By mid-September, a source at the Chicago Tribune tells me, that paper “will look and feel vastly different.” But however much the Trib changes, it won’t be presenting its reconfigured self as the newspaper of the future. The newspaper business has pretty well conceded that its future is online, which means the print Tribune is deciding how to dress smartly for its funeral.
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Seven years ago the Tribune labored for months to redesign itself to accommodate what today seems like a trifling exigency—the paper was narrowing its page by an inch to save on newsprint. Expensive design consultants were brought in and much of their advice was ignored—editors and readers alike wanted the new Tribune to look a lot like the old one. Today’s redesign is a crash project being done in-house, and nothing’s sacred. “Here’s the deal, Mike,” said the staffer I’ve traded e-mails with. “It’s not that the old guard is cautiously inching their way towards change. It’s a bunch of radio guys in an ivory tower telling us: you have to change. And you have 90 days to do it. Call me an eternal optimist, but that can be a great thing. It shakes us to the core.”
“RE-THINKING MEANS DUMBING DOWN: Usually does. But that’s the last thing we need to do in this era. Someone told me that the editorial people are not going to like what I offer, assuming re-thinking and re-inventing means introducing cheap tricks to jack up circulation. Ah.. . not exactly. It’s really all about looking at re-formatting so quality can have some breathing room and get seen more effectively. It’s unfortunate that in media, it usually IS dumbing down that is the quick fix. But I think our future is more about what some other industries are doing, or trying to do—Smarten.”
If they stay, then what goes instead? The chaff, I suppose: old-school news stories larded with detail and striving for “balance” yet reporting nothing that a reader who cares hasn’t already found on the Web; formulaic, celebrity-driven features.
That’s a transformational reform right there, even if it’s not significant enough on its own to blind readers to the collateral damage. Bottom line, my contact observed, is that “sections are getting cut and people are losing their jobs. We’ll be seeing the combination of sections. There is no word on how many people will be leaving, but the number on everybody’s lips is 100.”
