Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is an American daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1847, it was formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper", a slogan from which its once integrated WGN radio and WGN television received their call letters. It is the most-read daily newspaper in the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region, and the sixth-largest newspaper by print circulation in the United States.
In the 1850s, under Joseph Medill, the Chicago Tribune became closely associated with the Illinois politician Abraham Lincoln, and the then new Republican Party's progressive wing. In the 20th century, under Medill's grandson 'Colonel' Robert R. McCormick, its reputation was that of a crusading newspaper with an outlook that promoted American conservatism and opposed the New Deal. Its reporting and commentary reached markets outside Chicago through family and corporate relationships at the New York Daily News and the Washington Times-Herald. Through much of the 20th century and into the early 21st, it employed a network of overseas news bureaus and foreign correspondents. In the 1960s, its corporate parent owner, Tribune Company began expanding into new markets buying additional daily papers. In 2008, for the first time in its history, its editorial page endorsed a Democrat, Barack Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, for U.S. president.
Originally published solely as a broadsheet, the Tribune announced on January 13, 2009, that it would continue publishing as a broadsheet for home delivery, but would publish in tabloid format for newsstand, news box, and commuter station sales. The change, however, proved unpopular with readers; in August 2011, the Tribune discontinued the tabloid edition, returning to its established broadsheet format through all distribution channels.
The Tribune was owned by parent company Tribune Publishing. In May 2021, Tribune Publishing was acquired by Alden Global Capital, which operates its media properties through Digital First Media; since then, the newspaper's coverage has evolved away from national and international news and toward coverage of Illinois and especially Chicago-area news.
The Tribune settled a lawsuit over illegal charges to consumers in 2013 and was again sued for deceptive billing practices in 2023.
History
19th century
The Tribune was founded by James Kelly, John E. Wheeler, and Joseph K. C. Forrest, publishing the first edition on June 10, 1847. Numerous changes in ownership and editorship took place over the next eight years. Initially, the Tribune was not politically affiliated, but tended to support either the Whig or Free Soil parties against the Democrats in elections. By late 1853, it was frequently running editorials that criticized foreigners and Roman Catholics. About this time, it also became a strong proponent of temperance. However nativist its editorials may have been, it was not until February 10, 1855, that the Tribune formally affiliated itself with the nativist American or Know Nothing party, whose candidate Levi Boone was elected Mayor of Chicago the following month.Around 1854, part-owner Capt. J. D. Webster, later General Webster and chief of staff at the Battle of Shiloh, and Charles H. Ray of Galena, Illinois, through Horace Greeley, convinced Joseph Medill of Cleveland's Leader to become managing editor. Ray became editor-in-chief, Medill became the managing editor, and Alfred Cowles, Sr., brother of Edwin Cowles, initially was the bookkeeper. Each purchased one third of the Tribune. Under their leadership, the Tribune distanced itself from the Know Nothings, and became the main Chicago organ of the Republican Party. However, the paper continued to print anti-Catholic and anti-Irish editorials, in the wake of the massive famine immigration from Ireland.
The Tribune absorbed three other Chicago publications under the new editors: the Free West in 1855, the Democratic Press of William Bross in 1858, and the Chicago Democrat in 1861, whose editor, John Wentworth, left his position when elected as Mayor of Chicago. Between 1858 and 1860, the paper was known as the Chicago Press & Tribune. On October 25, 1860, it became the Chicago Daily Tribune. Before and during the American Civil War, the new editors strongly supported Abraham Lincoln, whom Medill helped secure the presidency in 1860, and pushed an abolitionist agenda. The paper remained a force in Republican politics for years afterwards.
In 1861, the Tribune published new lyrics by William W. Patton for the song "John Brown's Body". These rivaled the lyrics published two months later by Julia Ward Howe. Medill served as mayor of Chicago for one term after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
20th century
In the 20th-century, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, who took control in the 1920s, the paper was strongly isolationist and aligned with the Old Right in its coverage of political news and social trends. It used the motto "The American Paper for Americans". From the 1930s to the 1950s, it excoriated the Democrats and the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was resolutely disdainful of the British and French, and greatly enthusiastic for Chiang Kai-shek and Sen. Joseph McCarthy.When McCormick assumed the position of co-editor with his cousin Joseph Medill Patterson in 1910, the Tribune was the third-best-selling paper among Chicago's eight dailies, with a circulation of only 188,000. The young cousins added features such as advice columns and homegrown comic strips such as Little Orphan Annie and Moon Mullins. They promoted political crusades, and their first success came with the ouster of the Republican political boss of Illinois, Sen. William Lorimer. At the same time, the Tribune competed with the Hearst paper, the Chicago Examiner, in a circulation war. By 1914, the cousins succeeded in forcing out William Keeley, the newspaper's managing editor. By 1918, the Examiner was forced to merge with the Chicago Herald.
