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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Tribune's bankruptcy could be a harbinger

The Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Cubs, has filed for bankruptcy. Although this is sign of the distress in the newspaper business, the Tribune situation relates more to its heavily leveraged purchase a few years ago. The company has a mountain of debt and had little choice but to file for bankruptcy.

The Tribune's debt is dragging down some great American newspapers. The LA Times, the Sun and the Tribune are legendary and once fabulously profitable properties. These papers are not suffering alone. The McClatchy company, which bought foundering Knight-Ridder (another once-great newspaper company), owns the Miami Herald, Raleigh News & Observer, Charlotte Observer and other great papers. It, too, has a huge debt incurred in the Knight-Ridder purchase and has had to restructure that debt and lay off hundreds of employees. Cox Newspapers, out of Atlanta, has all of its North Carolina papers up for sale, leaving the Greenville Daily Reflector, Rocky Mount Telegram and others in limbo. There apparently are no eager buyers for newspapers, and the credit crisis has made it much harder to put together multi-million-dollar deals.

Could the Tribune bankruptcy be a harbinger for the entire industry? While Detroit automakers go hat-in-hand to Washington for a bailout, the newspaper industry suffers from some of the same problems that plague Detroit. Americans are not buying the traditional newspaper tossed in the driveway. More and more Americans are getting their news off the Internet or television (which is also suffering from revenue declines). Advertising revenues are down. Classified ads have been decimated by Internet options such as eBay and Craigslist. Sunday classified sections that once went on for dozens and dozens of pages are pitiful now. And daily classified sections are so thin they are no longer their own section or are so filled with "house ads" (newspaper promotions) that they are laughable. And newspaper management has not responded well to the challenges it faces.

But Americans still want to read the news. They want information, and they want it from a reliable source. Independent newspapers still provide that news, although layoffs in the newsroom and the redefining of news in futile efforts to win back readers have taken a toll on serious journalism. Investigative reporting, in-depth analysis and solid governmental reporting are getting more and more rare.

Newspapers are rushing headlong into the Internet with more and more sophisticated Web pages with photo galleries and video the print paper can't provide. But they haven't figured out a way to make the Internet pay as well as print ads did for more than a century. Until Internet ad rates rise sharply (which seems unlikely) or advertisers recognize that print ads are still valuable and worth the expense, newspapers will struggle, reporters and editors will be laid off, and readers (voters, citizens, decision makers) will be less well-informed.

An uninformed electorate is a danger to democracy. In terms of societal worth, newspapers are more important than automakers.