When a new group of Chicago investors took Sun-Times Media off the hands of the old group last December for $20 million, one of the new owners drew me an exciting picture of the journalism Chicago could be in store for. The picture hinted at a communion between old media and new—to be specific, the legacy print daily and a young digital start-up with big aspirations and an impressive pedigree. “There’s no deal between the Chicago News Coop and the Sun-Times at the moment,” said Bruce Sagan, who sits on the board of the group that runs Sun-Times Media—and sat on the board of the recently shuttered CNC. “They are indeed organizations with their own goals. But the goals are not far apart. It’s a question if they can make it work. The Sun-Times needs personality, viewpoint. That can’t come from somebody else. But is there a lot of news out there that can be shared? My god!”
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About the same time that O’Shea was getting CNC up and running, the collection of daily and weekly papers that constitute Sun-Times Media had been bought out of bankruptcy by an investment group led by James Tyree, chairman and CEO of Mesirow Financial. The other day Canning called Tyree a “visionary,” in the sense that if buying Sun-Times Media made sense to Tyree it made much less sense to anyone else. “I had no idea why Tyree did it,” Canning told me. “I knew Jim. He was a very Chicago-centric guy. And maybe it was ‘I’m not going to let this iconic Chicago paper die.’”
At any rate, Tyree centralized and centralized some more, slashed his staffs, outsourced printing to the Tribune, sold off real estate, and nudged the operation into black ink. But last March Tyree, never in good health, suddenly died. A month later, O’Shea made a bold proposal to the CNC board.
Was the Times OK with that? I wonder.
O’Shea wanted to deliver news stories to the Sun-Times in the same way he’d been delivering them to the New York Times. But—and it was a big but—he wanted to charge the Sun-Times a lot more money. “The relationship with the New York Times provided significant seed money,” Canning says, “but it was only $15,000 a month for a product that cost a hell of a lot more to produce.”
O’Shea’s hope and belief had been that Michael Ferro, the man of a thousand ideas, had put very near the top of his list the idea of bringing new resources to the emaciated flagship paper. If that was the case, CNC had a lot to offer: the core of O’Shea’s operation was a cluster of senior reporters and editors from the Tribune. But it wasn’t the case. Ferro’s mind was running in other directions.
