The Red Eye, another failedd effort to save printe newspapers

This post was published in the Wilson Times Oct. 26, 2019

At our daughter’s urging, my wife and I took a recent trip to Chicago, which neither of us had ever seen. We planned to see the sights and major attractions, the Lake Michigan waterfront, the “Magnificent Mile” of tall buildings, the parks, the Art Institute, Picasso’s massive untitled steel sculpture and more.

We had anticipated all those things; they were in our plans. What we didn’t expect was an artifact from the desperate attempts of a once-powerful and wealthy newspaper corporation in a great, even legendary, newspaper town to keep people reading their news in print.

I didn’t recognize at first the odd-looking metal box about three feet high with a big round red metal ball on top. Then I remembered reading about the RedEye, a tabloid publication that the Chicago Tribune launched in 2002 in the hope of luring 18- to 34-year-olds back to print media. RedEye was free at first and published daily. Initially, distribution agents just handed out the papers as commuters boarded or exited trains. The smaller tabloid format was thought to be “commuter friendly,” meaning it could be read by holding the RedEye with one hand while holding onto a pole or strap in the train with the other hand.

Readership of print newspapers was plummeting, and advertising was migrating to the Internet in the 1990s. From the late 1980s through the Great Recession, newspaper publishers scrambled to find a way to stop the bleeding. Many thousands of newspaper jobs were eliminated. Advertising-starved papers shrank in size, and all kinds of creative ideas, such as RedEye, were proposed by news executives and consultants. None of those ideas saved the industry. Aggregators such as Google and Facebook pile up billions in cash revenues while once-strong newspapers, which created the news aggregators sell, are forced to close.

Despite great promotional campaigns from a company with more than 150 years in the newspaper business (The Tribune started publication in 1847 and survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, then helped lead the city’s recovery and reconstruction), RedEye ultimately failed to bring younger readers and commuters back to ink-on-paper news. After giving away copies of RedEye for six months, the Tribune began charging 25 cents per copy. The decrepit newspaper boxes with the big red ball on top that I saw show that RedEye just couldn’t make it. In 2017, RedEye switched to a weekly production schedule.

Tribune Media, once a dominant news and content provider in newspapers, radio and television, went through a series of mergers, spinoffs, and other attempts to stay solvent before succumbing to bankruptcy in 2008.

The old RedEye boxes were not the only artifacts of a once-thriving industry. The grandiose Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue is another artifact of a bygone era, from the same company that attempted a turnaround with red news boxes, splashy promotions and big red orbs atop their news boxes. The 1925 Gothic Revival Tribune Tower was the result of an international competition to design the greatest skyscraper ever. The elegantly chiseled stone building that once housed the Tribune empire was a cathedral to news. Now, the 36-story building is being converted to apartments and retail space. It still looks impressive, and I’m sure the apartments are very pricey. It, too, is a reminder of how far the newspaper industry has fallen in half a century.

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