Tuesday, September 16, 2008
News / News Bites Chicago Reader publisher Michael Crystal resigns
Posted by Michael Miner on Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 7:22 PM
Michael Crystal resigned Tuesday as publisher of the Chicago Reader. It was a job he'd held through four-plus complicated years. During that time the print edition was redesigned twice, the company was sold by its original owners to Creative Loafing Inc. of Tampa, and the staff was reduced by roughly half. The process of reinvention Crystal oversaw continues: this week the paper launches a pullout music section and some more design updates.
The interim publisher is Kirk MacDonald, who, in addition to being COO of Creative Loafing, runs a marketing firm in Denver. Earlier, MacDonald was CEO of the Denver Newspaper Agency, publisher of the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post. He expects to spend three days a week in Chicago. The new associate publisher, and Crystal's heir apparent, is Steve Timble, the founding publisher of Time Out Chicago, launched in 2005. Timble left TOC abruptly in 2006 after a falling out with his bosses and joined the national ad sales force of the New York Times.
In a brief conversation in his office after his announcement at an afternoon staff meeting, Crystal described himself as a general manager type of publisher at a time when the Reader needs top-down expertise in developing ad sales. Crystal, who never gave up his home in Seattle and will be moving back there, was an unruffled sort of executive whose manner recalled the good old days at the Reader, when there was nothing much to get ruffled about. Those of us who remember those days remember them fondly.
Comments (12)
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Steve Timble will learn quickly that declining ad sales at the Reader are not the fault of Mike Crystal. They are, however, the result of a set of much larger issues that Creative Loafing chooses to ignore.
Less content, fewer in-depth stories that take time and talent, more filler, and an earlier day of publication that often negates correct movie times (even though the paper is often hard to find before Thursday). What's not to love?
I think you will find the movie showtimes as correct as they've ever been, if not always as complete. They're also updated online as soon as theaters make them available.
Rumors abound that VVM is making a play for this publication again since the CL folks don't have a clue about how to compete in Chicago and want out before they lose even more money on this deal, and will bringing in their "ad sharks" from Texas/Denver as well as revamp the entire editorial staff,look for heads to roll before in 4th Q or 1st Q 2009!
"Negates correct movie times" -- that's what is typed above. To my mind the absence of movie times in your paper equals incorrect movie times. Great, they're on the Reader's internet site, like a zillion other sites. That's a great help to anyone standing outside a theater or restaurant trying to plan a quick visit to the movies. Movie times, like where a band is playing or whether a play is good, sadly, is the main, if not only reason a great many Reader 'readers' look to the paper for. And it may have happened, but I don't remember ever seeing blank movie times two weeks in a row when the paper published on Thursday. Now it's worth noting when the times for the River East 21 show up two weeks in a row.
Got a cell phone, John? Try Google SMS. Txt "m chicago" to 466453 (GOOGLE). Voila. The listings are useful, but as far as I'm concerned, the Reader could stop running movie listings and use that space for running longer stories again.
John- If you are outside the theater, why not just look at the marquee for showtimes?
John, the content problems you refer to started years before CL arrived. It's been a slippery slope.
Jimmy, obviously content has been on a slide almost industry wide the past decade. Fewer ad dollars lead to less content, less content leads to fewer readers, leads to even fewer ad dollars. But quite clearly the lack of content accelerated under Creative Loafing. Not long before CL took over the Reader printed an excellent and extremely brave piece on Scientology and a number of connections to Chicago. While the frequency of that sort of endeavor may have slowed, even dramatically, under the prior regime, there's been nothing like that with the current one. And as CL looks for ways to fill the Reader with out of town content from sister publications, I doubt we ever will.
The Scientology story was published in 2002, about the time the Reader began to decline. The writer was Tori Marlan, who got canned along with John Conroy, Steve Bogira and Harold Henderson. All those names were synonymous with the kind of feature writing you praise the Reader for publishing. Looking at the staff box now, I am sad by the lack of writers, yet there seems to be as many editors as always. Someone in charge must have very, very bad judgment.
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