Death of another paper means more jobs lost
Editor’s note: This column originally published April 4, 1995
I almost lost another job last weekend. Naturally, it was a newspaper job.
I was bitten with the newspapering bug when I was 5 or 6. My Dad taught me to read at the kitchen table by going over the block Gothic headlines every evening in the Chicago Sun-Times. Reading on my own, I devoured all four of Chicago’s dailies every day, to the point where my lunch money went to buying newspapers we didn’t get at home. That’s why I’m so thin now.
I was born out of my time. Newspapers have been generally on the decline since I got into the business. I refuse to accept responsibility for that.
Journalism is taught as a science in colleges. Fortunately, I never went to journalism school. When I was graduated from De La Salle High, I wrote to all four papers in town for a job and the Daily News made me a copyboy. It was the year the White Sox went to the World Series. The Daily News ran a “Magic Number” feature on the front page every morning counting down to a pennant.
I wrote the feature. My first newspaper story - and on page one, at that.
I went to college because a reporter at the News said it was the easiest way to become a reporter. In my senior year at DePaul, I got a job reporting nights for UPI. I quit going to classes that very day and never was graduated.
UPI led to the Army led to various PR jobs led to the Tribune. Quit the Trib in 1969 for the Sun-Times. In 1978, the Sun-Times’ sister paper, the News, folded. A bunch of jobs went with it - from both papers. I went out on the street, starting writing thriller novels - and started working freelance for the Tribune again, of all places.
Started here a year ago. I don’t have a seat in the office because Jack Mabley keeps throwing spit balls at everyone, but it is a fine job and fun. Which leads me back to the Sentinel.
In the late ‘70s, I applied there for a job as TV critic and was on the verge of being hired when I decided I couldn’t afford the lower pay. (Like Mabley, I had been a TV critic before but I never got the hang of spit ball throwing.) So I might have been on the Sentinel last weekend when it was folded into its sister paper, the Journal, to become the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Everyone admires the Journal for its Pulitzers and serious reporting. I always admired the Sentinel for its wiseguy attitude, snappy writing and in-your-face style of reporting. Like this piece on a Milwaukee mob family:
“It was a meeting about bloodshed. Frank P. Balistrieri wanted some. His father-in-law didn’t.” That’s writing.
The merged paper is a tad too pompous. Reader complaints - presumably from Sentinel aficionados - have jammed the switchboards there. More important, a few more newspapermen lost their livelihoods in the merger and I feel for them. Given my record, I probably would have been one of them if I had taken the Sentinel job years ago.
I’m not worried about the Daily Herald. It prospers, has fun and circulation is growing - something I’m not used to on newspapers that employ me. My mission here is to write about Chicago and the Milwaukee Sentinel was not in my circulation area, but I did see two people from Milwaukee yesterday in The Saloon restaurant on Chestnut Street and they said they missed the old Sentinel, too. I figured it was the local angle I needed. Once I get my spit balls down, I’ll stake out a computer on Campbell Street.