Ravings from the editor

A new study by the Community Media Workshop pronounces Chi-Town Daily News the No. 1 independent/alternative source for local news in Chicago.

One of the study's main components was looking at how large of an audience local websites reach. So if you're a regular Daily News reader, give yourself a pat on the back. You helped get us the gold.

We've worked really hard over the past year to grow traffic and produce reporting that has some real impact. It's nice to be noticed.

No good deed goes unpunished, though. Some naysayers are already questioning the statistics, and the operator of one local blog flat out accused us of making up our traffic numbers today. Jealousy is not pretty.

For the record: We told Community Media Workshop that we serve 65,000 unique visitors a month. For the cynical among you, here's a screen-cap of our Webalyzer stats report showing that. We also track unique visitors with Google Analytics. And though GA shows a lower number of page views, it still gives us 65,000 unique visitors a month.

Generally our traffic has grown about 3x during each of the three years we've been in existence, and we're trying...more

Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's media critic, wrote a great article today on the Daily News.

Meanwhile, Chicago Tonight took an interesting look at local journalism in Chicago in the wake of the Sun-Times bankruptcy. My big mug is featured prominently.

One of the more tragicomedic moments of yesterday's Journalism Town Hall was the reaction to my assertion that a $2 million online news organization could replace the local-news reporting function of a Sun-Times or Chicago Tribune.

People flat out didn't believe it. I heard pushback on the panel, I heard about it during the break, I heard about it after the event ended.

I don't know what these folks have in mind, but it sounds like a lot of journalists and news observers are convinced it takes tens, or hundreds, of millions of dollars to run a robust local news organization.

Trust me: It doesn't.

Yesterday, I promised to share a spreadsheet proving my point. So here it is -- Chicago's $2 million news organization.

The spreadsheet is payroll only. But our experience is that other expenses are pretty much negligible. Tack on an extra 30% for benefits. We're paying $25,000 in rent for a space that would house the reporters listed below. A couple thousand bucks for insurance, some cash for the lawyers and accountants, and you're in business for well under $2 million.

It's worth noting that this organization pays the regional average wage to its reporters and...more

At yesterday's Chicago Journalism Town Hall, I suggested that it'd be possible to replace the local-news functions of the Chicago Tribune or the Chicago Sun-Times with an online news operation costing $2 million a year.

A big part of that, I said, would be reporters making $35,000 a year and covering key local beats like City Hall and the County Board.

This idea was met with guffaws. Imagine... Reporters making $35,000 a year.

The group then moved on to consider ways to ensure that talented reporters in Chicago make $100,000 a year or so. 

But the federal Department of Labor has the last laugh on this one. The average salary for reporters in the Chicago metropolitan area is $40,290.

Throwing around this $100,000 number is a terrible idea -- most journalists, even at the Tribune and other large news organizations, don't make that kind of money.

And the notion, articulated by some at the Town Hall, seems to be that we're entitled to.

But the framers of the Constitution didn't write the First Amendment to ensure that journalists would be able to live a comfortable, upper-middle-class lifestyle.

They did it to ensure citizens would be informed and government held...more

Nonprofit news has become a hot topic over the past few days. Some people are calling on Warren Buffet to drop a cool billion dollars or so to endow newspapers.

Others say going nonprofit is a cop-out.

Fueling these discussions are a couple of myths about the nonprofit world. Since we've operated in it for three years now, let me dispel them:

* Nonprofit is the easy way out. Ahem. Perhaps you noticed that NPR and Chicago Public Radio just laid off staff. Perhaps you, at some point in your career, have written an article or 12 about the local nonprofit school/church/clinic/theater/bookmobile that is going out of business because it can't pay the electric bill.

Nonprofit is not easy, and it's not a cop-out. Asking for donations is just as difficult, if not more, than making ad-sales calls or finding venture capital. Philanthropic fundraising involves identical processes, and has an identical (i.e., horribly low) ratio of prospects to successes. 

* All you need to do is find a sugar daddy. If only. Stable nonprofits have a diverse revenue stream, just like stable for-profit businesses. Getting one guy to kick in a huge sum of money is a bad,...more

CTA honcho Ron Huberman doesn't have much education experience, but was named today to head the Chicago Public Schools.

Perhaps it's because he came at the right price?

It's been a long week here in Illinois (half as warm and twice as corrupt as Florida!) waiting for our governor to resign.

He's got an approval rating well below freezing and no good reason to stay in office.

He can't use the resignation as leverage with the feds, because he's not going to be reelected, and it's tough to govern from jail. Offering to quit a job you can't keep anyway is no negotiating tactic.

And it's not like he can actually get anything done. Productive meetings, at least in Illinois, are prefaced by the idea that the feds don't have your office  wired like Radio Shack.

So why can't G-Rod do the right thing?

I think he's waiting for someone to pay him.

Can we really expect the man to tried to raffle off a U.S. Senate seat to give up the governorship for free?

He's got a lot of legal bills coming due over the next several months, and cigarettes at the prison commissary are not cheap.

