It was a small story on Orland Park Patch, one of about 500 hyperlocal websites that AOL hopes to have up and running across the country by the end of the year. “A Few More Cuts at the SouthtownStar,” said the October 5 headline. The local daily was trimming its staff yet again; the latest to go were reporter Stephanie Gehring, described as a “well-liked 20-year veteran of the newspaper,” and Rex Robinson, a community news editor. More cuts were said to be a possibility.
After ten years with Sun-Times Media, four of them thinking like a spokesperson, Chase is packing up her desk this week. She’s been laid off. It’s something she was pretty sure was about to happen when she talked to the Orland Park Patch, and she got the official word a few days later. Sun-Times Media can no longer afford a corporate spokesman—CEO Jeremy Halbreich will now do that job himself.
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When things got crazy at work, Chase says, she used to joke that she ought to write a book. If she ever does, I’ll read it. She started out as a reporter at a tiny paper in Iowa, went on to Bloomberg, and joined the Sun-Times as a financial writer in 2000. The paper belonged to Hollinger International back then, and Conrad Black and David Radler ran it. Chase never met Black, but now and then she’d ride the elevator with Radler. “He was very tanned and surly looking,” she says. If Radler even knew she worked for him he probably also knew she belonged to the Newspaper Guild; Radler, who despised unions, would have considered her a lower life form.
And if Black got off, shareholders wanted to know, what would that mean for their shares? “A lot of investors were ticked off,” says Chase. “They thought he owed the company and the shareholders a lot of money.” That’s a lot of money as in hundreds of millions of dollars. “You can’t blame them for being grouchy,” says Chase. “We had the trial. We owed the IRS money. Our potential liability had gotten up to—I think at one point it was $600 million. The investors were understandably worried.”
Even so, on Monday afternoon, March 30, when the various vice presidents and other top executives assembled in the boardroom and new CEO Jeremy Halbreich said, “OK, it’s a go for tomorrow,” Chase had to look away. “I could feel these tears welling up in my eyes. I was pregnant too, it could have been hormonal. But I was very sad and I went back to my office and cried a little bit and went back to work.”
“The anniversary’s this week!” says Chase, just realizing. No celebration was being planned.
Chase is pregnant again. She’s 42; her husband, Brett Chase, used to be an editor at Crain’s Chicago Business, but now he’s freelancing. “They were good salaries,” she reminisces. “My husband and I were able to buy a house, a little fixer-upper bungalow near Foster and California.” If journalism could still support a family she’d try to get back into it. But she’s not sure it can.
