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 The Passive Consumer RedEye keys into readers' fundamental laziness. Editor & Publisher's Mark Fitzgerald made a reasonable suggestion a while back: RedEye should stop pretending it's for sale. "I think a switch to free is inevitable -- and that it will come sooner rather than later," Fitzgerald wrote in December, observing that "of course, for most RedEye readers, the tabloid has been free from the day it was launched two years ago." By "most," he meant the vast majority -- all but 15,000 of some 80,000 daily readers, according to the numbers he got from the Tribune. Today RedEye is freer than ever. It's being given away aggressively at certain CTA stations (the Tribune won't say how many) every weekday morning at rush hour. The Tribune calls this "sampling." At my Irving Park Brown Line station a hawker stands at the door handing out copies to the commuters pouring in. He told me he's making an extra $40 a day moonlighting from 6 to 9 AM. RedEye can charge more for ads if circulation is up, he explained. The marketing insight at play here is that if you put something light, easy to read, and disposable in the hands of people facing a 15-minute train ride, many will take it. And having taken it, they'll feel less of a need to buy some other paper -- even if that paper was their actual preference. For the last nine years, Rose (who doesn't want her last name used) has managed the newsstand inside the Irving Park station. "I was selling 70 to 75 Sun-Timeses a day, 30 to 35 Tribunes, and 20 to 25 RedEyes," she told me. "Now it's 12 or 13 Tribs and about 30 Sun-Timeses." Overall, she said, her business is off 70 percent. I told the hawker that Rose was taking a beating. "They're closing [the station] in September anyway," he said. Rose says she complained to the Tribune about their sampling program, asking how long they'd keep it up, "and they said 'It's going on a while.'" She also complained to the CTA. "They said, 'They are out of the premises. We can do nothing. If they were on the premises, we could stop them.' But they're right at the door!" The drivers who bring Rose's papers to her each morning have told her other stations are also being hurt. "We're way down," says Jay Gandhi, who owns the kiosk at the Fullerton el. He used to get 250 copies of the Sun-Times and 350 copies of the Tribune each morning and sell nearly all of them. Now a RedEye hawker and free RedEye boxes stand a few steps away, and he says his draw had to be reduced to about 45 copies of the Sun-Times and 40 copies of the Tribune. The sidewalk outside the Belmont el station is lined with red boxes stuffed with gratis copies of RedEye. "We used to sell 500 papers a day," said the newsstand operator, who didn't want to give his name. "Now we're down to 100. Would you pay if you could get it free? "Everyone has the same problem," he went on, rattling off the names of other stations plagued by the RedEye sampling. "They do it because they can." Far be it from anyone at the Reader to object on principle to newspapers being given away for free. But I hoped John O'Loughlin, general manager of RedEye, would comment on the collateral damage done by his paper's campaign. My call was routed to Tribune spokesman Patty Wetli, and she didn't. "There are some locations where we've been sampling papers in the afternoons and have switched to mornings," Wetli said. "It's part of a sort of holistic look at our distribution and where it makes the most sense to have samplers in the best way to get the most copies in the hands of the most readers." Like Fitzgerald, John Cruickshank would like to see RedEye stop pretending it costs a quarter. But while Fitzgerald thinks the tabloid has a bright future as a freebie, Cruickshank, publisher of the Sun-Times, just wants it to disappear (Red Streak, the Sun-Times's forlorn imitation, would follow no more than 30 seconds behind). "Will they not finally just give up and go away?" he wondered. "The only reason they're doing it is for advertising. But when you can't sell the thing and have to give it away -- you can either attract a readership or you can't." But advertisers don't care much how papers round up their readers, and RedEye's figured out one way of doing that. You have to hand it to them -- which should be the paper's motto. Cruickshank told me the Sun-Times had come up with a plan to help out Sun-Times vendors "who we've identified as taking a particular hit." Sure enough, this Tuesday morning new posters appeared alongside Rose's newsstand. Buy a Sun-Times and turn in your RedEye, they announced, and you'll get a coupon for a free cup of White Hen coffee. Found Guilty by the Tribune Thomas Knight finally confronts his nemesis, the Chicago Tribune, before a jury next week. Knight, who's acting as his own attorney, is suing the Tribune for defamation, and he expects the civil trial beginning May 2 to last at least three weeks. Twenty years ago, Knight was Du Page County's lead prosecutor in the first murder trial of Rolando Cruz. After three trials and ten years on death row, Cruz was cleared of the 1983 murder of ten-year-old Jeanine Nicarico, and as that case dragged on the Tribune became merciless. Here's the editorial page in 1995: "One thing is clear: None of those involved in the Cruz prosecution deserves ever again to enjoy a position of public honor or trust. They have demonstrated that they have no honor and they merit no trust." And columnist Eric Zorn in 2000: "County prosecutors and police blew this case big time, then cheated brazenly in an effort to cover their tracks and keep innocent men behind bars for more than 10 years." Knight and six other Du Page County prosecutors and sheriff's deputies were indicted for perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. As the 1999 trial was about to begin, investigative reporters Maurice Possley and Ken Armstrong wrote: "Thousands of pages of testimony from the DuPage 7 grand jury and court documents paint a picture of a prosecution that was constructed with lies and half-truths, buttressed with distorted evidence and, according to the indictment, stitched together with criminal misconduct." |