In 1919, Patterson left the Tribune and moved to New York City to launch his own newspaper, the New York Daily News. In a renewed circulation war with Hearst's Herald-Examiner, McCormick and Hearst ran rival lotteries in 1922. The Tribune won the battle, adding 250,000 readers to its ranks. The same year, the Chicago Tribune hosted an international design competition for its new headquarters, the Tribune Tower. The competition worked brilliantly as a publicity stunt, and more than 260 entries were received. The winner was a neo-Gothic design by New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood.
The newspaper sponsored a pioneering attempt at Arctic aviation in 1929, an attempted round-trip to Europe across Greenland and Iceland in a Sikorsky amphibious aircraft. But, the aircraft was destroyed by ice on July 15, 1929, near Ungava Bay at the tip of Labrador, Canada. The crew were rescued by the Canadian science ship CSS Acadia.
The Tribunes reputation for innovation extended to radio; it bought an early station, WDAP, in 1924 and renamed it WGN, the station call letters standing for the paper's self-description as the "World's Greatest Newspaper". WGN Television was launched on April 5, 1948. These broadcast stations remained Tribune properties for nine decades and were among the oldest newspaper/broadcasting cross-ownerships in the country.
The Tribunes legendary sports editor Arch Ward created the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in 1933 as part of the city's Century of Progress exposition.
One of the great scoops in Tribune history came when it obtained the text of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. Another was its revelation of United States war plans on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack. The Tribunes June 7, 1942, front page article implying that the United States had broken Japan's naval code could have resulted in the Japanese learning a closely guarded military secret. The story implying that Americans broke the enemy naval codes was not cleared by censors, and had U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt so enraged that he considered shutting down the Tribune.
From 1940 to 1943, the paper supplemented its comic strip offerings with The Chicago Tribune Comic Book, responding to the new success of comic books. At the same time, it launched the more successful and longer-lasting The Spirit Section, which was also an attempt by newspapers to compete with the new medium.
Under McCormick's stewardship, the Tribune was a champion of modified spelling for simplicity. Beginning in 1934, the paper compiled lists of dozens of common words whose spelling could be made "saner", removing double L's and shortening "-ogue" endings to "-og", among other changes. In 1939, some of these alternative spellings were abandoned due to unpopularity, such as "crum" for "crumb" and "sherif" for "sheriff", while introducing more prominent changes, such as the words "altho", "tho", "thoro", and "thru", which would become distinctive features of the Tribune for decades. Most of these simplified spellings were kept until a stylebook update in 1975 adopted Webster's Third as the paper's authority on spelling, with an editorial concluding that "we do not want to make any more trouble between Johnny and his teacher." However, a few others, including "cigaret" and "dialog", were kept as late as 1981.
1948 U.S. presidential election
The paper is well known for a mistake it made during the 1948 presidential election. At that time, much of its composing room staff was on strike. The early returns led editors to believe that the Republican candidate Thomas Dewey would win. An early edition of the next day's paper carried the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman", turning the paper into a collector's item. Democrat Harry S. Truman won and proudly brandished the newspaper in a famous picture taken at St. Louis Union Station. Beneath the headline was a false article, written by Arthur Sears Henning, which purported to describe West Coast results although written before East Coast election returns were available.McCormick, a vigorous campaigner for the Republican Party, died in 1955, just four days before Democratic boss Richard J. Daley was elected mayor for the first time.
In 1969, under the leadership of publisher Harold Grumhaus and editor Clayton Kirkpatrick, the Tribune began reporting from a wider viewpoint. The paper retained its Republican and conservative perspective in its editorials, but it began to publish perspectives in wider commentary that represented a spectrum of diverse opinions, while its news reporting no longer had the conservative slant it had in the McCormick years.
On May 1, 1974, in a major feat of journalism, the Tribune published the complete 246,000-word text of the Watergate tapes, in a 44-page supplement that hit the streets 24 hours after the transcripts' release by the Nixon White House. Not only was the Tribune the first newspaper to publish the transcripts, but it beat the U.S. Government Printing Office's published version, and made headlines doing so.
