The 2,000-foot Chicago Spire isn’t being built for Chicagoans, Paul O’Connor was explaining to me. “The fundamental idea of the place is to be a global pied-a-terre for the superrich from the Persian Gulf states, east Asia, Russia, western Europe, and South America. The spire is a metaphor for ‘global city,’ just as ‘one-newspaper town’ is its antithesis.”
I went to him the other day for his take on the tattered state of the Chicago press. Say the stricken Sun-Times dies—will that mean a hill of beans to a sheik from Bahrain pricing suites in the spire? My own feeling is that it might, and that it should. O’Connor tore into the subject:
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Sam Zell took over the Tribune preaching “relevance.” The word can mean nothing in the wrong hands, but O’Connor thinks the paper’s new owner is on to something. To O’Connor, relevance is a meeting of content, language, and audience at a “harmonic spot.” It’s a newspaper in tune with its readers. “When I look at Zell I say, ‘Hallelujah. There’s a chance. There’s a fresh perspective.’ You have enough people at the Tribune to effectively march against Indiana, and what do they do? They’re a bunch of MBAs who don’t know the street, they don’t know where the city’s going.
O’Connor believes the Tribune should send its staff out into the world to look for stories that matter to Chicago and explain how they do. He thinks David Greising is the paper’s “poster child.” From 1998 to 2003, Greising wrote a column for the front page of the business section that had the vigor and sass of a sports column. In 2003 the Trib tried to move the column to page two, so Greising stopped writing it. The shift of pages would have changed the message from “you’ve got to read this guy” to “he’s not so important.” O’Connor thinks the paper lost its nerve. “He got his legs cut out from under him. I think there was squawking from the business side that he punched too hard, so they dropped him into the brass chipper.”
Today he’d be googling. Royko grew up over his old man’s bar. Maybe the next one is now a kid sweeping out the family’s Internet cafe. v
