Friday, June 25, 2010
Media / News Bites Alison True Fired as Reader Editor
Posted by Michael Miner on 06.25.10 at 01:49 PM
- Karen Kring
I consider this act unfathomable — a tragic misjudgment by two people, Draper and Petty, whom I respect. I suppose they have a vision of tomorrow's Reader they think True is wrong for. Change is in the air — design consultant Ron Reason has just finished helping Creative Loafing's Atlanta paper overhaul itself, and he's due in Chicago in a few weeks to add his two cents here. True, in the last couple of years, had to fire some extraordinary journalists — among them writers John Conroy, Steve Bogira, Tori Marlan, and Harold Henderson. The original leaders of Creative Loafing had saddled her with a budget under which she couldn't afford them — I got that, though a lot of readers understandably didn't. But operating within a drastically smaller budget, True produced a Reader that did what it could still afford to do at a level that maintained its traditional standards.
I mourn True — who's as good a friend as I have — and hope for the best for those standards.
UPDATE: Alison Draper says that Ron Reason is not booked to participate in any sort of retooling of the Reader. She writes: "The Reader has not engaged Ron Reason on any projects. I have not determined the timeline for a redesign, nor engaged any designers in initial conversation. The leadership team at the Chicago Reader will determine when and if a redesign is to take place. We will collaborate around which designer(s) best understands the needs of the Chicago Reader and its audience and can best assist in the process of evaluating brand-centric creative options."
Comments (93)
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Regular readers are probably aware of the esteem in which I hold longtime contributor Lee Sandlin. To get a sense of what Alison's meant to the Reader (and being comparatively new, I can't pretend to have a full grasp of what that means), I would encourage you to read Sandlin's dedication to Alison True:
http://leesandlin.com/site/dedication.htm
I'm heartbroken.
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The Reader in its current iteration is a superb publication, keeping its traditional long-form stories and in-depth reporting side-by-side with an easy-to-use website and solid, reliable listings - and very good tweets and facebook updates. I don't know what else the money-people can expect than what you guys already turn out.
WHAT. I gasped out loud when I saw this. Alison was great to me when I was an intern and took the time to cultivate new writers, as well as manage an insane workload as more and more editors were laid off. I am so baffled. Sure, people whine about the Reader getting smaller/laying off fantastic writers, but she had to work within very difficult budgetary constraints. Seems like a bit of killing the messenger here. Alison, I hope you land on your feet okay. This is totally undeserved, from my outsiders' viewpoint.
Katie
I'm very saddened to hear this. I've been working with Alison at the Reader since the late 80s--in fact, I'm pretty sure she gave me my first assignment. I've always held her in high regard and felt sympathy for her being stuck in the middle between the new owners and a staff that she clearly loved and respected.
Having a hard time believing/accepting this. I began writing for Alison when I was still in college and she was an editorial assistant back in the mid-80s and always found her and still find her to be incredibly astute.
My professional association with Alison goes back almost twenty years now, and I would have to call it one of the great experiences of my life. Everything I wrote from the early 90s till a few years ago, I wrote with her in mind: I thought of her as my ideal audience for my most envelope-pushing experiments in feature journalism. Of course that changed when the Reader changed, and she no longer had the room for my favorite kind of work -- but she was constantly trying to find ways of coaxing me back anyway. And leaving aside how much I owe her, just think of how much this town owes her: even when the Reader was basically reduced to panhandling for spare change to pay its contributors, Alison was still running amazing journalism every week. Firing her is a monumentally stupid decision.
So what's the Reader's next move? Outsource editorial duties to the Trib just like they're going to do with circulation?
I'm having a hard time grasping this. As a journalist in this town, though one who has never had the pleasure of working with Allison, I'm appalled. As a news consumer, I'd saddened and worried about the Reader's future direction. Having been unaware of budgetary constrains prior to today, I am amazed at what Allison could do with what little she had. This strikes me as a total injustice.
I had the pleasure of working with Alison over the past year and found it challenging and always worthwhile. I have no insight into the machinations of the newspaper industry but doubt very much that there's any sense to this move...
I was lucky enough to work at the Reader for a couple of years, and I look back on that time as the most valuable experience I've had in journalism. Most of what I know about good writing and editing I learned from Alison and the paper she ran so well---even when it was owned by people who often seemed actively determined to run it into the ground. I don't know how to express how saddening it is to hear she's been let go.
I've worked with her only briefly, but Alison True has impressed me as an editor of high integrity and intelligence.
MM- what happened to not ending sentences with a preposition? Like "for" in your article?
I love the Reader. Great content, with credible long form reporting. My one gripe: why is the section "What the Reader's Reading" not updated daily? Someone has been slacking.
