WITHOUT A KICK-ASS SPORTS COLUMNIST, THE CHICAGO MEDIA IS GIVING UP ON LIFE
A city known for great prose — recall John Schulian and David Israel? — has lost all regular opinion writers, allowing bad owners to play phony and asking folks to hear Dan Bernstein ... oh, he's gone
In a metro area of 8.8 million sports fans among 8.9 million residents — including the dopey gamblers — a Chicago newspaper demands a regular sports columnist. I don’t see one for the first time EVER. The Sun-Times just lost two who accepted buyouts, meaning they no longer write a combined three columns weekly and lose complete sight of the 24/7 news cycle. The Tribune has one who writes mostly baseball, making him Dave van Dyck or Jerome Holtzman, something out of yesteryear.
This is a city that used to feature the best writers ruling each paper’s sports section. John Schulian dueled David Israel. Bob Verdi and Bernie Lincicome were in charge at the Tribune until one day in the 1990s. Big billboards were erected at Wrigley Field and near Soldier Field — throughout Chicagoland, frighteningly — when a columnist arrived from The National sports daily after fun stops around the country.
“Sports With An Attitude!” shouted the caption.
That would be me, at 32. And we went at it. I referred to the Tribsters as sleepy. Then Sam Smith’s agent gave me excerpts from his book about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, which was lovely because they appeared in the Sun-Times before the Tribune, which paid for the same excerpts and paid Smith to cover the team — and almost fired him. At one point, a newsroom clown contacted the Tribune and wondered why the paper’s security director didn’t want online threats running below my columns.
I won the battle that day. The Tribune announced it would run comments about me — gee, would both papers pay me? — which gave the Sun-Times a monster edge after the Tribune’s sports editor beefed that his writers weren’t as energetic as ours. You could have walked around town and asked who was on top in the daily wars. The Sun-Times, of course — thanks to our terrific staff and to me and Rick Telander, though we didn’t get along and somehow were wholly effective.
I left when management, too busy pandering to Jerry Reinsdorf, couldn’t figure out how to post our columns and stories from the Beijing Olympics. Was there a future when the bosses didn’t understand the Internet? Daily print circulation dropped steadily in the 90 percent range. I gave up on the place years ago. Next came owners from Chicago Public Media, where the new CEO, Melissa Bell, said she was “very serious” about speaking to me late last year. I have her email.
December soon turned to March. And the Sun-Times forced layoffs and lost 35 staffers, 23 in the newsroom. Attrition does not mean Chicago sports fans should be forgotten. The columnists should remain urgent voices in making sure owners remain accountable, in a city where five men are among the worst collection of buffoons in American business. The beat writers are sharp, but they must remain watchful and not write commentaries about Ben Johnson and Caleb Williams twice monthly in March. People still love to read sports — and not watch Dan Bernstein off himself and Stephen A. Smith scream every morning. Ask The Athletic, owned by the New York Times, successful enough to earn money from a suburban paper, the Daily Herald, which is running the site’s national and local material. That’s a victory when the Sun-Times and Tribune have nothing.
On a sad Monday in media life, the Sun-Times published a morning story that sent me rushing to my keyboard. No longer will the paper run editorials from the staff board. The remaining “journalists” — Rummana Hussain, Neil Steinberg, Lee Bey, Alden Loury — will be given “space to write from their personal experiences, points of view and subject matter expertise.” Space? Meanwhile, chief content officer Tracy Brown will include a monthly series “featuring columns from a diversity of residents in metro Chicago.” She will run numerous Letters to the Editor and “guest columns from community members, leaders and scholars.”
Wrote Brown: “We want to open more doors for the public to express itself. We are grateful to the service of those who made very personal decisions about their futures as well as those who have been an important voice in and for Chicago for decades. This change does not mean we are retreating from public dialogue or silencing debate. Rather, we’re acknowledging that the voices we need to uplift in Chicago are the voices of the people. … We want to bring them the most insightful thinking in Chicago, wherever it originates.”
That’s wonderful. Have it both ways, right?
No. She appears to be emphasizing those who aren’t in the media.
And there you have it, readers. The Sun-Times, which sold hundreds of thousands of daily papers not too long ago, apparently is smirking at columnists including sports columnists. I haven’t heard lately from Bell. I tried Steinberg, who hasn’t returned an email. I tried Sun-Times Guild co-chair Nader Issa, who was too busy saying employees were “disturbed” by the “dramatic downsizing.”
Co-chair Mitch Armentrout said people “feel like the powers that be don’t have full familiarity with the Sun-Times.”
Chicago Public Media cannot distribute the Sun-Times without mighty mouthpieces. Richard Roeper is gone, but a good movie critic must be hired. A sports columnist must be summoned, and if it’s not me, he or she must kick ass. There is plenty to boot.
Otherwise, stop caring. Read something else. The better idea: Have me join Steve Greenberg and Scoop Jackson as regular columnists. Hire Courtney Cronin from ESPN. Then you have a 4-1 lead on the Tribune, when we’ll write about so much more than baseball. The Sun-Times eventually would win the ultimate war.
But what do I know? I left because the Internet sucked.
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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.