Past Columns

Saved by the Sell

Oak Park’s Wednesday Journal rescues three city papers from certain death.

By Michael Miner

February 28, 2008

These are desperate times for the press, yet some newspapers refuse to die. Consider my neighborhood paper, the weekly Booster—not a distinguished publication but an old and proud one, as familiar to Lakeview as its el tracks. Like Dr. Who, the Booster has been known to change completely in appearance from week to week, and with the most recent change Patrick Butler, the reporter who carried the paper on his back for decades, has disappeared. But the Booster lives.

“Things have been going fast and furious here,” its new publisher, Dan Haley, e-mailed me on January 23, as he was taking over. “Yesterday our effort to buy the three Lerner papers was dead. Today we resuscitated it and have reached an agreement.”

Those three papers—the Booster, along with Skyline and the News-Star—are what’s left of the storied chain of community papers that Leo Lerner launched in 1926 when he bought a shopper, the Lincoln-Belmont Booster, and added news. At its peak, Lerner Newspapers published 54 titles. The Lerner chain passed out of the Lerner family’s hands in 1985 and, by now greatly diminished, was bought in 2000 by Hollinger International. In 2004 Hollinger’s tattered remnant, the Sun-Times Media Group, assigned the six surviving Lerner papers—on Chicago’s north and northwest sides—to its suburban Pioneer Press chain. Pioneer forced them into the tabloid mold that had worked so well in the suburbs and plumped them up with a lot of canned features shared by all its papers.

But neither circulation nor advertising cut the mustard. And when STMG realized late last year that it had to slash costs by $50 million, Pioneer’s six city papers began living on borrowed time.

So there were talks. First between Pioneer Press publisher Larry Green and Bruce Sagan, who used to own the Daily Southtown and several other titles and at 79 still keeps a hand in his Hyde Park Herald and Lakefront Outlook. Green wondered if Sagan would be interested, or knew anyone who might be, in Pioneer’s Lerner papers. Sagan suggested Dan Haley and Andrew Johnston at Wednesday Journal Inc.

Haley entered community journalism some 30 years ago, when he and two friends started the Wednesday Journal in Oak Park. Six months later the paper was almost bankrupt, and Haley learned a lifelong lesson about community journalism: “If you’re going to try to make a nickel, you’ve got to keep the staffing levels pretty lean.”

That’s what he’s done, and Wednesday Journal Inc. has slowly grown to encompass four weeklies in and around Oak Park, Chicago Parent magazine, and two editions of the Chicago Journal serving the South and West Loop and the Wicker Park-Bucktown area. Haley’s original partners dropped out early on, but Johnston joined him as a partner and is now the company’s vice president.

Green called Johnston, and they met with Haley at Johnston’s house in Oak Park December 4. Then Haley and Johnston talked with Sagan. Johnston used to work for Sagan at the Southtown and considers him a mentor.

“It seems to me,” says Sagan, “that you have a new circumstance with the immigration to the city of the kids and the empty nesters. You have a whole population base which never existed. And it seems logical that it creates a circumstance for the kind of community journalism that these newspapers seek to do.”

All six papers was too big a bite, but Haley and Johnston—and Sagan too—were intrigued by the idea of picking up Skyline, the Booster, and the News-Star. Do the deal, Sagan said, and you’ll have papers running from the South Loop to Rogers Park. He was so enthusiastic that when Haley and Johnston got the papers they created a new subsidiary to run them, Chicago Journals LLC, and made Sagan a partner in it.

“The issue is, can you create that kind of niche [for a paper] in these communities which have been reborn?” says Sagan. “That’s a very interesting journalism question I couldn’t resist. I have to tell you, I sent an e-mail to my own children that started ‘I can’t help myself . . . ’ ”

Haley wanted three things: the papers’ names, their circulations, and the annual community guides they published. “For us, these were a central piece,” Haley says. “There’s a lot of revenue tied to these guides.” Haley thought the guides were on the table; STMG said they weren’t. Why would you want them, Haley argued, if you don’t even have papers in those communities?

