Then I got in touch with Coleen Davison. “We’d been [Tribune] subscribers for 12 or 13 years,” she told me. “Obviously we’ve seen changes we weren’t thrilled by, but the last redesign was the final straw. It was sound-bite journalism — all pictures, no stories.”
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Last September 29 the Tribune, exclaiming “It’s a whole new day,” presented its recreated self to Chicago, the fanfare and visual razzmatazz intended to mask the blunt reality that for financial reasons the Tribune was shrinking its news hole. Davison, who describes herself as a stay-at-home mom, and her husband Joel, a computer engineer, were already becoming disenchanted with the Tribune, she said: “It just sounded less and less intelligent as the years went by. The quality of the writing went down” — John Kass being an exception she mentioned. She said she and her husband found themselves joking a little too often about typographical errors they’d spotted.
She heard back from John McCormick of the Tribune editorial board. McCormick wants his letters to Davison to remain between them, but much of the first letter can be inferred from her response to it. Thanking McCormick for the attention he’d given her, she nevertheless felt that he’d confirmed her suspicions — “the new redesign was indeed intended to appeal to younger readers with (in my opinion) limited attention spans and a strong interest in popular culture…
(By this point, she tells me, “I felt I was beating a dead horse.”)
Here’s a link to Davison’s complete correspondence with the Tribune.
