The people of Illinois have to act to make certain we have choices. Download a Walls-Tobin Petition and get your family and friends to sign. Notarize it and mail it to Walls For Gov,47 West Polk St. #152. 60605. https://t.co/F7DRbeEYgThttps://t.co/0j2ASHkWwi
Until now, we’ve offered our online content for free. But we can no longer afford to operate our business this way.
The Alliance of Audited Media, an industry group that monitors the circulation of news publishers, estimates that the percentage of legitimate websites generating relevant, original content is very low, about 3 percent of the world’s 329 million websites, because the economics are brutal.
Google and Facebook dominate digital advertising, together collecting 73 percent of all digital ad revenue, according to a 2017 analysis by the research firm, Pivotal. All other companies compete for rest of the digital advertising pie. As print advertising has declined year-after-year, this has a created an impossible business model for labor-intensive, quality local journalism.
Earlier this month, the Denver Post made a dramatic plea to save that paper from an owner who has financially drained the company and trimmed the reporting staff to the bone. Our story — in many ways — is similar.
We’ve suffered through a series of managers who sold our assets, took money out of journalism and left us hollowed out.
As recently as last summer, some thought the only way forward was to fold the Sun-Times into the competition. That’s when a broad coalition of business and labor leaders stepped up to thwart a takeover by the Chicago Tribune — and made a promise to help us win.
* The paper is also currently running an ad bashing the Tribune. It starts at the 33:34 mark…
If you let the video play after the ad, you’ll see Sun-Times Editor-in-Chief Chris Fusco explain the ad. Fusco also notes that his wife works for the Tribune.
I enjoy robust competition, but this level of contempt for the other paper vastly exceeds anything I’ve seen in nearly four decades here. […]
Traditionally, competing papers, like most competing consumer products, tout their virtues in ads and imply or allude politely to their advantages over other brands. Harsh attack commercials are generally reserved for political campaigns, which is why this Sun-Times spot, which alternates praise for itself with whacks at us — the Sun-Times’ “priority is hardworking people”; the Tribune’s “priorities aren’t so clear,” and so on — feels distinctly political.
Not to mention false. Look no further than the massive investigation the Tribune launched into how failures in the Cook County property tax system harm the poor most of all for evidence of our priorities. Look at the extensive analysis of lead in Chicago’s tap water we published earlier this month to see what matters to us. Look at the deep-dive investigation our reporters conducted last fall into children dying from abuse or neglect while under state supervision to see whom we haven’t written off.
* But…
The @Suntimes put into an ad how a lot of us feel about the brand Chicago Tribune. There are good reporters at CT, of-course, some I follow religiously - but the brand ID isn’t that far off from that ad. https://t.co/X0o9l7kaCE
I should have put an asterisk on this post. The statement above does NOT include the Ferro years. To be fair I didn’t see much of the paper back then as the website was made unreadable.