“We were working against a clock,” says Haley. “The Sun-Times had a board meeting looming. For us, this was a big deal and for them not a big deal.” But the guides looked like a deal breaker—STMG, which had already shut down the Lerner papers Haley didn’t want, announced publicly that Skyline, the Booster, and the News-Star would close too. But then, without saying why, the company had a change of heart. You can have the guides, it told Haley, and the deal went through.

Again the look of the three papers changed overnight. When my wife held up the February 7 issue of the Booster and asked what had happened to it, she was holding a paper as handsome as it was gaunt—still a tabloid, and down to 32 pages from 60 the week before, but vivaciously redesigned by Haley’s art director, Rebec­ca Lomax. The canned features had disap­peared, and good riddance. But where was the police blotter? Where was Pat Butler?

Above its masthead the old Booster had listed the communities it served: Lakeview, North Center, Roscoe Village, Avondale, Wicker Park, Bucktown, Ukrainian Village, West Town. The new Booster simply said, “News of Lakeview, Roscoe Village and North Center.” “That’s it,” Haley explained in a page-one letter. “Nothing else. That relentlessly local coverage is what we can offer you that no other media can or cares to. It is why we exist.”

His letter went on, “We all came close to losing this newspaper. If you care about your neighborhoods and understand the power of a strong local paper, then this is the moment to reach out and grab it.” He asked readers to write in and say what they thought.

They did, and Haley learned a lesson in community journalism. His other papers were start-ups—the challenge was to get people to care. These three papers were fixtures. “There was a much more powerful bond with these papers than I’d anticipated,” Haley says. “[Readers] are really clear about what they want. They’re very grateful about the fact the papers are still being published. But they want their crossword puzzle back and their movie reviews back.”

That won’t happen—Haley has other priorities. But the readers also demanded gossipmonger Ann Gerber—and there she is! And the blotter—Haley couldn’t find a freelancer to pull it together in the Booster that first week, but now it’s back. And on high school sports, Haley’s caved—he’s telling readers to give him a few weeks to work on it. “We’ve been invited to a couple of community meetings to talk about what the local paper should be doing,” he says. “That’s pretty cool, and it’s not what I would have expected. But newspapers are such a habit. If you ingrain that habit in people, even if what you are publishing isn’t as strong as you’d like, they’ll stick with it.”

Readers were just as clear about whom they wanted to read. Reporters at metro dailies deal with the fact that no one pays attention to bylines but themselves. But the neighborhood press is different. In Lakeview, sponsors of community events haven’t wondered if the Booster showed up—they’ve looked around for Pat Butler. At Skyline that reporter has been Felicia Dechter, at the News-Star Lorraine Swan­son. They each had to decide—work for Pioneer somewhere else or for Haley in the neighborhoods where everyone knew them.

“I’d say two-thirds of the e-mails I got were ‘Make sure you get Lorraine,’ ” says Haley. “We sat down with her and it’s like, this woman knows everything.”

“The day after the sale was announced,” says Swanson, “their office opened at 8:30 and I called them at 8:31 asking to interview for my job. After working the city beat I couldn’t see myself farmed out to Algonquin or someplace like that.”

Haley didn’t just keep her on as an overworked reporter (in last week’s News-Star she had three stories on the front page alone), he made her the editor too. “Dan wants to return it to its neighborhood roots,” Swanson says. “Local stories. Local ads. Local calendars. Just more of that uberlocal coverage. That’s where print journalism is going to thrive and survive—that local focus.”

Felicia Dechter turned down a staff job because she’s caring for an ill mom, but she describes herself now as a “superstringer” freelancing for Skyline and the other Chicago papers. “I can crank them out,” she says, “but I don’t have the pressure of really working for somebody. Pioneer was very good to me, very good to me. But they’re only in the suburbs now and I’m born and raised in the city. That’s where my heart is.”

Butler sized up his situation differently. He joined the Booster in the 60s; the city is what he knows. But he decided Pioneer offered him better pay and more security. “I’m a fifth-generation Chicagoan,” he tells me. “I will certainly miss the city. But I had to make what I thought was for me the most responsible decision.” Now he’s chasing stories for Pioneer in Oak Park, River Forest, and Hillside—competing with Haley’s older papers on foreign turf.    

For more, see Michael Miner’s blog, News Bites.

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