I've written for a lot of local and national publications, but the standards for writing, editing, and reporting that I learned at the Reader are still the highest, hands down.
I assure you, Mr. Harley, that nobody at the Reader has been slacking. Not Alison, not anybody.
Oh, Jeffrey. You win today's contest for best "Lamenting the scattered deck chairs on the Titanic" moment.
I checked my phone at a stoplight and was so appalled and saddened that I had to pull over. Alison True is one of the best editors I've worked with. One of those editors who you still wanted to work for/with even though she couldn't pay you as much with the budget cuts. Who championed and helped shape stories that kept the true grit and characters of Chicago above ground, not buried. This is a sad, sad day.
Alison True is a superb editor and manager. The Best of Chicago has just walked out the door.
The Velvet Lounge loses Fred Anderson and the Chicago Reader loses Alison True, both in the same week. Must be the season for tearing the hearts out of things.
At least Alison is still with us in life, so that we only have to mourn her as our editor.
Terrible news. Hopefully Alison will land somewhere where upper management will appreciate her.
Alison has shepherded many, many fine pieces of journalism during her tenure and succeeded longer than most in an increasingly demanding field. I wish her well.
I thought this was some sort of inside joke when I saw the headline link going around twitter earlier. I can only hope the Reader doesn't become a street rag of bite-sized stories and pop-colored headlines paired with an ad-heavy, flashy website of quick hit info. (That is perhaps a more powerful statement when I add that I work in advertising design and run two music blogs.) I like the Reader because it has always played on it's own field and never needed to step into that world to be a recognized voice. And, it still doesn't. I thank Alison for her effort and for giving me a path to aspire to.
Truly a sad day for Reader writers and Reader readers. Alison has always been a great, generous editor to work with, someone who said yes to weird stories no one else would have touched. I am grateful that I had the chance to work with her for the past six years.
As I have watched from afar as the Reader has been redesigned, restructured and resold I always thought that the core of what made the Reader distinctive and sustainable could carry the company through the turmoil in the media industry. Now with this latest news about Alison, I'm beginning to think this is the beginning of the end. I still think no one person makes the Reader special. It really is the work and culture of a whole lot of special people. But so many things and people have been cut or diminished that I'm really afraid that the Reader will die by a thousand cuts. I hope that's not true. Chicago needs the Reader's distinctive voice.
As a long time Reader reader, I am moved by this outpouring of emotion, appreciation, and support from Allison's colleagues. It will, I hope, be a consolation to her on what certainly has been a painful day.
What the ____!!!
There is no short epitaph that would sum up what Alison was to the Reader through the many, many, many years she spent there trying to make it, like everyone who has ever worked there tried, a perfect thing of beauty.
This is sad news-- and a big mistake on the part of management. Much of the Reader's success over the past many years and its 'voice' is indirectly due to Alison True being at the helm of the paper's editorial ship.
Though I only worked with Alison very briefly on a couple of stories I wrote which appeared in the Reader in 2003, I knew her again- and again briefly- when I joined the Reader's ad sales team less than two weeks before the paper was acquired by Creative Loafing in 2007. Needless to say, the ship went down from there, and I resigned 11 months later to go back to a former employer.
Despite the onset of phrases like 'urban explorer' which came from Creative Loafing mgmt (one of whom accompanied me on a sales call to a potential bar advertiser in Wicker Park and kept idiotically saying to the person that we were trying to sell to that we would help him "capture the urban explorers of Atlanta!" - wtf? we were in chicago?!) to these "brand-centric creative options" Draper speaks of, each week I pick up the Reader and I am thankful that much of its content is still very strong. This is no accident-- it is due to Alison's influence.
Having known someone who was cut from the editorial team because he was too senior, even he knew it was nothing personal and it was all about money and the bottom line. It's obvious and unanimous from all of the posters and comments that Alison has been able to make more out of an increasing amount of less these past few years... and now they've let go of who is best about the Reader too.
The Reader has lost its mind, disposed of its arms and legs, and now, its heart. Godspeed to Alison, and to the remaining vital organs left in her wake.
So now the Reader is at the mercy of a Florida CEO who did such a good job at her last job they let her go, and an "acting" publisher du jour from Texas whose last great accomplishment was cutting the frequency of the publication she managed from daily to weekly. I'm sure, Mike, they're absolutely lovely people, but they seem less like saviors than Atalaya vultures.
