Richard Longworth’s travels through the heartland took him to the newsroom of one of the midwest’s largest newspapers. Longworth, a retired Chicago Tribune globe-trotter who’s now a fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, doesn’t want to embarrass the paper by naming it, but its influence once extended far beyond the city it served. Over the past few decades, though, it’s slowly declined—much like that city, and much like the entire midwest.
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Longworth told me this story in a recent exchange of e-mails after I’d finished reading his new book, Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism. In his telling, the midwest is a region largely abandoned by heavy industry, conquered by corporate agriculture, and occupied by immigrant workers essential to the economies of desperate towns whose natives loathe them. Longworth’s midwest reminded me of America’s south half a century ago—a failing region mired in a romanticized past. But if the lost war and jim crow scarred the south, they also united it. The midwest must learn to think globally and act regionally, Longworth insists, but today it’s state against state, county against county, town against town. Decades of good pay for rote work on the assembly lines of patriarchal corporations deadened the spirit of entrepreneurism, in Longworth’s view, and when those corporations eventually moved their plants south and then overseas midwesterners were left naked to their obsolescence.
Longworth spends little space on newspapers in his book because in his view they didn’t cause the problem and they’re not playing much of a role in solving it. But I found myself envying the south for its legendary editors who stood tall against the Klan and White Citizens Council. “I wouldn’t draw too tight a parallel,” Longworth advised me. “For one thing, there were precious few of these courageous southern editors—so few that we probably know most of their names—Harry Ashmore, Hodding Carter, a few others… Second, it seems to me that the truly good ones didn’t necessarily have a deep intellectual capacity so much as a strong moral sense.”
Longworth was referring to the “Impact Study of Newspaper Readership” produced between 2000 and 2002 by NU’s Media Management Center, which at the time was run by John Lavine, now dean of the Medill school of journalism. What the research showed, the MMC reported, “is a strong reader appetite for news that is intensely local and personally relevant. In recent years newspapers have focused more and more on ‘local news’ [but] there is still a large, unrealized potential for local news of a particular kind…. It includes ‘chicken dinner’ news—community events—but is not limited to events. It includes stories about ordinary people, and it could be reasonably concluded that this extends to coverage of other news topics through their effects on ordinary people.”
But if he were Sam Zell, he’d be an entrepreneur who thinks the Tribune Company has been leaving a lot of money on the table but makes his own living by doing deals, not by creating. A genuine press lord might want to know more about Longworth’s idea, but Zell doesn’t claim to be one.v
