The way I heard it, Rick Kogan had sent a strong message to the barbarians at the gate—his job be damned if they didn’t like it. But when I called Kogan at the Tribune, he didn’t know what I was talking about. He thought he remembered using the word “nutty” to describe some of the memos raining down on the staff of the Tribune from the new owners. But nothing he could imagine them making a fuss about—and in fact no one at the Tribune had said a word to him about it.
“These are precarious times for that creature known as a newspaper columnist,” Kogan said. “These are precarious times for that thing so many of us love and know as a newspaper. Those of us at the Tribune a couple of weeks ago watched hundreds of years of experience walk out the door in a buyout. My friends at the Sun-Times:beleaguered by an impending sale. Those of us at the Tribune, besieged by these kind of deranged memos from the new bosses that we have”—this brought tittering from Kogan’s audience—”that as I read them seem to be telling us, reimagine, reinvent, reinvent.
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Anderson, who’s known Kogan since Kogan was a teenager, left the paper a year and a half ago but stays in touch. “I feel about my friends at the Tribune the same way I feel about the troops in Iraq,” he says. “I wish they’d get out of there and get safely home and into different jobs. It’s a really depressing place. The editors have always been kind of depressed anyway—they rarely make eye contact when you pass them in the corridor. So when you cut down on the number of reporters and you just have the core of editors it makes it more depressing, and they’re worried about their jobs and everything else. But Rick’s always been the defiant one.”
My point here is to think about/address/invent the new versions by dealing with the obvious first. . . . once that’s attacked, the other points will fall in line. A creative domino effect.
Abrams’s memo wasn’t the only text from the new regime that circulated in the Tower in the days just prior to the Terkel awards. Another was a news release announcing a new president of Tribune Interactive. The headline: “Surely You Can’t Be Serious?” Sample copy: “Marc Chase obviously blackmailed his way into a position he is not remotely qualified to hold. . . . EDUCASHION—Nearly Graduated with Honers School of Alabama in Atlanta Georgia 1985. COMMUNITY SERVICE—400 Hours (reduced from 600) Judge gave time off for good behavior.” The announcement was signed “Hugh Jass,” and it ended with a footnote that explained that the Tribune Company “is also becoming known for its sense of humor and for not taking itself or the industries in which it operates too seriously.” It was the sort of exercise anyone would laugh at who suspects laughter is now in his job description. Dawn Turner Trice refused to comment when I asked whether it influenced her choice of the word buffoons.
