ArtsPlus: Not Dead, Just Buried
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I hate to sound like a cheerleader for the paper, but check out the page’s music coverage: over a recent two-day period the Trib ran no less than eight music reviews by eight writers, encompassing rock old and new, punk, heavy metal, Christian music,
Lost in the shuffle was Steve Nidetz’s thrice-a-week broadcasting column. Nidetz had a difficult job: going up against Rob Feder of the Sun-Times. The Sun-Times invested in Feder many years ago by giving him a daily column and time to develop sources. Today he dominates his beat as perhaps no other journalist in Chicago. Nidetz did fine in the position, but the Tribune didn’t publish him often enough–or long enough–to allow him to compete effectively with Feder. This is a textbook case of half-assed newspaper editorship. But word is that the preprinted Tempo section may go “live”–i.e., be put together the day before publication–and that should this happen, Nidetz’s column would be reactivated and run daily.
The Stones’ multimillion-dollar pact with Budweiser–which required the band to appear in beer commercials–is “another important revenue stream,” as Bongiovanni puts it. (The European tour is sponsored by Volkswagen.) Over a period of 13 months it all added up to gross sales of somewhere between $250 million and $300 million. “Nobody’s ever done that before,” Bongiovanni notes. “The Stones are at the top of their game. It’s not to say that it couldn’t happen again, if any other band wanted to work that hard for that period of time. But for now the Stones have set a new standard.”
