The RedEye Guy
The kiosk has long since closed. Nobody reads the Sun-Times anymore, I muttered aloud. (This week, Sun-Times management began talks with the Newspaper Guild over the desperate paper’s plan to cut 35 guild jobs.) The RedEye man disagreed. “A few people read it,” he said. “Every day I see seven or eight come in.” Sure enough, just then someone entered the station carrying the Bright One. “That’s one of the eight,” he said.
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By six o’clock each morning three newspapers are lying on my front porch. They don’t get there by themselves. Last week two guys who were hired years ago to deliver the Tribune dropped by my house to talk. One eventually quit because, he said, he found himself getting less pay for more work.
“The Tribune pays very well,” said the English-speaking driver, “but they have a lot of stops in the middle between the Tribune and its drivers.” (He said Tribune division managers deal with the independent agencies, whose agents in turn hire the drivers.) When he started, he said, he was paid 17 cents for each Tribune he delivered, and when he quit it was down to 11 cents. He said the drivers like to think the Tribune has no idea this is going on. (Perhaps a bit like the serfs who said the czar would never permit this if he only knew.)
“Nothing,” he said.
Such is the life of the contract worker throughout the industry. The Tribune just raised the price of the daily paper from 50 cents to 75 cents. The other driver wasn’t expecting to see any of that 50 percent increase. In fact, he wasn’t aware there’d been a hike.
Greising said that in his meetings with the staff Zell talked a lot about relevance. “To me,” Greising said, relevance is “the Congo”—a reference to Paul Salopek’s report last month on that abbatoir of a country. “It’s the rain forest,” Greising went on. “It’s finding out what happens when cops shoot somebody”—a reference to an investigation Steve Mills and David Heinzmann worked on for six months and broke in December. “My guess is Zell would consider all those stories relevant. He’s a guy with businesses all over the world. And who can resist finding out more about the cops? That’s a universal story.
