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Hot Type, for the week of July 23, 2004 -- continued
Pietrusiak launched Citylink in November 2001 -- "We couldn't have picked a worse time," says Wendorf -- and gave it the next two and a half years of her life. "I could do a cover story about Logan Square neighbors tearing up the concrete on their property to create more green space," she writes in an e-mail. "I could write an article about an up-and-coming band and give them their first -- or an additional -- piece of press that could help them get signed, as was the case with local metal band Bible of the Devil. I covered prostitution roundtables. . . . I'd like to think that these articles made a difference somehow." It was a heady life. Last January Citylink seemed solid enough for Editor & Publisher to run a gushing profile of Pietrusiak under the headline "'Grrl power' in Chicago." She told the trade magazine, "Being in my 20s, I can definitely relate to the younger majority of the target audience. In one night I can hit a fashion show or cover a metal band, and just be part of the scene. I've got enough life and energy that I can have six different things going on at the same time." But by then a lack of advertising was slowly killing Citylink. One of four full-time staffers when the paper was new, Pietrusiak had become the one and only, and at age 24 she was being ground down by a classic journalistic challenge -- putting out almost singlehandedly a paper you can't separate yourself from. "There were a lot of things I went to that were social and also for work," she says. "I went to parties that were pretty cool and I got in free. But there were times I didn't want to talk to anybody and wanted to stay in my house for a week, but I couldn't." Last winter she had a chance to spend a few days in Iowa observing the caucuses. "I thought, 'Why would I go and not write something?' I realized I could turn it into a Citylink story. How many people actually know the dynamic of being in a caucus room?" Hardly any, she decided. "I was going to come home and, you know, drink a bunch of coffee and start transcribing my notes," she says. But her old boyfriend dropped by. "He tried to be nice, and he gave me a back rub. But I got relaxed and went to sleep -- and I didn't have time to go to sleep." Because she dozed off she got behind, and typos and little factual errors sneaked in that now make her cringe. "This is a really, really good story," she says, reading it again. "I had a lot of calls from that story. People loved it. Too bad it sucked." Tellez and Wendorf were "relentlessly optimistic," Pietrusiak says, until a week before they pulled the plug. The final issue came out in mid-April, and a couple of weeks later, when we talked about the paper's death, the body was still warm: the black Citylink boxes still had papers in them, and because there'd been no announcement, a lot of casual readers didn't realize those papers were dated and Citylink was history. Pietrusiak couldn't say for sure who those readers had actually been -- there'd been no money for market research. "We weren't sure if we were an arts paper or a community paper," she says. "Whenever I wrote an article I had two pictures in my head. One of a younger Wicker Park artist-musician sort, and one of a longtime Logan Square activist in a fight for more green space and traffic controls. And I'd try to write somewhere in between." Wendorf and Tellez would like to bring Citylink back. The unsolved riddle is what to put in the paper that will attract readers who'll attract advertisers seeking the market the two of them still believe is there. "The challenge is, what should be its content?" Wendorf says. "On one end you have traditional community newspapers, which tend to have a lot of local news -- content-driven things. On the other end you have papers like the Reader and New City -- they tend to be analytical, arts driven, that kind of stuff. The area needs a blend of both. It's how to do it. It's not a traditional neighborhood. It's a series of neighborhoods. That was one of the dilemmas. How do you bring people from Lakeview, for instance, to purchase services in West Town, Bucktown, or Wicker Park?" From Lakeview? "We were on the western side of Lakeview," Wendorf says. "We had retail drops." In June, I talked to Mark Valentino, editor, publisher, and owner of the Gazette, a paper that successfully spans several neighborhoods. It's a thick monthly with a divided soul -- stuffed with real estate ads while given to reporting on community groups fighting gentrification. Founded in 1983, the Gazette was known as the Near West/South Gazette until the May issue, when it announced that it was shortening its name and expanding into Bridgeport, Chinatown, West Town, and East Village. For the last four years the competition in the Gazette's old neighborhoods has been the weekly Chicago Journal. Who are you up against in West Town and East Village? I asked Valentino. "Citylink's the paper there," he said. It folded two months ago, I told him. "They did? I didn't realize that," he said. "Gosh, what an ironic twist!" Pietrusiak was paid $25,000 a year to put out Citylink. In a good week she got an editorial budget of $100. "With no freelance money," she told me, "I found myself working with a lot of English majors who were just venturing into journalism who were willing to work for free. I found myself at times being a mentor as well as an editor -- at a time when I needed a mentor too. "The majority of the time I had no money to pay contributors. And it was hard, because in the beginning I told people they could get paid. I stopped asking to get comped for gas, for lunch, for going to Kinko's late at night because our computers were screwy. I stopped asking for compensation because I was under the impression there was no money, and I was almost OK with that because I wanted it to work, and if I put the time into it and money into it there'd be something later on. And there wasn't." Even at a fat paper like the Gazette everyone works part-time. That includes Valentino, whose day job is assistant dean for development at the University of Illinois at Chicago dental school. Venus was Pietrusiak's business model -- a dedicated core working all hours for nothing. She couldn't duplicate it. "Maybe I just wasn't cool enough," she says. She adds, "A lot of these pubs that depend on their freelancers working for little or no money are not publishing every week, and they're not necessarily out to make a profit, at least not in the beginning. They're born from one passion or another. So here I was, taking someone else's seed of an idea, adding on what I could, learning what it was, deciding what it was going to be, and developing my own dedication and fire. But it's not like I had a lot of time in between issues to recoup, take a step back, mull over what was going on." A half dozen of the black Citylink boxes still sit on the streets, some chained to light poles. They're scarred by graffiti, festooned with decals, stuffed with debris. Pietrusiak says some have been appropriated by other papers -- "squatters," she calls them. "I really like looking at them," she says of the abandoned boxes. "They're such works of street art. They're being absorbed by the street." Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com |
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