A week later, after studying the transcripts, the paper's editorial board observed that "the high dedication to grand principles that Americans have a right to expect from a President is missing from the transcript record." The Tribunes editors concluded that "nobody of sound mind can read
On December 7, 1975, Kirkpatrick announced in a column on the editorial page that Rick Soll, a "young and talented columnist" for the paper, whose work had "won a following among many Tribune readers over the last two years", had resigned from the paper. He had acknowledged that one column he wrote, dating to November 23, 1975, contained verbatim passages written by another columnist in 1967 and later published in a collection. Kirkpatrick did not identify the columnist. The passages in question, Kirkpatrick wrote, were from a notebook where Soll regularly entered words, phrases and bits of conversation which he had wished to remember. The paper initially suspended Soll for a month without pay. Kirkpatrick wrote that further evidence was revealed came out that another of Soll's columns contained information which he knew was false. At that point, Tribune editors decided to accept the resignation offered by Soll when the internal investigation began.
After leaving, Soll married Pam Zekman, a Chicago newspaper reporter. He worked for the short-lived Chicago Times magazine, by Small Newspaper Group Inc. of Kankakee, Illinois, in the late 1980s.
Soll was born in 1946, in Chicago, to Marjorie and Jules Soll. Soll graduated from New Trier High School, received a Bachelor of Arts in 1968 from Colgate University, and a master's degree from Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University in 1970.
In January 1977, Tribune columnist Will Leonard died at age 64. In March 1978, the Tribune announced that it hired columnist Bob Greene from the Chicago Sun-Times.
Kirkpatrick stepped down as editor in 1979 and was succeeded by Maxwell McCrohon, who served as editor until 1981. He was transitioned to a corporate position. McCrohon held the corporate position until 1983, when he left to become editor-in-chief of the United Press International. James Squires served as the paper's editor from July 1981 until December 1989.
Jack Fuller served as the Tribunes editor from 1989 until 1993, when he became the president and chief executive officer of the Chicago Tribune. Howard Tyner served as the Tribunes editor from 1993 until 2001, when he was promoted to vice president/editorial for Tribune Publishing.
The Tribune won 11 Pulitzer prizes during the 1980s and 1990s. Editorial cartoonist Dick Locher won the award in 1983, and editorial cartoonist Jeff MacNelly won one in 1985. Then, future editor Jack Fuller won a Pulitzer for editorial writing in 1986. In 1987, reporters Jeff Lyon and Peter Gorner won a Pulitzer for explanatory reporting, and in 1988, Dean Baquet, William Gaines and Ann Marie Lipinski won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting. In 1989, Lois Wille won a Pulitzer for editorial writing and Clarence Page snagged the award for commentary. In 1994, Ron Kotulak won a Pulitzer for explanatory journalism, while R. Bruce Dold won it for editorial writing. In 1998, reporter Paul Salopek won a Pulitzer for explanatory writing, and in 1999, architecture critic Blair Kamin won it for criticism.
In September 1981, baseball writer Jerome Holtzman was hired by the Tribune after a 38-year career at the Sun-Times.
In September 1982, the Chicago Tribune opened a new $180 million printing facility, Freedom Center.
In November 1982, Tribune managing editor William H. "Bill" Jones, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971, died at age 43 of cardiac arrest as a result of complications from a long battle with leukemia.
In May 1983, Tribune columnist Aaron Gold died at age 45 of complications from leukemia. Gold had coauthored the Tribune's "Inc." column with Michael Sneed and prior to that had written the paper's "Tower Ticker" column.
The Tribune scored a coup in 1984 when it hired popular columnist Mike Royko away from the rival Sun-Times.
In 1986, the Tribune announced that film critic Gene Siskel, the Tribunes best-known writer, was no longer the paper's film critic, and that his position with the paper had shifted from being that of a full-time film critic to that of a freelance contract writer who was to write about the film industry for the Sunday paper and also provide capsule film reviews for the paper's entertainment sections.
The demotion occurred after Siskel and longtime Chicago film critic colleague Roger Ebert decided to shift the production of their weekly movie review show, then known as At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert and later known as Siskel & Ebert & The Movies from Tribune Entertainment to The Walt Disney Company's Buena Vista Television unit. "He has done a great job for us," editor James Squires said at the time. "It's a question of how much a person can do physically. We think you need to be a newspaper person first, and Gene Siskel has always tried to do that. But there comes a point when a career is so big that you can't do that." Siskel declined to comment on the new arrangement, but Ebert publicly criticized Siskel's Tribune bosses for punishing Siskel for taking their television program to a company other than Tribune Entertainment. Siskel remained in that freelance position until he died in 1999. He was replaced as film critic by Dave Kehr.
