Promised cuts came Thursday to the Chicago Tribune, with a net loss of 28 editorial positions, the end of its stand-alone WomanNews section and the demise of a legendary local news service.
New City News Service, the descendant of the City News Bureau that sent a young Mike Royko and generations of other cub reporters onto Chicago's streets to chronicle crimes and fires, wound up in the morgue.
The Tribune, sole owner of the wire service since 1999, announced it is shutting down the operation at year's end.
"You are well aware that in recent years and months virtually every major paper in the nation has undergone layoffs, some of them repeatedly," Tribune Editor Ann Marie Lipinski said in a note to staff.
"At the Chicago Tribune," she wrote, "we have been fortunate to largely avoid those newsroom cuts. ... But the familiar gale winds that buffet the American economy in general and our industry in particular are at our door. I am sorry I could not stave them off."
The cutbacks in the newsroom of 670 hew to an industrywide trend. A recent estimate determined that about 2,000 jobs will have been eliminated at large to midsize U.S. papers in 2005.
Publicly-held newspaper owners such as The New York Times Co. and Knight Ridder Inc. are making similar cuts. Despite their profitability, newspapers face falling circulation, rising newsprint costs and increased competition for readers and ad money from other media, especially the Internet.
Dennis FitzSimons, chairman, president and chief executive of Chicago Tribune owner Tribune Co., wrote in an October message to stockholders that all of the company's newspapers were "pursuing further cost reductions to be implemented by year end."
Even in making reductions Thursday, the Tribune announced it soon will add newsroom positions to accommodate plans for bulking up its 24-hour news presence on the Web.
And the WomanNews section will be folded into a weekly chapter of the Tempo section, Lipinski said.
But among the well-known bylines soon disappearing from the newspaper will be longtime sports writer Bill Jauss and business columnist Carol Kleiman. Both volunteered to leave.
The cutbacks did not come as a surprise, and many of the departures were voluntary. But that didn't mask the somber and subdued mood in and around the paper's newsroom as management informed those affected in meetings through the day.
Besides circulation and advertising declines at some of its papers, factors in the Tribune Co.'s struggles include a dip in television revenue and a September defeat in U.S. Tax Court concerning a $1 billion dispute with the government that it inherited with its 2000 purchase of Times Mirror Co. Tribune is appealing the Tax Court ruling.
Word of City News' closure was delivered to its 19-member staff Thursday morning in the Tribune's fourth-floor newsroom. Tribune Managing Editor James O'Shea told City News staffers the paper plans to soon post 13 openings for its round-the-clock Internet desk.
"That doesn't mean our people will get 13, but they can apply for those positions," said bureau chief Paul Zimbrakos, a 47-year veteran of the service.
O'Shea said in an interview that the decision to shut down City News "was driven more by competitive factors than economic factors," in that the Tribune's investment in the service was subsidizing media rivals rather than serving Tribune readers the way it is hoped a "more aggressive" Internet presence will.
But left in the lurch will be the local TV and radio stations that pay for City News dispatches and have come to rely on them to plan and supplement their own coverage.
"We're going to have to figure out another plan of action," said Frank Whittaker, vice president of news at WMAQ-Ch. 5. "Obviously, City News has been a critical wire service that all the stations in town use for information. I don't know if there will be another effort to try to come up with another version of City News similar to the last time this happened [in 1999], or whether each of the stations will be on its own."
Mike Krauser, news director at WBBM-AM 780, said he wasn't sure what his all-news station will do.
"We are kicking it around," Krauser said. "It may be that we wind up hiring a planning person. We haven't even brought this up yet, but we might partner up with [WBBM-TV] Channel 2 and see what we can do. We get a lot out of City News. They give us a heads-up on things that we need to be at, obviously."
Some might argue City News died six years ago, when operations closed down at its 35 E. Wacker Drive headquarters after TV and radio stations balked at paying increased subscription fees, and the Chicago Sun-Times, the service's co-owner at the time, decided to not continue its $250,000 annual support.
Rechristened New City News Service, the operation continued providing reports for local TV and radio stations under Tribune ownership, though staffing and the scope of coverage were reduced.
"We were really streamlined," Zimbrakos said. "At old City News--it was called City News Bureau of Chicago--we covered everything. We covered public housing. We covered education. We covered politics."
In the days before computers made the grunt work unnecessary, Zimbrakos said, City News on election night would add city vote tallies with those from suburban Cook County "so our clients could know what the total county vote was."
Of particular value to this day is the City News "Day Book," a comprehensive listing of scheduled news events.
"Otherwise I have to go through 1,800 faxes and e-mails and then call around to make sure we're not going to miss something," Krauser said. "There's little stuff that can be really good that we're not going to get [without it]."
Whittaker, caught off guard by Thursday's announcement because his station had just signed a new deal with City News, called it "a security blanket" for his assignment desk.
As for the Tribune, the loss of personnel was a jolt to a paper long accustomed to stability. Kleiman, who joined the paper in 1967 to write the pioneering "Women at Work" column, called the prospect of no longer being a woman at work both "traumatic" and "exciting."
Her position is being eliminated, though Kleiman said she has enough of her "Worklife," "Jobs" and "Letters" columns written to run through at least mid-January.
Asked what advice Coach Carol, the career-counselor persona her many readers know well, would offer someone in her own situation, Kleiman was characteristically pragmatic.
"My advice right now, with the economic picture the way it is, and the way the job situation is, if the opportunity arises, take [the buyout] and use it wisely," she said.
