Gregory Tejeda publishes Chicago Argus, which bills itself as the "World's Greatest Weblog." In his February 16th piece Tejeda discusses a number of subjects from the vantage of a journalist, basically a how the Sun-Times was lost piece.

Good for you Greg.

There is another side to these things however. Take for example, the Hollinger created hegemony of the Sun-Times Media Group in the Chicago area. Outside of the Chicago Tribune, all of these properties, the Southtown-Star, the Post Tribune, Waukegan Sun, Naperville Sun, Pioneer Press, Herald-News, were and are on paper, a media jugernaut.

But it never happened the way David Radler envisioned.

The printing operations of all of these newspapers would be run through a very efficient centralized operation on Ashland Avenue, in Chicago. And the delivery, customer service and billing operations would be combined too. Advertising opportunities would be created among a network of local outlets. Local? You want local? The Sun-Times News Group would write the book on local.

But the Ashland plant could never get up to speed. There was a large lawsuit over the presses against the bankrupt manufacturer, and many of the savings promised years ago never materialized. The potential savings from combined circulation, they never materialized either.

But now we're talking out of the hat, with the only backup being the financial filings of a company that the auditor reports, you can't really trust. Shame on me.

Tejeda is correct in many of the things he is pointing out in his blog about the STNG and its editorial policies. However, I think he is missing the significant problems encountered by the Company as it attempted to meld operations of the newspapers support staff.

Finally, according to the financial reports of the Company, many of the printing operations are being centralized. The Chicago Tribune has taken responsibility for the delivery of the newspapers. [Monday the Company announced it had also outsourced some of its advertising functions too.]

All this now seems to little and to late.