It's going to take money to get this thing done. Fortunately, there's got to be someone out there who'd pay a pretty...more

Journalists are, for the most part, watchers rather than doers.

We like to sit on the sideline, take notes and mutter snarky comments to each other. When the doing is done, we weigh in with artfully constructed prose that explains what happened and who stepped in it.

That's a fine approach for most news stories. But when the story is the systematic disembowelment of the industry we all know and love, cynical detachment and dispassionate observation won't cut it. 

It's time for rank-and-file journalists to demand, or seize, a seat at the table and begin forcefully guiding the industry toward a meaningful future.

In Chicago, where the Tribune Co. declared bankruptcy yesterday and owner Sam Zell has run roughshod over journalistic values, that may mean a coordinated, aggressively public push for his ouster.

It may mean approaching the company's creditors with a rescue plan that includes something more than mindlessly trimming employees and gutting newspapers.

It almost certainly means risking your job by speaking up, or possibly threatening a mass walkout.

A year or two ago, that would have seemed like a risky venture; today, it's the smartest path to ensuring the Trib survives to issue another payroll. 

In Denver,...more

When Sam Zell took over the Tribune Company last year, I was cautiously optimistic. He seemed to have a healthy urgency about changing the hidebound thinking at the company and its newspapers. 

But as recent months have demonstrated, the only thing more dangerous than a stodgy bureaucracy is a a leader bent on destroying it without the skills and ideas to build anew.

Zell, who pledged a new dawn at the Trib and other media properties, is instead recycling the worst ideas spawned by three decades of desperation over falling newspaper circulation.

Cut reporters? Yup, done that.

Kill sections? Yup, done that.

Redesign featuring huge photos and headlines to mask lack of content? Yup, got that.

Over the weekend, as news trickled out that Tribune is eyeing a bankruptcy filing, it became clear: Zell doesn't have the goods.

He took over the Tribune with a pile of hubris and borrowed money, but no game plan.

At this point, it's time for Zell to acknowledge that he doesn't have what it takes to move the company forward, and to limit the damage to that which he's already inflicted. 

And it's time for the Tribune's employee-owners to demand that he...more

I often think rural newspapers have a much bigger impact on their communities than their colleagues at the fancy metro dailies. 

The obit for Tom Gish, the editor of a Kentucky weekly, is one example of that.

It's also an amazing reminder that very, very few things are truly new. Gish, the obit says, has been publishing the work of citizen journalism for decades.

The Trib had an interesting article today about Mayor Daley's budget conundrum.

Some aldermen are saying Daley should cut the millions of dollars City Hall spends on public relations contractors and staff spokespeople.

It's a little unclear to us how hizzoner's PR tab could be so high, because in three years of trying, the Daily News has NEVER received a return phone call from a mayoral flak.

Which brings up an even better proposal: pay them per call.

The true test of a newspaper has always been the Sunday edition.

It's the one people have the most time to read, and the one journalists have the most time to report and write.

A good Sunday paper provides a mix of thought-provoking enterprise reporting, lively features -- and, of course, news about whatever happened on Saturday.

That's not what subscribers of the Tribune saw when they picked up yesterday's metro section.

This was a news section that I, in all likelihood, could have written, reported, photographed and edited singlehandedly in the course of a day or two. And I'm not boasting about my journalism chops.

There ain't nothing in it.

The Trib ran two items on the metro front, and neither of them was a news story.

One was a column by Mary Schmich. Fine -- she's always been a great read. But I'm pretty sure she'd agree her musings are best consumed in the company of actual news.

The second item, which ran under a ginormous photo and headline of two old folks (if you thought being old and sitting around at home was boring, try looking at a photo of it), was a lead-in to an inside...more

Some critics are calling for CNN to reassess its work with citizen journalists because one of them created an apparently erroneous report that Apple chief Steve Jobs had suffered a major heart attack.

Of course, nobody argued that Bloomberg News should conduct a head-to-toe reassessment of its newsgathering four weeks ago, when the service reported Jobs HAD ACTUALLY DIED.

I think it's great to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of traditional and new approaches to reporting. But it's important to apply some balance.

Lately, the discussion about citizen journalism seems to focus on individual miscues. And the critics never note that even the best newspapers can barf all over themselves in spectacular fashion. 

At the Daily News, we work with nearly 70 citizen journalists, and a handful of professional beat reporters. Correction rates are about the same for each.

You'll notice a few changes to the way we display news articles in the coming days.

We will be highlighting the excellent work of our crew of seasoned freelance beat reporters by including a tag line on their articles with a bit of information about their backgrounds. We'll also be changing their bylines to reflect the beats they cover.

For example, Paul Bowker, who produces the best coverage you'll find anywhere of the Chicago Public Schools, will now be credited as "Paul Bowker / Education reporter."

Similarly, we'll be spotlighting the great journalism produced by our volunteer neighborhood reporters by including tag lines that provide a bit of info about them.