New owners of Chicago Sun-Times vow to return to paper's working-class roots-NY Times

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"Along with Mr. Eisendrath, the new ownership of The Sun-Times includes several private investors and the Chicago Federation of Labor, an umbrella organization whose president is Mr. Ramirez."
 
7/23/17, "At Chicago Sun-Times, New Owners Vow Return to Paper’s Working-Class Roots," NY Times, Julie Bosman, Sydney Ember

"At a Christmas party in December, Edwin Eisendrath, a former Chicago alderman, bumped into Jorge Ramirez, a labor leader. As guests nibbled on decadent desserts, the two men contemplated an audacious plan.

Should they buy The Chicago Sun-Times, the city’s scrappy but perpetually endangered tabloid?

Less than two weeks ago, their fledgling idea came to fruition, when a group led by Mr. Eisendrath overcame a rival bid by Tronc, the publisher of The Chicago Tribune. The deal not only saved The Sun-Times from possible extinction, but also created a highly unusual arrangement: Labor unions now share ownership of a news organization that covers them closely, in what is still one of the nation’s strongest union towns.

Now that the acquisition has become official, Mr. Eisendrath, a Chicago native who has spent much of his career as a politician and business executive, is laying out his grand ambitions for The Sun-Times. He wants to breathe new life into the newspaper, revitalizing it as a publication that tells stories of the working class and acts as a voice of the people.

The idea is particularly resonant in Chicago, one of the last two-newspaper cities in the country, and the place that gave America Studs Terkel and Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”

“The North Star, for us, is great journalism that genuinely reflects the lives and interests of the working people of Chicago,” Mr. Eisendrath, 59, said in an interview last week in his downtown office, a room with few trinkets or wall hangings but a sweeping view of the Chicago River.

“Our story is such a Chicago story,” he said. “There’s such an overlap of identity between the city that we love and the group that we put together and this mission that we’re on. We think we’re going to serve the city really well.”

Along with Mr. Eisendrath, the new ownership of The Sun-Times includes several private investors and the Chicago Federation of Labor, an umbrella organization whose president is Mr. Ramirez. Since the deal closed, Mr. Eisendrath has sprinted into action, assembling a board of directors, arranging new office space in the city’s booming West Loop neighborhood and sketching out his vision. The deal also included The Chicago Reader, a weekly.

The sale capped a tumultuous few months for The Sun-Times. In May, Tronc said it had entered into an agreement to buy Wrapports Holdings, the paper’s owner. The move, however, caught the attention of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, which immediately said it would investigate the possible acquisition — The Sun-Times is The Tribune’s main competitor — and asked other suitors to submit bids.

Tronc said when it announced the deal that it intended to operate The Sun-Times as an independent entity. But the prospect of one company publishing the city’s two most prominent newspapers made some people in Chicago apprehensive. Heightening the anxiety was the man at Tronc’s helm, Michael W. Ferro Jr., a polarizing figure in the city and a former majority owner of The Sun-Times.

Mr. Ferro donated his stake in The Sun-Times to a charitable trust last year to avoid perceived conflicts of interest after taking a $44 million stake in Tronc, known then as Tribune Publishing.

When Mr. Eisendrath’s group emerged victorious, many in the country’s third-biggest city — at least those who pay attention to the ownership of The Sun-Times — felt a sense of relief.

“It would be wonderful to have a paper that attracted to its pages some of the literary ghosts of the great age of Chicago journalism,” said Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer and author in Chicago. 

“Those journalists back then were the voices of the working class, because they were working class.’’ 

Others were skeptical of how truly progressive the new owners are. “It will probably wind up being a Chicago political-establishment-oriented newspaper,” said Don Rose, a longtime political operative in Chicago who has been critical of Mr. Eisendrath’s political career.

Mr. Eisendrath may seem to be an unlikely champion of the working class, given that he grew up wealthy on Chicago’s North Side and graduated from Harvard. But he taught public school for several years and, at 29, represented the city’s Lincoln Park district as an alderman. He said he believed in keeping a diversity of working-class voices in newspapers.

“The Sun-Times has always had this in its DNA,” he said. “Around the country, it’s being lost, and I think it’s one of the reasons that Americans all over the country have come to distrust journalism.”

Mr. Eisendrath is distantly related to the Sulzberger family, which publishes The New York Times.)

Before the sale, some in Chicago feared that Tronc’s ownership would shift The Sun-Times, which has traditionally been a progressive counterpoint to the more conservative Tribune, to the right. Others thought Tronc would simply close The Sun-Times.

In a statement, a Tronc spokeswoman said the company had “always been committed to keeping The Sun-Times an independent media voice within the city of Chicago.”

The deal’s terms were not disclosed, but The Tribune reported that the purchase price was $1. Mr. Eisendrath’s group also put aside more than $11 million to finance the newspaper’s operations for roughly 30 months.

Rocked by ownership turmoil and crippled by staff cuts, The Sun-Times is hardly the same celebrated Chicago paper that won eight Pulitzer Prizes and once featured the columnist Mike Royko. Circulation has fallen to about 120,000, compared with roughly 350,000 a decade ago, and the paper, like most print publications, has struggled to figure out how to succeed in the digital age. Its website was clunky and outdated until a recent redesign.

 

The Sun-Times also has a burdensome $25 million-a-year contract with Tronc to print and distribute the paper, which the new ownership group has said it will honor.

The Sun-Times’s sports coverage remains strong, but the paltry size of its newsroom staff — about 70 employees, including fewer than 40 reporters — has made it difficult for the paper to delve deeply into some of the city’s biggest issues, including immigration and gun violence. 

Still, the newspaper has a loyal following among minorities, progressives and members of Chicago’s working class. Mr. Eisendrath’s group also bought Answers Media, a production studio that could help The Sun-Times make progress digitally.

Even as the arrival of the new ownership group was met with optimism in some circles, it also sent ripples of alarm through some in the newsroom. Labor unions carry a lot of might in Chicago, raising questions about whether the new owners might try to influence coverage.

When Mr. Ramirez came to the Sun-Times building to introduce himself to staff members after the sale, he promised not to interfere with their work.

“I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was nervous in the beginning,” said Jim Kirk, the publisher and editor in chief. “We cover the unions very aggressively.”

Mr. Kirk said he would like to add more cultural reporting in a city whose residents are obsessed with theater, art and architecture; more investigative reporters; and more feature articles about everyday life.

So while the future of The Sun-Times remains uncertain, the deal has preserved one of Chicago’s beloved institutions for now. 

Peter Alter, a historian for the Chicago History Museum, said Chicagoans had a deep affinity for The Sun-Times.

“Even as far back as rising like a phoenix from the ashes in the 1871 fire, Chicago has seen itself as favoring the underdog and as a working-class city,” he said. The battle between The Chicago Tribune and The Sun-Times, he said, “has that David and Goliath-type aspect to it.”"

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