I’ve been away a couple weeks. In Spain. Didja miss me? No? Not even a little?
Sigh.
Can’t say I’m surprised. We exist in such a howling media pandemonium nowadays, a continual cacophony of bugles and brasses blaring all the time. Who can even notice if a particular tin horn drops out or joins in?
Did I miss anything? Of course I did. A city like Chicago is a Niagara of news, a never-ending cataract of information roaring past. Blink and you overlook something important.
So what did I miss? Let’s see ... the past two weeks ... Lori Lightfoot? Fact-finding in Mexico! People being shot? Already covered like a damp shirt. For the record: It’s bad.
There was the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Sun-Times — actually the Sunday Sun and Times, the hyphen came five months later — on Oct. 5, 1947. That could be viewed a big deal, at least by people who work here. The folks still left at the Tribune certainly felt their 175th birthday was an occasion worthy of note, with a six-week celebration last spring penned by my pal Rick Kogan, the ghost in their increasingly stripped-down machine,
I like that image. The once mighty Trib sets up circus tents and holds a month-and-a-half-long jamboree to mark its anniversary. While here at the scrappy Sun-Times, some crusty oddball who’s been wandering around, blinking in the Iberian sun, his absence at home unnoticed, comes scurrying back, drops his luggage, raises a finger and trills, “Umm, sorry, we, ah, missed that ...”
Though my timing is perfect. (It’s better to be lucky than good.) Because just last week the Sun-Times announced a big change in our business model. Instead of covering your eyes until you cough up for an online subscription, our online content is now free, thanks to voluntary contributions, the way it works with our bosses, whoops, partners, at WBEZ.
This is a perfect time to remember the newspaper’s founding, because it took place for exactly the same reason: to survive and maybe thrive in a changing media landscape. To glance at how Mr. Sun wed Miss Times 75 years ago is to see ad hoc adaptation at its finest. Department store scion Marshall Field III had created the Sun in 1941 with the sole purpose of pushing back against the isolationist, xenophobic, Hitler-canoodling Chicago Tribune. The first issue was published Dec. 4, 1941. Three days later, its entire reason for existence vanished after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and America entered the war. We came into a world mooted, with darkness setting in and two strikes against us.
But we came out swinging.
By 1947, the morning Sun had never made a penny of profit, and Field, obviously slow on the uptake, had purchased a second newspaper, the afternoon Times. A grubby sports-fixated photo tabloid founded in 1929, out of the ashes of the Chicago Journal (a paper begun in 1844, which is why you sometimes see claims that our roots pre-date the Trib. It’s a stretch).
In its first issue, Sept. 3, 1929, the Times ran a manifesto describing its average reader, who of course was assumed to be a man, and a semi-literate man at that:
“He wants the news at a glance, because his life is crowded and he hasn’t much time to waste on words.”
Hasn’t ... much time ... to waste ... on words. Ouch, that stings. That’s like finding out your great-grandfather was a child molester.
Searching for the will-o-the-wisp of efficiency, it was decided to merge the two papers’ Sunday editions into one, redubbed the ‘Sun and Times.” The first issue ran an editorial containing this sentence: “When you believe in freedom, you believe in the capacity of democracy to defend itself without adopting the tactics of totalitarianism.”
A sentiment that hasn’t aged a second. Unfortunately.
One of the things you pay for with a newspaper (or don’t pay for, and you know who you are), along with accountability, is persistence. The Sun-Times has been amazingly consistent. In the winter of 1949-1950, The New Yorker’s great press critic, A.J. Liebling lived in Chicago. His classic “Chicago: The Second City” observes this about the paper:
“It sometimes raises a great row with stories about local political graft. Although Chicago municipal graft is necessarily Democratic, since the city’s government is Democratic, it is the Sun-Times, rather than the Tribune, that gets indignant.”
Do we ever. I wish I could outline the important ways the Sun-Times has tried to keep Chicago from being an even more corrupt and incompetently run city than it has been and is. In February 1948, the two papers merged completely into “a single ’round-the-clock daily newspaper.” So as WBEZ and the Sun-Times gingerly go about incorporating our organizations, it might be a comfort to remember we’ve been doing this literally since the day we were born.
Maybe in February, I’ll reprise a bit of that proud history, to mark our birth as a daily newspaper, an essential frame through which to view the city, state, nation and world — more important than ever as deceit and deception move from fringe vices to mainstream party policies — and a strongbox containing a rough draft of history, preserved safe from the obliteration of time.
We seem to be at the end of today’s effort, and the subject barely touched, which is typical. The only thing I would like to add, looking back over 75 years of Sun-Times history, is that I have written for the paper for slightly more than half that time: 38 years, my first byline appearing in 1984. And I can honestly say, in that third of a century plus, there has never been a moment more pregnant with promise, with hope, than right now. As to whether that promise will pan out, well, some of that depends on whether you join up and contribute your fair share to this ongoing effort to capture the most significant aspects of Chicago and present them in the clearest, most accurate, comprehensive and interesting way possible. I gave the Sun-Times my life; I figure, you can kick in a few bucks.