In February 1988, Tribune foreign correspondent Jonathan Broder resigned after publishing his article from February 22 that contained a number of sentences and phrases taken, without attribution, from a column written by another writer, Joel Greenberg, that had been published 10 days earlier in The Jerusalem Post.
In August 1988, Chicago Tribune reporter Michael Coakley died at age 41 of complications from AIDS.
In November 1992, Tribune associate subject editor Searle "Ed" Hawley was arrested by Chicago police and charged with seven counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse for allegedly having sex with three juveniles in his home in Evanston, Illinois. Hawley formally resigned from the paper in early 1993, and pleaded guilty in April 1993. He was sentenced to 3 years in prison.
In October 1993, the Tribune fired its longtime military affairs writer, retired Marine David Evans, saying publicly that the position was being replaced by a national security writer.
In December 1993, the Tribunes longtime Washington, D.C. bureau chief, Nicholas Horrock, was fired after he chose not to attend a meeting that editor Howard Tyner requested of him in Chicago. Horrock, who shortly thereafter left the paper, was replaced by James Warren, who attracted new attention to the Tribunes D.C. bureau through his continued attacks on celebrity broadcast journalists in Washington.
In December 1993, the Tribune hired Margaret Holt from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel as its assistant managing editor for sports, making her the first female to head a sports department at any of the nation's 10 largest newspapers. In mid-1995, Holt was replaced as sports editor by Tim Franklin and shifted to a newly created job, customer service editor.
In 1994, reporter Brenda You was fired by the Tribune after free-lancing for supermarket tabloid newspapers and lending them photographs from the Tribunes photo library. She later worked for the National Enquirer and as a producer for The Jerry Springer Show before committing suicide in November 2005.
In April 1994, the Tribunes new television critic, Ken Parish Perkins, wrote an article about then-WFLD morning news anchor Bob Sirott in which Perkins quoted Sirott as making a statement that Sirott later denied making. Sirott criticized Perkins on the air, and the Tribune later printed a correction acknowledging that Sirott had never made that statement. Eight months later, Perkins stepped down as TV critic, and he left the paper shortly thereafter.
In December 1995, the alternative newsweekly Newcity published a first-person article by the pseudonymous Clara Hamon but quickly identified by Tribune reporters as that of former Tribune reporter Mary Hill that heavily criticized the paper's one-year residency program. The program brought young journalists in and out of the paper for one-year stints, seldom resulting in a full-time job. Hill, who wrote for the paper from 1992 until 1993, acknowledged to the Chicago Reader that she had written the diatribe originally for the Internet, and that the piece eventually was edited for Newcity.
In 1997, the Tribune celebrated its 150th anniversary in part by tapping longtime reporter Stevenson Swanson to edit the book Chicago Days: 150 Defining Moments in the Life of a Great City.
On April 29, 1997, popular columnist Mike Royko died of a brain aneurysm. On September 2, 1997, the Tribune promoted longtime City Hall reporter John Kass to take Royko's place as the paper's principal Page Two news columnist.
On June 1, 1997, the Tribune published what ended up becoming a very popular column by Mary Schmich called "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young", otherwise known as "Wear Sunscreen" or the "Sunscreen Speech". The most popular and well-known form of the essay is the successful music single released in 1999, accredited to Baz Luhrmann.
In 1998, reporter Jerry Thomas was fired by the Tribune after he wrote a cover article on boxing promoter Don King for Emerge magazine at the same time that he was writing a cover article on King for the Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine. The paper decided to fire Thomas—and suspend his photographer on the Emerge story, Pulitzer Prize-winning Tribune photographer Ovie Carter for a month—because Thomas did not tell the Tribune about his outside work and also because the Emerge story wound up appearing in print first.
On June 6, 1999, the Tribune published a first-person travel article from freelance writer Gaby Plattner that described a supposed incident in which a pilot for Air Zimbabwe who was flying without a copilot inadvertently locked himself out of his cockpit while the plane was flying on autopilot and as a result needed to use a large ax to chop a hole in the cockpit door. An airline representative wrote a lengthy letter to the paper calling the account "totally untrue, unprofessional and damaging to our airline" and explaining that Air Zimbabwe does not keep axes on its aircraft and never flies without a full crew, and the paper was forced to print a correction stating that Plattner "now says that she passed along a story she had heard as something she had experienced."
The Tribune has been a leader on the Internet, acquiring 10 percent of America Online in the early 1990s, then launching such web sites as Chicagotribune.com, Metromix.com, ChicagoSports.com, ChicagoBreakingNews.com, and ChicagoNow. In 2002, the paper launched a tabloid edition targeted at 18- to 34-year-olds known as RedEye.