- NAM Y HUH/AP PHOTOS
- Then-U.S. Senate hopeful Jack Ryan back in ’04
A day or two before this month’s elections, I spotted a curious political ad on TV. Bob Dold, the Republican candidate for Congress in the Tenth District, was boasting that the newspapers had spoken—and they all rejected his opponent, the Democratic incumbent, Brad Schneider.
Imagine that!
The second was shrewd. Back at Goldman Sachs he’d seen big retailers brought to their knees by “category killers”—specialty shops that did a better job of selling one thing than the department stores did selling anything. Best Buy took away electronics; Toys R Us took away toys. “I looked at the Tribune and thought exactly the same thing will happen to traditional media companies,” Ryan told me. “Every section will be taken out by category killers.” In 2005 he joined the wolf pack (led by Craigslist, which had classifieds between its teeth), and launched his first weekly in Homer Glen. “My aisle is the local journalism aisle,” he says. 22nd Century Media now has six weeklies on the North Shore, seven in the southwest suburbs, and yet another in Malibu, California, where Ryan has a home.
(Ryan has a point about Axelrod. I scanned the Tribune‘s election coverage from 2004 and came across Axelrod being described as “Obama’s chief strategist,” as “Obama’s lead campaign consultant,” as a “Chicago-based Democratic political consultant,” as a “repulsive Democratic political consultant” (that was Dennis Byrne), and as “president of AKP Message & Media, the Chicago-based media firm that is advising the Obama campaign on media strategy.” But nowhere did I see him identified as a former Tribune political reporter. I probably gave up too soon.)
