Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In this week’s column I come down pretty hard on the Tribune, not an unusual thing for me to be doing. Sometimes I wonder if I have a lifelong animus against the Tribune that goes back to the days when I was a dashing young reporter at the Sun-Times and we were certain we had it all over the fusty old Tribune when it came to street smarts, imagination, panache, and getting high on the pure adrenaline rush of knocking your socks off with a story.
If you tell me this doesn’t look good, I can’t disagree. If the Tribune protests, I’ve got no haughty comeback. I can’t even insist that time will show I remain as willing to dish it out to one side as the other—because I’m not sure time will. Over the last many months, I’m pretty sure I’ve written at greater length, and more critically, about the Tribune than I have the Sun-Times, and I expect this pattern to continue. The reason is that the Tribune is simply—and by far—the more serious and substantive of the two papers, and I read it much more closely. Moreover, I see the Tribune doubling down on substance, raising its bet on what is to my mind serious journalism. And, because more serious, more provocative. I often want to talk back to John Kass—and I do. But, really, I don’t have anything to say to the Sun-Times‘s Daily Splash.
