Your New Sunday Tribune?
A leaked dummy shows long stories on bright paper—with no ads. Would you pay for it?
By Michael Miner
When I describe the Tribune's top-secret project, everybody makes the same snarky comment. The Tribune is designing a weekly edition that it will offer subscribers for a surcharge. The premium content will consist of long, thoughtful reporting and commentary—local in its focus—on the news and cultural affairs. The inevitable comment is this: That's what the Tribune is already supposed to be doing.
Once upon a time perhaps it did. But the abbreviated coverage a diminished staff has been offering readers since Sam Zell took over has cleared out plenty of room for the Tribune to create a new product that's a quantum improvement. The Tribune is calling this new product by a rich and ancient name, Five Star—signifying the final edition, the one with the ball scores and theater reviews, the one a big city wakes up to in the morning. Sources tell me the Trib hopes to roll it out in January.
I've obtained a partial copy of a dummy. Five Star consists of four sections printed on heavy, expensive stock. They're called the A Section, Culture, Focus, and Words, and the first three—all but the tabloid literary section—are broadsheets, roughly 13 by 23 inches. That was a pretty standard size in the day when newspapers were newspapers, but it's zaftig by current standards, two inches wider than the present Tribune, which was narrowed by half an inch in 2007 and another inch in February. The dummy's 56 pages in all, with a coffee-table heft that sends a message: read me or don't, but your home will feel tonier for having me in it.
Maybe I'm groping for analogies, but Five Star suggests to me the day Hollywood's knees stopped knocking and it hit back at television with CinemaScope. Five Star is the antithesis of RedEye. It's not portable and it's not disposable. For one thing, the pages are simply too big and heavy to negotiate on a bus or train; for another, you'd be barely done with one article when you pulled into your stop.
There are no ads.
Two Tribune editors I called about the Five Star project said the only thing they could tell me was that they couldn't tell me anything. The Trib's top editor, Gerould Kern, didn't return my call. What I hear from less official sources is that the plan is to offer Five Star to Sunday subscribers for an extra $5 a week, beginning with a print run of 25,000 copies. Sunday is the day when newspapers make whatever money they're still able to make; but the Tribune reported in April that over a six-month measuring period its Sunday circulation had dropped 7.5 percent from the year before. Meanwhile the Sunday circulation of the New York Times had dropped just 5.2 percent. And circulation of the Times's Chicago edition had actually increased a little—or so I was told in May by the Times editor in New York who oversees the two pages of Chicago news prepared every Friday and Sunday for the Times by the Chicago News Cooperative.
Those two pages on Sunday don't sound like much, but they could be nudging some readers to the tipping point. This is the point where they decide that Sunday isn't Sunday without the $6 New York Times but the Tribune is one paper too many. Five Star looks to me like the Tribune's ambitious attempt to hold its ground.
The gravitas and handsome design of Five Star reminds me of upscale British Sunday papers like the Times and Guardian Observer. Its size suggests Panorama, the 320-page one-off Dave Eggers published last December in San Francisco. Panorama was Eggers's tribute to the old-fashioned American newspaper and an assertion of what print journalism is still capable of when a thousand compromises haven't eviscerated it.
Can the Tribune pull this off? Can it round up a stable of dazzling contributors? The articles in the dummy promise intellectual firepower, but few came from the Tribune. In the Culture section, for instance, I spotted articles poached from recent editions of the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and Salon.
At the back of Culture are two pages of puzzles and comics, including a comic by Chris Ware. I asked Ware if he'd signed on with the Tribune and would be drawing for Five Star when it comes out. He didn't know anything about it. So we shouldn't think Chris Ware—we should think Chris Ware-ish. And what about the Jeff Tweedy byline over a column on typographical errors that tosses around names like Max Beerbohm and Delmore Schwartz? That turns out to be an exercise in hopeful thinking. The actual text was written by Joseph Epstein for the Weekly Standard.
But then, a dummy isn't a newspaper. It's a collage titled Newspaper.
Another thing: how will anyone who reads Five Star find the time to read the regular Sunday Tribune? Advertisers in the Sunday Trib won't enjoy knowing, or at least suspecting, that the cream of the audience they thought they'd purchased is recycling, unread, the edition their ads are found in.
