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Hot Type, for the week of June 25, 2004 -- continued
Whatever the number, the Sun-Times seems to have been secretly hemorrhaging tens of thousands of readers. Why? "I think it was a bunch of things," Cruickshank said. "We had tremendous disruptions when we put in the new [printing] plant -- two to three years of late papers, really spotty service. And then, yeah, we didn't have any marketing [the present "Bright One" campaign is the first in seven years]. We had a really stripped-down circulation department, almost no merchandising, a very, very small number of district managers. We have almost the same number of people handling single-copy sales as the Tribune. [The Trib's a subscription-driven paper, whereas the Sun-Times survives off street sales.] And then, of course, we took the size of the newsroom down by 20 percent between the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2004. We disinvested! We made it harder to get the product. We went through a period of really poor service." Don't forget, the editorial page made a hard right. That too -- though one reporter told me this didn't matter because nobody reads the editorial page. But Cruickshank considers it a factor. "I don't think," he told me, "there's any doubt that on some issues the paper was not in sync with the city and certainly not in sync with the readership. You can't preach at your readers and expect them to be your readers. You can lead, but you can't lead them into positions that don't make any sense to them. This is a Democratic town. You really do have to be engaged with the thoughts and feelings and life of your market -- and I think in some ways we got a little detached." Is this a darkest-before-the-dawn situation at the Sun-Times? Some people see nothing ahead but more night. "It's hard not to assume the worst," said the lugubrious veteran. "So many things are looming in the future, not least of which are union negotiations that just got under way, and the planned move to the new building, which we've been promised will be a first-class facility. Now it makes you wonder where that money's going to come from." I'm not sure what would cheer him up except the sight of Radler taking a perp walk. But not everyone's so dour. Contract talks haven't actually begun yet -- though the present contract is up October 1 and they're about to. And Bob Mutter, cochair of the Newspaper Guild unit at the Sun-Times, is cheerier. He noticed that when Cruickshank was interviewed on WTTW last week, "he could have cried poor but he did not say those things. He talked about a fair and equitable settlement and what a hardworking newsroom we are. It was very encouraging." It's been decades since anyone at the Sun-Times could place much faith in the future, and at the moment it's a complete mystery. This Tuesday Cruickshank held a series of staff meetings where he predicted the paper would be sold to somebody in two years. But there's a bracing we're-all-in-this-foxhole-together camaraderie shared by labor and management alike. "I think basically everybody here has been on the same side for a long time," Mutter told me. "Our common enemy has departed, hopefully never to come back." That being Radler? Radler here, and Black living large in London. What is it about Radler? The other day I was talking to Dennis Britton, the editor of the Sun-Times when Hollinger bought it ten years ago. I asked Britton how he remembered Radler. "I thought he was a snake, and you can put that on the record," said Britton. "The most interesting example of Radler to me was, he came into an executive meeting once and threw a sheaf of papers down and said, 'I want 100 people laid off.' We said, 'What are you talking about?' He said, 'See this sheaf of papers? There were 100 people off work last week and we got the paper out without them.' That's the kind of guy he was. He was ruthless." Britton lasted only a few months after Hollinger took over, but it was a time when Black and Radler were taking the company public and courting investors. "I had to go to one of those dog and pony shows," said Britton. "Everything they said was a lie. One of the [labor] contracts was about due and it was going to be ugly and they said, 'Oh, we have labor peace.'" Why were you talking to Britton? To hear him reminisce. As I said, newspapers are obsessed with circulation. For example, the Tribune's been obsessed with keeping its Sunday circulation above a million, though this could be the year it loses that battle. When Britton was editor the Sun-Times was obsessed with keeping daily circulation above 500,000. Leonard Skaykin, an investment banker with a knack for fancy financing, had bought the paper from Murdoch, and the loans the deal required came with all sorts of conditions. One stipulated that circulation could never drop below half a million. "There was one thing we talked about at every executive meeting," Britton remembered, "and it was that 500,000 was the key to our continuing." At one point he and publisher Sam McKeel personally hit the bricks to sell the paper. I thought the Sun-Times downplayed circulation. Actually, it does. It much prefers to brag about its total readership, which a company called Scarborough Research measures by doing random telephone interviews. The Sun-Times is standing by its readership claims. Trouble is, the rate card it shows advertisers is pegged to circulation, not readership. And advertisers are already suing. Oh, yes. The first two suits were filed June 17 in circuit court. One of the plaintiffs is Central Furniture. "I'm sure they won't go to court," Mike Jacobson, Central Furniture's owner, predicted, no doubt accurately. "And I hope they won't go out of business, because they reach my customers." If the ads work, what's his beef? Savor the irony. I happened to talk to an ad rep who used to have the Central Furniture account. "He wasn't paying anywhere near the rate-card rates," she said. In fact, hardly any advertisers were. "The Sun-Times works totally off the rate card," she explained. "One guy was paying one-eighth of the rate card, another guy half. Because the Sun-Times is the underdog, they work deals." In other words, the advertisers now griping that they didn't get the 480,000 circulation they paid for didn't actually pay for 480,000 circulation? Some of them paid a hell of a lot less. But so what? When I told Jacobson I'd heard he was a hard bargainer, he snapped back, "What kind of a bargain am I getting?" He thought he was getting a 480,000-paper bargain, and he wasn't. All Cruickshank can do is shrug. "We're going to be sued by people who owe us money," he told me. "We're going to be sued by people who never paid us in the first place." Let's try to look at the bright side. Well, all of a sudden the marketing department couldn't be more important. As Jaclene Tetzlaff, who runs it, told me, "I think I have job security." Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com |
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