"Even if you’re an old-school journalist who despises fancy words like ‘content’ and ‘synergy'"

Perhaps at some point it will eventually hit me how in the world anyone could despise (or even just dislike) the word "content". Right now, I have absolutely no clue. It's just a more specific word than "product" and a more general word than "news". I can understand "synergy" because it is a word that can sometimes be associated with layoffs and reorganizations. But "content" I am baffled by.

"Ferro was already on the board of the CNC, a two-year-old purveyor of public interest journalism. "

If people want to talk about being annoyed by certain words or phrases I would say that "public interest journalism" would be close to the top of the list. The phrase is somewhat ironic because many people use the phrase specifically to describe content that they believe the public does not have enough interest in to support a certain amount of journalism that they think is beneficial. And the phrase also implies that the public does not have an interest in other types of journalism. I wouldn't say I despise the phrase but I do find it rather strange and annoying.

" Otherwise, what we have is a paper and a chain now controlled by white, male, North Shore Republican types"

I'm not sure what people's party affiliation has to do with anything. You may be unaware of this, but Republicans don't generally bite. Many of them are actually are very nice people. Far more than not at any given moment in time over the last few decades, both Chicago newspaper companies were controlled by Republican owners or CEOs but the newspaper was likely edited by a Democrat. So it doesn't seem to make much of a difference what party affiliation the people who control the company are. And I certainly don't understand what their race or gender has to do with this.

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Yet another newspaper executive who plans to put digital first. Isn't it odd that every major paper in the country is doing almost the same thing and nearly every one of them is failing? Miserably. You'd think some bold idea would crop up somewhere, some willingness to experiment. The only variation is whether to set up a paywall, which isn't working for even the New York Times. And no wonder, as the whole paywall concept actually penalizes a publication's most loyal readers. ("You like us? You really, really like us? So much that you come back again and again to read more than 20 stories a month and see all the ads? So, pay up, schmuck!")

Putting together a successful but cheapo, nearly staff-free site like Cars.com is the exact polar opposite of putting out a news product that, to be worth a damn, requires lots of generously compensated, professional editors and reporters who have the time to cover a beat and write infrequently enough that they can bring to the task some thought, knowledge and depth when they do sit down at the keyboard. Assigning a digital-first guy to reshape a newspaper is like asking a confectioner to design a bulldozer.

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I can't say what needs to be done to make Sun-Times Media thrive from a business perspective. But as a news organization, it needs more staff. Talk to anyone who subscribes to their papers and they'll say the same thing - there's nothing in it. You can't expect people to keep paying for something and spending their time looking at it when they don't feel like they're getting anything out of it. The Aurora Beacon News covers dozens of schools, yet it has one sports reporter to cover those and the local colleges. That's better than the Naperville Sun and Elgin Courier, which have none. The Elgin Courier has two reporters to cover a dozen towns. The Naperville Sun's editor was laid off and not replaced, so who directs the coverage? Most of the copy editors and designers in the suburbs were laid off, so now the paper will be edited and designed by folks in Chicago who neither know nor care about the suburbs. I'm sure they'll do a great job though. And there's a really high likelihood that they'll recognize when a councilman's name is misspelled by the freelancer who is writing the story that used to be written by a staff member who would have spent years learning that beat and the pertinent issues.

I used to work for one of those suburban papers and was fortunate enough to leave because I found a new job, not because I was laid off like most of my other colleagues. My dad - who proudly proclaims that if there's only one paper left in the country, he will subscribe to it, because he likes reading the paper that much - says all the time that he should just cancel the paper he gets because there's nothing in it. Now if he can no longer see the value, can you really expect anyone else to see it? Sun-Times Media is in a vicious cycle of staff cuts which lead to poorer content, which leads to fewer readers, which leads to less ad revenue, which leads to more staff cuts. Someone needs to figure out how to stop this cycle.

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It's not time to empty our bladders on this development yet. Give them a chance to see what they can do. You can parse yourself right into a conclusion that nothing can ever work given the track record of only print or only digital. The other component of this is the embrace of technology by the wider culture. Are the people who are most interested in good journalism also most prepared to get it across a variety of platforms? We'll see. It all smells like opportunity to me for people who are willing to forget about old models, ignore the gurus who say it's all about marketing and construct something that reflects what is important for the people who need to know what is going on. Also, we have yet to see much of a model constructed from the bottom on up based on the revenue it CAN produce instead of some fantasy model that tries to meet the revenues levels it once produced. There is an opportunity to try that here. So good luck!

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ditto madigan….w/ this off-the-top suggestion….they need to go out & hire some damn gifted psychics & give them all the assignment of channeling the likes of Will Rogers, Sydney J. Harris, Ben Hecht, Ernie Pyle, H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann, Jimmy Breslin, et al….need ‘em more than ever.

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