Well, R&D is for working through these issues.
Another project in the hopper at the Tribune is Chicago Live!, which will find the Trib and Second City teaming up for a "lively weekly stage and radio show bringing the hottest stories, newsmakers and entertainers in Chicago to the stage." I'm quoting a draft of a Tribune Media Group flyer here.
Chicago Live! is supposed to be up and running sometime this fall. The idea is to monetize news by sending it up across platforms—a 90-minute stage show before a paying audience that's recycled on radio and the Internet. Last I heard a venue hadn't been chosen, but the Tribune was looking at a space in the basement of the Chicago Theatre. v
Care to comment? Find this column at chicagoreader.com/media.
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Comments (20)
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There's someone still left at the Tribune who knows who Delmore Schwartz was? Astounding.
Zell and his apes have spent the past two years purging every smart voice they could identify at the Tribune. NOW they want to turn out a product for readers?
By the way, did you see the talent Dave Eggers lined up for The Panorama? The presentation was terrific, but the content more than justified the treatment.
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A quick check confirms chicagolive.com is indeed owned by the Trib: http://www.whois.net/whois/chicagolive.com
Nothing on the site yet.
I think this is a fantastic idea. It's refreshing to see the Tribune trying to play to the STRENGTHS of the print medium, rather than just trying to pad it with an insane amount of AP content and ads.
Hallelujah! Very excited to see this product. In theory, it sounds fantastic. It'll be interesting to see if they have the ability to pull it off.
Hahahahahahahah. Maybe they've been trying to get Delmore Schwartz to write for them! Since there are no writers there any more, maybe they'll just start reprinting the work of the dead. Oh, wait. . .
Sounds good. I hope the newspaper will establish a special website for this set of publications and offer the print edition at bookstores nationwide, not only in Chicago.
"The antithesis of RedEye" sounds pretty good to me. At the end of the day, it's the content that matters, though.
As a fan of substantive print journalism, I am more than willing to cling to the thin shred of hope that this work-in-progress offers.
As a long-time watcher of the Tribune's corporate Brahmins, I fear the work-in-practice will be a $5 Sunday RedEye.
-- MrJM
I admire the ambition so far as it goes, but its competition will be what, The New Yorker and The Atlantic? Which are rather less than $260 a year these days.
The thing that this doesn't let go of is the idea that we want a portmanteau publication with a little bit of everything in it. A Life magazine, a Sears catalog. But that's not where the world has gone. Instead of Sears where you can go to one store to get everything, you have the mall where you can go to 100 stores to get everything. The real innovation will come when the newspaper realizes that it's a content creation collective which can take many final forms. Put out a sports publication, put out a politics publication, put out arts and food and lifestyle publications; draw on the same staff, use each to cross-sell the others, but recognize that the reader's mentality is no longer that I wanted every subject pushed through the sausage grinder of the same editorial staff and made to fit the same format in the same way.
The Tribune has always demonstrated a talent for creating world-class prototypes and dummies. Many have seen the light of day and succeeded ... others, not so much. I suppose that Red Eye could be considered a success, too, if one ignores the original mission statement, which was to encourage teenagers, collegians and young adults to someday sample the traditional product. Instead, RE attracted older commuters too cheap, er, frugal to afford the regular freight. Last time I heard, the AVERAGE age of a RE reader was in the early 30s.
Previous newly introduced special sections -- Friday, for example -- were successful partially for the content provided by highly qualified staffers, who were perceived by management as having plenty of spare time on their hands and grossly inflated paychecks. Although freelancers were essential to the success of those sections, they weren't particularly well paid or respected by the brass. In fact, in the mid-90s, they weren't even allowed to write while in the Tower.
(Tribune executives saw IRS agents behind every mail box and they already were playing fast-and-loose with freelancers, who often worked more than 40 hours a week, had mailboxes in Tower, had free access to morgue, but made pennies on the dollar, compared with staffers. More importantly, they received no benefits. The IRS had begun cracking down on such practices -- especially the lack of withholding taxes, Social Security and other expenses -- and Tribune executives overreacted by imposing absurd limitations on the near-slave laborers. I think freelance reviewers still make what they did in 1990.)
