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She wrote: “The office ghosts live on as long as people who knew them are in the office. For a while to come, some people around here will still hear Mitch or Ken picking up the phone and saying, ‘Copy desk,’ or see Charlie striding through the newsroom one last time, wearing his guitar.” Charlie is columnist Charles Madigan, and he tells me he read Schmich and “blubbered.” But Madigan, in the grip of strong emotions, had hoped to say goodbye for himself. He’d even written a farewell column. The Tribune decided not to print it. The message to Madigan wasn’t “Don’t slam the paper on your way out” — his column bubbled over with good will. Madigan explains to me that the ghosts will be slipping away over the next several weeks and the Tribune doesn’t want a series of them pausing at the door to issue public valedictories.
“If you give honestly, it gives back in so many ways. What more could a person ask for? To readers, it could be that literacy is in collapse, but it could also be it’s just not as easy to make money in newspapers as it was a decade ago so executives are crying the blues, with Wall Street serving as a greedy Greek chorus. None of that really matters if you maintain your own commitment to reading and thinking about all kinds of things, which is what good newspaper work is all about.”
