Tuesday, October 9, 2007
News / News Bites A Crazy Idea--It Just Might Not Work!
Posted by Michael Miner on Tue, Oct 9, 2007 at 8:50 PM
As someone close to the Daily Southtown just said, if you like to read about Mount Carmel football, you'll love the new Southtown. To save money, the Sun-Times Media Group is merging the biweekly Star into the Southtown. Painful but necessary, I suppose. And to save more money, or perhaps to make the Southtown less competitive with the flagship Sun-Times downtown, the Southtown is dropping pro sports. Like jumping off a cliff to avoid stampeding buffalo, it's a move that might make sense but still be suicide. The Southtown's pro beat writers held their own with the press box crews of the bigger dailies.
The no comments at the Southtown Tuesday went all the way up the chain of command, and I was finally directed to a corporate spokeswoman downtown who wasn't in.
UPDATE: I reached the Media Group's Tammy Chase Wednesday morning, and she said that in the future the Southtown's pro sports coverage will be picked up from other Media Group papers -- that is, from the Sun-Times. "We have a finite number of sports reporters," Chase said, reminding me that the merger will save money by shrinking the pool of reporters now at the two papers. "Our bread and butter is local news. If we want to survive, this is the way to go. People want local, local, local." The Media Group is estimating that the merger will save it $3 million. The two papers become one in mid-November, and the name of the combined paper has not been announced.
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Does this diverge from from TV stations dropping sports from their newscasts, or newspapers dropping stock listing from their business sections? The Internet has changed the landscape.
They might have done it as a business decision but more media outlets should cut back on coverage of pro sports. This year we've seen the cheating football coach, the felony quarterback, and a field littered with drug users and drunk drivers. Maybe giving the kids some ink will be good for all of us.
the southtown has gotten much worse over the past few years. i finally cancelled my subscription last week. the paper relies too heavily on big graphics/pictures, wire stories and feel-good, 'fluff' pieces to occupy its print space. now that they're dumping pro sports coverage, the paper becomes one step above the local high school papers or the free weeklies that end up at your doorstep. the last straw for me was when they did a full-page lay-out on their sportswriter who played in a celebrity golf tournament. big f'n deal. i'm done with that paper and hope others will be as well.
How soon before Creative Living lowers the boom on this waste of space? Couldn't come soon enough.
Why is Michael a waste of space? How about giving some reasons to your post--or are you just trying to be an asshole? And what does this have to do with the Southtown?
Southsider is an asshole.
hey stop examining your own bellybuttons and think. makes sense to have two guys on same payrool side by side in press box rewriting handouts from the team's PR hack? dropping pro sports would mean not having it in the paper. that's not what this is about, you self-indulgent dopes
Southsider sounds like a disgruntled pisswad. Clearly he doesn't actually read the paper because there's almost no wire in it, and next to no graphics. Losing their own pro sports beat writers will be tough. They really did hold their own against the metros. One of their top guys was pilfered by the Sun-Times for the Sox beat. Consolidation in the media saves money, but doesn't help readers. On the other hand, readers are turning away from papers too much for them to be able to afford all that variety.
The Sun-Times company seems to do the right things with the Southtown and Star, only five years late (to put it charitably). A merger between the two papers seemed like a forgone conclusion back when they were put under the same roof in Tinley Park about 10 years ago. So of course it happens now. The web sites for all of their papers were given a late-1990s facelift last year, and they are still so antiquated that I don't even bother reading more than one or two articles. The merger is a good idea, however I am convinced the execution of it will be mishandled.
Taking away pro sports writers from the Southtown is a big disappointment. The pro sports writers add a southsiders perspective to pro sports (which is what the Southtown was designed to do). Jeff Vorva from the Southtown's comments are often quoted by others and I have heard him on WGN radio-truly his opinions are valued. I would favor keeping pro sports with Southtown sports writers for the "Southtown perspective"-otherwise why not just buy the Sun Times?
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