To charge $5/copy -- or, as JYW points out, $260/year -- the Tribune will have to add writers, copy editors (at least)and designers, increase paltry freelance payments and fill the pages with something other than copy from the LA Times and Baltimore Sun. Neither do those nice big photographs take themselves.
A subscription to most magazines these days is in the $12-15/year range and fewer people than ever are making even that meager investment. And, for God's sake, who pays $6 for a Sunday Times, when you can get the whole for weekend for almost half that price by subscribing?
With Zell and his radio goons pre-occupied with their own fates these days, some of the Tower mice are having fun playing with what's left of his money. Something tells me Michael Eisner won't be nearly as gullible or delusional as the current brain trust.
"But that's not where the world has gone. Instead of Sears where you can go to one store to get everything, you have the mall where you can go to 100 stores to get everything."
Whoo! I almost thought it was 1980 when I read that. I'm pretty sure that the retail landscape has gone back the other way. And it did so decades ago. You cannot find a little bit of everything in malls anymore. If you go to an average mall you will normally find very few products other than clothes, cosmetics, jewelry, and perhaps some luggage and stationary. In 2010, people normally do go to one store to purchase a little bit of everything. Wal-Mart and Target, of course, are the most popular.
well, coming from the folks who gave us Woman News, Kid News & RedEye, don't get overly excited.
as for Chicago Live "bringing the hottest stories…in Chicago to the stage" what are we talking about?
tap dancing obits?
musical box scores?
or perhaps bringing in louis black for a dramatic reading of the blago tapes…actually, that might work.
I'm interested. But what makes them think that part of making it a better product is having no ads? Newspapers are the medium in which the audience least minds having ads--they're not interruptive like broadcast commercials. In fact they tend to think of them as a service, newspapers being the place to go, for instance, to see who has a good sale on when they're in the market for a car, a mattress, an air conditioner. or what shows are in the theaters.
I think C makes a really good point. Mag/newspaper ads are still really effective--I can say, I think, with some authority as a Reader employee and before that, a reader, that the ads in the music section are of some value to readers. They're good information. Or, for example, fashion mags--a lot of time the ads use the same stable of photographers and look just as interesting as the spreads.
Given what they're trying to do with Five Star, I'd say that a more curated ad selection, like Coudal's Deck, would be appropriate.
I agree that a thoughtful advertising section, e.g. movie listings in a movie section, would be more than welcome. But I fear that that inevitably leads to the available advertising determining the publication's sections, e.g. real estate and automotive sections.
-- MrJM
Yes, I speak from some experience as an advertising media buyer. But I see your points, whet and Mr JM, about "curated advertising" and not letting the sections and coverage of the paper be too advertising-driven. I've always observed that the most successful magazines let themselves be editorial-driven, attract a loyal and valuable audience, and then go after ads that are really relevant and complement the environment as well as do the fashion ads in Vogue. Perhaps that is the plan. They should just make sure the readers don't expect an ad-free environment forever. I guess I already made the point that it wouldn't be much of a turnoff. But does that mean they will reduce the price of a subscription accordingly? That could be a sticking point for readers to get PO'd, unless handled well.
Isn't this what the new owner of NEWSWEEK recently stated: longer articles and heavier, smarter content? I like it; it puts a pricetag on smart reading and status and that will, indeed, sell. Now, let's see them overhaul their godawful funny paper, too. The company that owns Little Orphan Annie and dick Tracy turned them into garbage to the point that when they stopped running in Chicago, nobody even commented that the comics section was Dickless...
"The gravitas and handsome design of Five Star reminds me of upscale British Sunday papers like the Times and Guardian."
The Guardian is Mon - Sat. It's The Observer that's essentially the Sunday edition of the Guardian.
Since Sam Zell's waves of purges, I haven't found much I like in the Trib for free online, let alone enough to pay for it. And it would have to outdo the New York Times for me to pay that much extra for the privilege of reading it on paper again -- which is not likely as long as Zell and his minions remain. Good bloody luck to the journalists who are still there.
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