Windy City Blown Away

By Michael Miner
August 6, 1999

The stack of resignations was supposed to be sitting on Jeff McCourt's desk when he got to the office Tuesday. But McCourt didn't get to the office Tuesday. He spent the day in Michigan, at his place in Harbor Country, on the phone a lot of the time and hurt, angry, and stunned.

That morning I'd called him for comment. Comment on what? he wondered.

Just about everybody you employed at Windy City Times has quit to start a newspaper of their own, I said.

"They did?" he said. Everything after that was off the record.

A blowup the day before explains why the resignations were late. Monday was payday, and the staff's plan was to do a day's work, take their paychecks to the bank, and quit. But McCourt didn't show up with the checks. He called from Michigan and said his car had broken down.

Metro news editor Louis Weisberg, on the Chicago end of the line, was furious. This inconvenience was a little too familiar to suit him. If we're not paid there's no paper this week, Weisberg told McCourt. ("It was rather chaotic," says national news editor Lisa Neff.) Business manager Jim McElaney and senior account managers Bill Feld and Dave Ouano drove to Three Oaks, Michigan, collected the checks from McCourt, and brought them back Monday night. But there was no way for the staff to get to the bank until 7:30 Tuesday morning. We don't want McCourt to find out and stop payment, they told themselves, so the resignations weren't turned in until ten. The reason I found myself breaking the bad news to McCourt is that he wasn't supposed to know it yet.

But insurrection had been brewing for months. Last February Feld had lunch with his friend Bill Atwood, a venture capitalist. Atwood recalls Feld telling him he was unhappy at Windy City and wishing he could buy the paper or start a new one. "That's kind of my business," Atwood told him. And their talk turned serious.

Feld wasn't the only one discontented. Most of the Windy City staff had been stewing for a long time and for a lot of reasons, some of them personal, some philosophical. They complained about paychecks that arrived late. They complained that McCourt, the editor and publisher, was marketing his paper for a narrow, upscale gay market when the community it ought to serve was far broader. They didn't complain about McCourt's salary scale, but that was their only solace. Atwood, says former classifieds manager Jeff McBride, raised their sights from "wishing and dreaming by disgruntled staffers" to careful planning. Through intermediaries they sent out feelers, testing McCourt's interest in selling the paper, something he'd been talking about for years. They concluded it wasn't going to happen. They courted investors and located the essential backer in Jerry Matustik, an Oak Brook insurance executive. Several weeks ago they quietly incorporated.

A couple of months ago a McCourt loyalist who would stay at Windy City came across a discarded scrap of paper dated June 7. It was a to-do list of people to see and calls to make that clearly revealed that the paper stood on the brink of upheaval. The staffer wrote a note to himself that he called "The Plot Thickens," and this week he read it to me. "Later that day it did occur to me that there's so much ill will and negative energy out there towards Jeff, but they fail to empathize with a man who embodies so many of the demons they themselves can't shake....There is right action, there is right speech, and things that cause hatred and division and negativity cannot be good even if it's based on the truth. Truth does not justify cruelty though it seems to fuel it....I hope Jeff finds balance and happiness and hope he finds peace from the suffering of the life that he's living....If they do try to destroy him, I think I might try to help Jeff insofar as he is a person worthy of some dignity and respect, even if flawed."

But McCourt has fought battles before. In 1985 he led a staff mutiny at the old Gay Life and founded Windy City Times with Tracy Baim. Two years later Baim walked out in the name of editorial in-tegrity, taking some of the staff with her, and founded Outlines. McCourt kept on trucking. Because no one doubts his resilience, no one was confident that he wouldn't find a way to go on publishing, even though his paper had just been gutted.

On Tuesday most of the old Windy City staff issued a press release announcing that the first edition of the new Chicago Free Press would appear on August 25. Their goal was "to raise the alternative weekly press to the next level." Matustik will be CEO of Novus Publishing Group, the corporate frame-work. Weisberg will be editor in chief and Neff managing editor. Feld will be general manager and Mark Olley advertising manager. Other Windy City renegades present at the creation are Jason Smith, the new art and photography director; Jeff McBride, the classified advertising manager; writers Kerrie Kennedy, Bill Behrens, Jennifer Earls, Paul Varnell, and Jennifer Vanasco, and account managers Tim Nedoba, Matt Mabery, and Ouano. Atwood will be around too, as a business consultant.

"I think that all of us were frustrated with Windy City Times," says Neff. "We feel that personally and for the community we have ambitions we just can't realize there. We're leaving Windy City Times to create a paper that we think will serve the community's needs better." Weisberg adds, "Right now the gay and lesbian media market is way too segmented. There's a paper [Outlines] with feminist appeal, a paper [Windy City Times] with upper-middle-class white male appeal. There are minority papers and party-boy papers. But nothing appeals to a cross section--and a good alternative publication does."

Chicago Free Press will be printed by Newsweb, which used to be McCourt's printer. Its president, Fred Eychaner, is a prominent benefactor of gay causes and someone it was foolish to alienate. Nevertheless, McCourt managed to do it. A couple of years ago unpaid bills prompted Eychaner to file suit and drop the account. Windy City Times eventually settled out of court.

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