Without Alison True, I would never have become a writer on architecture, but not even that can tarnish Alison's reputation as an exemplary editor who cared about developing writers and nurturing distinctive outlooks that made for compelling stories. Week after week, Alison put out a product whose quality frequently put Chicago's two dailies to shame. My suspicion is that Alison's unforgivable crime was that her commitment to that quality made her an obstacle to those absentee landlords who seek a cheaper, more blandly marketable, more generically modular Reader whose content can be created largely on autopilot from the home office in Florida.
For management to dismiss Alison is a huge misfortune for the Reader and an outrage to its readers. What would be a tragedy, however, would be for Chicago to lose her entirely. We can only hope that a major publication that still retains some capacity for judging talent will snap her up - and quickly.
I was fortunate enough to establish myself as a writer with feature stories for the Reader in its glory years. I had the latitude to write about almost anything that interested me - and the trust and first-rate editing of people like Alison True, Mike Miner, and Kitry Krause. To say that I am appalled by this action is to be guilty of the grossest understatement.
Sarah Bryan Miller
Says Ms. Draper: "We will collaborate around which designer(s) best understands the needs of the Chicago Reader and its audience and can best assist in the process of evaluating brand-centric creative options."
What sort of brain-dead corporate fuckstick writes a sentence as ugly, empty, and meaningless as that?
There's not much I can add that hasn't already been nicely stated in the comments above except to say that I'm enormously grateful to Alison for her kindness and encouragement and that I hope that the personal and professional generosity she's put out there over the years will come back her way many times over.
I'm not sure which Reader everyone else here has been reading the past five to eight years.
But the editorial content of the paper has been VERY inconsistent. Some cover stories like Robert Loerzel's recent piece on public transit have been great. And pretty much you know any cover story by Dumke and/or Joravsky is going to kick ass and make someone in city hall cry like a baby. But more often than not, I can barely suppress a yawn trying to get through the first page of many cover stories in recent years.
Years back, nearly every week the Reader's cover story would be a hard hitting piece that would grab you by your lapels and slap you right in the face. Sometimes you couldn't bear to put it down. There was some seriously excellent journalism going on then.
The consistency was excellent, although the length of these articles were often prohibitive. Of course, the recent state of the newspaper industry in general, and the declining number of editorial inches everywhere, would make any editor's job much more difficult.
And while within the last 12 months, things have improved mildly, overall the Reader has seen better days.
The idea of objectivity in reporting is often thrown out the door on many stories. The flaming left wing stance of the paper is so all encompassing, I can't recall, in 20+ years of reading that newspaper, a story or column of any type that even tried to represent or report fairly on an issue from the right side of the political spectrum.
To my mind, perhaps Ms. True's abrupt firing will be a fresh start for the paper to rediscover or even reinvent itself.
In my opinion, the Reader needs to re-double its commitment to the type of journalism and story telling that made it a weekly must read over a decade ago, lose that smirking left wing attitude and perhaps make some of their current writers take a refresher course in the fundamentals of objective reporting that ultimately best serve the (lower case r) reader.
I don't know Alison True. But after reading all the comments here, I fear for this publication without her. The Reader is enormously important to Chicago in the absence of a serious local daily. Speaking more personally, it helps me feel at home here. It's the only publication--the only one--that routinely surprises and informs me and rudely grabs my attention. I appreciate that.
How can we help? How can readers help to liberate this institution from, as others have noted, its idiot out-of-town corporate ownership. The Reader needs to be locally owned and safely in the black. Let's all think about this and then act. Maybe we can get Allison True and some of the other great people who once worked at the Reader back.
And let's launch that discussion on this thread. Having dropped the non-serious local dailies, I (for one) have some spare change. I'd be willing to shell out, say, $5 a week for a copy of a reinvigorated Reader liberated from editorial interference by Creative Loafing. How that would be collected and how a non-free Reader would be distributed I don't know. But let's think about it and get something going before it's too late.
This is it, folks. If the Reader goes the way of RedEye, we're all really, really, and I mean REALLY screwed.
Wow is right! This is a terrible mistake on the part of the owners. They are slowly but surely casting off that which is the soul of the Reader. Chicago will be worse off for this poor decision. I just hope True hooks up with a better, smarter company.
Mr. Timble, there is certainly an overall liberal point of view to the Reader - but I wrote major features for the cover and inside from a libertarian/conservative point of view, on subjects ranging from gun control to survivalism to homelessness. The Reader isn't as monochromatic as you would have it.
I can't believe this. This is absolutely ridiculous. I have such high hopes for the future of this paper, not anymore.
Ms. Miller,
I'm glad to hear the Reader's coverage is not quite as one-sided as I thought. But, as an avid and longtime Reader reader, as well as an insatiable consumer of the news, the VAST majority of that newspaper's point of view leans leftward--and in many cases there's not even the pretense of hiding it. Often, the one-sided coverage of an issue would produce poorly reported stories and again, the reader gets the short end of the stick.
