is in the future, and the sale of the Tribune has already taken place, and what's important today is that the paper continues. You'll find dismal Opening Day baseball stories in the sports section, and Police Supt. Phil Cline's resignation, forced by Mayor Richard Daley because somebody had to fall for the videotaped beating of that petite Northwest Side bartender by a vicious, drunken cop.

Though changes have been announced, this remains the Chicago Tribune.

This is the paper that has been the one constant in an ever-changing city. It is the paper that fought slavery and supported Lincoln, and later bickered with other presidents and gangsters and political bosses. It is the paper that told Nixon to resign. It is the newspaper that called on another president to send a politically independent fed to Chicago to go after Al Capone, and Elliot Ness arrived and did his work. This is the newspaper that, only a few years ago, angered the Illinois political establishment by calling for a politically independent federal prosecutor to be sent to Chicago, to ferret out the political corruption plaguing the state's taxpayers. U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald has been quite busy since he arrived.

On the outer walls of Tribune Tower, there are fragments set in stone of temples and monuments taken from historic sites from all over the world. These are not mere souvenirs or trophies. They represent greatness and the great ideas behind them. Writers and editors pass these reminders each day and can't help but be informed by them, and we pass inscriptions carved into the walls of the Tower's lobby.

My favorite is quite brief, and it is set above a door leading to the elevators. I read this quote from Lord Thomas Macaulay every day and still get goose bumps: "Where there is a free press the governors must live in constant awe of the opinions of the governed."

But stones from palaces and temples and quotes don't make a newspaper. All that can change. What makes this a paper I'm proud to work for are people like my colleagues, like that woman who asked me the question, and who will keep asking about the how and why of things in Chicago.

----------

jskass@tribune.com