Hot Type, for the week of March 4, 2005 -- continued How to Unshake a Shake-up When Jeff Bailey resigned Friday as editor of Crain's Chicago Business he told his staff it was because he wasn't clicking with his publisher. "David [Blake] and I didn't get along well enough to be a team," the Tribune reported him saying, "and I felt there should be a team at a place that was changing that dramatically." But Bailey didn't click with a lot of people. Blake -- who wouldn't comment on Bailey's departure -- simply might have been one critic Bailey couldn't ignore. And if Blake was unhappy, we can assume his boss was too. That's Gloria Scoby, the Crain Communications senior vice president and group publisher who originally was Bailey's champion. What Crain Communications wanted then -- when Bailey, an outsider, succeeded Robert Reed as editor 15 months ago -- was a paper that was a little noisier, a little edgier, a little more colorful and unpredictable. "There are going to be evolutionary changes in the paper," Blake told me then, "and what can be loosely called lifestyle coverage is a piece of that." Reed was a hard-news guy. Scoops and in-depth reporting were a Crain's tradition, and if Crain Communications wanted a change it needed an editor who'd be comfortable making it. So Reed resigned. There was talk of a nationwide search, but Bailey approached Crain's from the Wall Street Journal, where he'd been a bureau chief and written a column on small business, and got the job. In his 15 months he did what he was brought in to do, maybe to a fault. There are a couple of new sections -- Focus: Finance and the Business of Life, which is industrial-strength lifestyle. Stories that start on the inside news pages, roughly pages two through eight, now end there. "It's breezier to look at, more USA Today in the tightness of its stories," says a longtime reader, a PR exec for major corporations who asked for anonymity. "It's a breezier, easier read, which is probably aiming for a younger set of readers, younger businesspeople." He's not one of them. "I don't read it as much as I did a year and a half ago," he says. "I don't see any breaking news in it, no thought pieces. I don't think CEOs are reading it. But they've done a great job of focusing on younger readers. It's more aimed at 'What do I, as a young businessperson, need to know to kind of get me ahead?'" Crain's claims circulation has stayed steady at about 50,000. That means the CEOs, CFOs, and COOs -- whom the longtime reader admits were dropping away before Bailey came aboard -- are being replaced by young readers, validating the changes Bailey was brought in to make. But Crain's is no longer the place where the who's who reads what's what. "Outside of the first three or four pages, it's clearly a much better paper," says someone still at Crain's. "But good people got pushed out. Some corporate sensibilities got stepped on. This is just one of those unfortunate episodes where somebody has to come in and say whoa." Decades of experience were lost as senior editorial employees resigned because they didn't want to work for Bailey. They complained about long weekends at the office, micromanagement, and insufferability. One of Bailey's changes was to take reporters off their beats periodically so they could spend a week working for the Internet editor. That was a good idea. The magazine's strength today isn't its front or back but its daily e-mailed business news, a "premium" service it charges extra for. CEOs do read that. The Web site has 125,000 registered users. "The online thing has supplanted the paper for a lot of people," the longtime reader says. "If I get their headlines on it I don't have to read the paper as carefully. I think their online is a brilliant service. I see more breaking news there than in any local medium." There isn't a paper that doesn't wonder how to coexist with its own Web presence. Shorter, fluffier news in print is one way to go when the hard news won't hold for the next edition. David Snyder, Reed's fondly remembered predecessor, got the Crain's Web site up and running, and now that he's returned from the post of associate publisher to be interim editor, he has to juggle print and pixels again. He's expected to reassert the dedication of Crain's to hard news and scoops. But after that? News Bite "Both the book and the Johnny Depp movie version of 'Fear and Loathing' begin with an epigraph from actor Samuel Johnson about the perils of alcohol: 'He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.'" -- Clarence Page, in the February 23 Tribune From Johnson, as passed on to us by his old vaudeville partner, Boswell. Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2005 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.