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Daily Herald columnist Jim Slusher: A crisis for newspapers has produced benefits for readers

Political opponents have enjoyed taking Rahm Emanuel to task for his famous call to never let a crisis "go to waste," but the former Chicago mayor and current U.S. ambassador to Japan had a point that has not been lost on us in the newspaper industry in recent years.

To be objectively understood, Emanuel's quote needs to be rendered completely. What he said was, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before."

As everyone is aware, the Great Recession that started in 2008 and the emergence of electronic resources for providing news dramatically affected traditional news sources, particularly print newspapers. It is no exaggeration to say that this period presented a crisis for us. Those of us, like Paddock Publications and the Daily Herald, that are finding our way on top of it are doing so because we're doing things we thought we could not do before.

Some of these things have special value for newspaper readers - as a particularly noteworthy example demonstrates in today's edition.

Through an arrangement with Crain's Chicago Business, we begin publishing occasional commentaries by Greg Hinz, an incisive veteran political and government journalist who has been a fixture at Crain's since 1996. Our arrangement will allow us to publish in print and online aggregations of Hinz' commentaries with online links to his original work at Crain's. In exchange, Crain's will have access to the work of Robert Feder, Chicago's preeminent media columnist whose observations we regularly aggregate and support online.

In an earlier time, we likely would never have thought such an agreement possible. Journalism is a notoriously competitive business, and for most of our history, the thought that any of our agencies would share resources or stories would be pure anathema. But necessity has a way of making people and institutions see the world through new eyes.

We now have had a longstanding arrangement, for example, to share materials with ABC 7 Chicago television. Similarly, we've been letting the Chicago Sun-Times use some of our suburban stories and pictures that they wouldn't typically have access to just as they let us use some of their city reporting, and we and Shaw Media do the same involving events and issues where our coverage areas overlap.

The result is a decided benefit for the readers and viewers of all our organizations.

To be sure, we all still compete for stories, and we aren't shy about striving to be the first to report important events or issues that affect our core audiences. But we've also discovered that we can also help give our audiences more of the news and information they care about by strategically working together to share our work.

So, we look forward to bringing you Hinz' great work, and I'm happy to report we're not letting our crisis go to waste, but using it to continuously find ways to improve the news, sports, entertainment and lifestyle information we bring you every day.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for administration and opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on Twitter at @JimSlusher.

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