More Less at the Sun-Times
For repositioning, think diminishment. Not just the Sun-Times, but newspapers throughout America are cutting back. Readers simply don’t buy them the way they used to. Papers will have to be reinvented, Nadler was saying, to appeal to a balkanized public. That raises a “really scary question,” Nadler went on, which is whether anything at all will glue a metropolitan area together when even its daily papers are aimed at niches. Just one thing, maybe. Observe how editorial departments flail around for identities, while sports sections keep getting bigger.
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Nadler’s relationships with some key figures from parent American Publishing were overtly contentious. CEO Larry Perrotto imposed a policy of attrition that Nadler, industry trends notwithstanding, opposed on grounds that the loss of talent would make the paper’s quality unsustainable. And Nadler was so openly hostile toward Nigel Wade, the London troubleshooter, that he made sure he was on vacation the last time Wade visited the paper.
Perrotto has heavier losses than Nadler to worry about. There’s Valassis. You’ve probably never heard of it, but it’s a Detroit-based company that provides newspapers with FSIs–that’s free-standing inserts, those slick pages of coupons from national advertisers that clutter Sunday papers so intolerably. Unless you save them, in which case you bless their existence.
“If your idea has merit, you’ll be rewarded,” he promised in a memo to all employees. “There’s a minimum of a $50 award for an accepted idea, but you could receive hundreds or even thousands of dollars . . . ”
A similar current of angry humiliation is now flowing among Latinos. As Hot Type reported, on May 19 the news director of WGBO, Channel 66, presumed to air a one-minute Associated Press TV feed of ceremonies in Cuba observing the hundredth anniversary of the battlefield death of Jose Marti. A Cuban vice president was heard putting a revolutionary, ergo anti-Yankee spin on the great patriot’s legacy.
Aponte preferred to let others do the talking, but now she spoke up. Although a screening of the news clip from Cuba had opened the forum, she was determined to move far beyond that incident. A boycott will focus all the anger here on WGBO, she said; it will gutter out after a couple of weeks, and nothing will have changed.