Even if you factor in the stories you have written for the newspaper and consider those stories on the right or Libertarian side of the political spectrum, those edit inches would show up as a rounding error, as it would account for such a tiny percentage of the Reader's stories.
It's my contention, that the best news reporting is done with the goal of objectivity. And often the Reader comes up short on this. While I don't expect any human to be 100% objective trying to report a story, but at least, with the help of an editor, a reporter should be able to come close. To me, there's something wrong with an editorial department when so many stories lack objectivity even after a series of editors look over a story before publication.
Sometimes a drastic shakeup like this is good for the health of a publication or any organization or group for that matter. Sometimes, events like this turn out to be healthy for both parties. Perhaps Ms. True has been at the Reader too long.
However, it's my guess, a person with the vast experience and journalistic pedigree like Ms. True will not be on the job market for very long.
Here's hoping to a stronger, better, aggressive, more objective Chicago Reader, and a new, challenging and better paying position for Ms. True.
Mr. Timble -
"A fresh start for the paper to rediscover or even reinvent itself."
Check out Creative Loafing's other journals if you want a taste of the future. These are today's lead-ins on CL's websites for journals in other cities:
CL Atalanta - "Gilbert Godfried Told Me Some Dirty Jokes"
CL Charlotte - "Cover Run: The DC Comics Art of Adam Hughes"
Washington City Paper - "Fort Reno Schedule"; Olde Tyme Misogyny Cartoon Corner"; and "What Does It Mean That Al Gore's Accuser Saved Her Pants?"
CL Sarasota - "Cook to Bang: The Lay Cook's Guide To Getting Laid"
CL Tamap - "Pride Day Survey" Is U.S. Soccer Superstar Landon Donovan Gay?"
Doesn't seem like the Reader's going "to re-double its commitment to the type of journalism and story telling that made it a weekly must read over a decade ago ..."
But check it out for yourself - http://www.creativeloafing.com/
Mr. Timble -
"It's my contention, that the best news reporting is done with the goal of objectivity."
Absolutely, without a doubt, and particularly in mainstream news media reporting. However, everyone has a point of view, and I personally prefer to know where reporters stand. (As a certain notable Cook County politician said at his first news media dinner event, "Most of you covered (my campaign). All of you voted for me.")
I wrote about survivalism at a time when the mainstream (including Mother Tribune) was portraying it as the exclusive purview of dangerous right-wing nutcakes. I talked to some people who saw it more as a matter of self-sufficiency and precautions. (What to do when the power goes out, or there's an earthquake, or civil unrest?) Thanks to the Reader, an alternative viewpoint (libertarian, not Libertarian per se) got some coverage.
At its worst, of course, the Reader is predictable. At its best, it provides alternative angles for viewing a subject, and a starting point for other outlets. That's worth maintaining.
Alison hired me as the greenest of green editors in 1998 and, over almost 10 years, was the best boss at the best job I'll probably ever have. She, and everyone at the Reader, taught me the value of skepticism in reporting and precision in language. Constitutionally immune to making a scene, she is a professional role model of the first order and I consider myself very, very lucky to have had the benefit of her support and expertise. I'll spare the internet the rest of my current, less charitable thoughts on the matter.
alison was my editor for years -- crucial years for my development as a writer and as a human being. i learned lots about writing but also about diplomacy and decency. godspeed, indeed, alison. thank you for everything.
Two further points, prompted by these fascinating posts.
First, about Mr. Timble's idea that the Reader used to be "objective" and but lately under Alison's lead has somehow been transformed into nothing but liberal propaganda -- this kind of charge from conservatives about the Reader's politics has a long history. In fact I was hearing it back in my earliest days of writing for the Reader, more than twenty-five years ago, when Alison was (if I recall correctly) still working in the Reader mailroom. It went along with another charge I often heard back then -- only this one came from the left: that the Reader had once upon a time been a voice for progressive politics but had lately sold out to rightwing corporate America. I once wrote a long essay about World War 2, and I got several angry letters and phone calls from people who called themselves longtime Reader readers, and who were furious with me because I hadn't followed a Marxist interpretation of Hitler. To them it was proof that the old reliably leftwing Reader had been ruined by effete apolitical types like me...
Second, let me just mention my reaction to the corporate-speak emitted by Ms. Draper. I don't wish unemployment on anybody, particularly not Alison, but if she's been having to listen to a lot of that kind of thing lately, maybe being fired isn't an unmixed misfortune.
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Alison Draper on why she fired Alison True as editor of the Chicago Reader
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