For disgruntled Tribune readers, Ken Fruit of Glencoe surely said it best in a scathing note to “Voice of the People”: “I almost mistook the new look of the Tribune for ‘My Weekly Reader,’” he huffed.
“I detest it!” Tapp seethed. “I find it very difficult to read, I feel it looks incredibly old-fashioned. This has a very small-town feel to it. This just doesn’t look professional.”
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The naysayers, of course, have the corner on colorful comments. But Twohey says he’s received about 200 letters and phone calls, and they’re running two-to-one in favor of the new design. Typical comments praise the larger, easier-to-read type. George Harmon, head of the Medill newspaper program at Northwestern, says the move to larger print reflects a national trend, which he attributes to “the fact that the average American is aging [and] their eyesight is getting worse,” and to research that shows that younger readers like bigger print.
“They’ve eliminated a lot of black rules, and they’re using hairline rules to separate columns,” Blake went on. “So they’re achieving a lightness to the paper that gives the reader a little more accessibility. On the other hand . . . with the heavier lines, you kind of turn up the volume of how the paper talks to you. A New York tabloid, for instance, screams at you. They lost a little of that structural spice by turning down the volume.”
Almost a decade later, Wills’s 17th book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America won this year’s Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. An adjunct professor of history at Northwestern, Wills lives in Evanston and continues to write an insightful, unpredictable column that’s read in over 50 cities, including New York, Detroit, Baltimore, and Dallas. But not Chicago.
“Yet the economic ravages visited on the black community over centuries are more crippling than anything the Mississippi River has done to Iowans or Missourians. And the government had a hand in the past forms of legal discrimination and social pressuring. The national administration did not cause the Mississippi to overflow its banks.”
Chicago readers will have to make do with Wills’s regular stream of books, articles for Time and the New York Review of Books, and occasional local appearances. At the Printers Row Book Fair, Wills read from Lincoln at Gettysburg and lectured on it before taking questions. “A lot of people speculate about what would have happened if Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated,” said one man. “For our generation, we wonder what would have happened if John F. Kennedy had survived. What do you think?”
