I MUST ASK: WHY DID $61 MILLION AT CHICAGO PUBLIC MEDIA LEAD TO 35 STAFF BUYOUTS?
It’s another serious issue at a paper, the Sun-Times, that could face last rites when donors were supposed to save it — and have lost so many writers that the last three years should be investigated
You might wonder why I write four times, five times, six times a week. I still love the thrills and the chills, like a guitarist on a patio or a painter with his easel, never leaving my high-school English class. Ballplayers retire, but a columnist never goes away. The trick is maintaining the joy by shedding the slop.
How many musicians say they dislike the industry? How many artists say they loathe the racket? Count me in. I once handed back a million dollars because the Chicago Sun-Times wasn’t worthy of the love. And I’ve spent recent months asking if the newspaper suddenly has found life, realizing it has not. I have a question after communicating since last autumn with the new CEO, who said she was “very serious” about talking to me: How did $61 million in donor support in 2022 sink to a mind-blowing 35 buyouts — 23 in the newsroom, including a movie critic and sports columnists — early in 2025?
Sixty-one million? Shouldn’t the last three years be investigated by investigators? Chicago Public Media almost was given more than the White Sox payroll this season. And it’s gone? Don’t blame Melissa Bell, who arrived in September and must be wondering if India was a much better career plan.
A collection of creators should enjoy their partnerships inside a major market. But all anyone wants to do is mope, having lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers while the operation nears last rites. “This is a pivotal moment for Chicago Public Media,” Bell said.
She’ll be the latest to try and fail. How many owners, publishers and editors have been chewed up and spit out by the Sun-Times? I never met Conrad Black before he spent 37 months in prison for defrauding investors. But he did have me appear at his dinner for Margaret Thatcher, requiring me to sit beside a lead editor who was fired that evening. Later, I dealt with one of Black’s creeps, Michael Cooke, who was so vicious about me in a never-published chat with The Athletic that I counted the years since last I saw him.
Fifteen.
Don Henley used to complain about David Geffen when all of us have David Geffens. The beauty of Substack is that I’ve never met the bosses. They are great because they don’t interfere with me or lie or hit me. In my days, I’ve had two magnificent editors: the one who gave me a column at age 25 and the one who made it work in Chicago.
Otherwise? Put it this way. An opposing editor in chief, from the Tribune, once said I should sue the Sun-Times because the place was more interested in irritating me from whiners on the copy desk to the biggest bosses.
I’ve had an editor shoulder-shove me in his office, and another editor who tried to fire me after appearing in my wedding, and another editor who sat in the front row of Bulls games wearing team paraphernalia, and another editor who suggested my column about Michael Jordan’s gambling might be the last of my life, and another editor who demanded every column including Jerry Reinsdorf be shipped to his house, and another editor who ripped me to a San Francisco TV station when he wasn’t my editor in Chicago as much as a third baseball writer.
The latter editor also allowed a bank, Wintrust, to subsidize a reporter who covered the Sky women’s basketball team. Correct. “Subsidized,” said reporter Julia Poe at the Tribune, telling me about “a sponsorship’’ with the company whose name is on the team arena. Chris De Luca is still employed, through Richard Roeper is not.
I’ve had a publisher scream at me after he left beer cans in the back of a car I was driving on assignment. I’ve had executives question what I know about sports business after I flattened Reinsdorf for a low payroll. I’ve had a radio boss order me not to criticize the White Sox or Bulls, and when I refused, he fired me. I’ve had another radio boss say he wasn’t dumping me because of my performance, but because he went to college “for business” — when I went for journalism. I’ve also broken up more fights between staffers than Dana White at a Vegas press conference.
And who’s painted as the bad guy? Me.
Because I stand up to powerful people in my columns instead of fanboying them. Isn’t that what a columnist is supposed to do? Or has the industry lost all focus, preferring to belly-kiss sports owners and promote their teams instead of scrutinizing them?
When I speak to students, my message is simple about Substack. It’s a professional operation, with an impressive outreach, and if I needed the money, it would be a swell way to make a living. I like it because it’s free. And I like it because I assign the column, write the headline, write the sub-headline, fix typos and publish it. I do the work of three or four people in the newspaper office.
Chicago Public Media? In February 2022, Sun-Times investor Michael Sacks helped raise $61 million from foundations and donors. Can you imagine me working for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Pritzker Traubert Foundation? I have no problem with JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, especially when he demands Reinsdorf pay privately for a new White Sox stadium. But somehow, I’m guessing these folks might want soft writers, along with people from the Builders Initiative, Chicago Community Trust, the Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Mansueto Foundation, Robin Steans and Leonard Gail and — ready? — an anonymous donor.
Why anonymous? I can think of many “anonymous” Chicago donors who don’t like me.
And isn’t Sacks the husband of Cari Sacks, a minority owner of the Sky, which means a Sacks connection exists between the team and the Sun-Times? Which might have led to the subsidy for the sponsored reporter?
Jesus Christ.
I love Substack.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.