A couple weeks ago I reported on a chat I’d had with a savvy observer of the Sun-Times Media Group who wanted to remain nameless. His advice to the Sun-Times included this: “Go the way of becoming almost like an urban daily magazine on newsprint and de-emphasize the personalities. . . . Give them the opportunity to become writers without their mugs in the paper, and if it doesn’t work sweep them out.” For the money they made, he believed, the destitute Sun-Times would do better “hiring a dozen to 18 outstanding writers and investigators who could write once a week or twice a month. That would add immeasurably more to the quality of the newspaper.”
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Lynch has been e-mailing me a lot lately. Like my anonymous savant and lots of commenters on my blog, he has plenty to say about the Sun-Times Media Group, which is bankrupt and on the brink of oblivion but might be saved if its unionized employees—Newspaper Guild members in particular—agree to tear up their contracts and accept the draconian terms of financier James Tyree. If they don’t, says Tyree, his investment group’s $25 million bid for the STMG’s newspapers and other assets will be taken off the table.
Lynch brings pretty impressive insider credentials to the task of weighing in on the STMG, and better yet, he’s willing to say some of what he thinks for the record. At the moment he’s living in Florida and out of work, but from February 2006 to June 2008 he was editor and publisher of the STMG’s Naperville Sun, a tabloid published six days a week, and seven weekly Suns in nearby towns that he dismisses as “basically shoppers.” Lynch’s background is in down-market tabloids—as a senior editor not just at the New York Daily News but also at Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, and not just at the Post but also at supermarket titles such as the Star, Globe, and National Examiner.
“(a) He has to bust the unions—there’s no way around it. It’s just today’s reality.
“Just kidding.”
Lynch tells me he hung “The Day the Lawns Weren’t Mowed” headline on a local landscaper who gave his Mexican workers the day off with pay so they could go to the rally in Chicago. Yes, he says, the headline was “too subtle” and was in fact a desperate attempt to tie a local angle to a story that had nothing to do with Naperville. At the next day’s news meeting, he says, “they crucified me.” But live and learn. Fact is, he says, he shortened the stories in the Sun but insisted they cover real Naperville news, and as a result circulation stopped shrinking and actually grew a little.
