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The [Tuesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

When Gannett flagship USA Today first came on the scene, it infamously inverted the journalism paradigm by focusing relentlessly on the sunny side of things. Thus, the classic headline “Miracle: 327 survive, 55 die.”
The paper is not quite so smarmy these days, but it’s still USA Today, and its satellite publications are still essentially McPapers – each one uses the same template for its website, for example.
Seeing as how Gannett is now in the midst of a hostile bid for Tribune Publishing, I thought I’d reimagine some Chicago news as if Gannett had owned the Tribune when it happened:

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Posted on April 26, 2016

The [Friday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

The Best of Prince in the Beachwood . . .
1. Bin Dive | Prince: Chaos and Disorder.
“Sure, he was in deep hate with Warner Brothers when he delivered Chaos, but that can only make Prince just so careless. As illustrated by all the marketing schemes he’s hatched since, the man is incapable of leaving strategy out of his game altogether, even when he’s working on a contractual obligation. In other words, it’s not that the major label system stifled Prince too much. In the case of this weird, engaging little album, I’d say it stifled him just enough, and in all the right ways.”

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Posted on April 22, 2016

The [Wednesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

Last year’s playoff series between the Cubs and the Cardinals felt a bit like the passing of the torch in the NL Central Division, even if the Cubs were a third-place wild card team and the Cards had won 100 regular-season games. That’s because the Cardinals seemed to unwittingly acknowledge a shift in trajectories when they lost their composure while the Cubs maintained a steady and even joyous mindset unaffected by the pressures of the proceedings.
I wonder if the same thing is happening in reverse to the Blackhawks in their current playoff series against the St. Louis Blues.

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Posted on April 20, 2016

The [Tuesday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

“Columbia College’s restive part-time faculty union lobbed another shell at the administration today, contending that members receive only 13 percent of school wages and salaries, despite teaching nearly half of all classes,” Crain’s reports.
“The union known as P-fac issued a no-confidence vote last summer in President Kwang-wu Kim, who is struggling like many college leaders to balance budgets amid declining enrollment and other financial headwinds, which in Illinois include the state budget mess.
“P-fac said it hired a CPA firm to do the math. Part-time faculty salaries totaled $13.3 million, it said, about 6 percent of Columbia’s fiscal 2016 budget of $207.7 million. The union said 1,470 of 3,065 assigned course sections were taught by part-time faculty in spring 2014.”
Not only is that unfair to part-time faculty, it’s unfair to students.

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Posted on April 19, 2016

The [Monday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

“Corporate borrowers across the world have defaulted on $50B of debt so far this year as the number of delinquent companies accelerates at its fastest pace since the financial crisis in 2009.”
There’s nothing magical about the private sector. Companies go bankrupt all the time. Companies fail. Companies screw up. Companies harm people. Running government like a business is a meaningless concept: Do you mean running government to turn a profit? Do you mean investing hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D? Do you mean ping pong tables and air hockey for Secretary of State employees? Do you mean back-stabbing office politics? Surely you don’t mean being more fiscally responsible. Because that’s not what the private sector is.

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Posted on April 18, 2016

The Weekend Desk Report

By Steve Rhodes

“For the majority of his life, Nasir Bin Zakaria was a citizen of nowhere,” Marwa Eltagouri reports for the Tribune.
“He was 14 when he was kidnapped by militants at a bazaar in west Myanmar. ‘Kalah,’ they hissed at him, a racial slur used toward Rohingya – the ethnic Muslim minority residing among the country’s Buddhist majority. He spent a night at the militant camp before escaping to Malaysia. He never saw his parents again.
“Now, at 45, he’s among almost 1,000 Rohingya refugees who’ve found a new home in Chicago, the majority of whom began arriving in 2013. The local group makes up nearly a fifth of the Rohingya refugees resettled across the country since 2010, U.S. Department of State officials said.
“Most of the roughly 300 Rohingya families in Chicago live in the Rogers Park and Albany Park neighborhoods.”

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Posted on April 16, 2016

The [Friday] Papers

By Steve Rhodes

“A police accountability task force confirmed what communities of color live with daily. A report by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s hand-picked group called out the nation’s third-largest police department for racism,” Chicago Reporter editor and publisher Susan Smith Richardson writes today.
“But the strong acknowledgment of racial discrimination and the clear recommendations in the report, including getting rid of the primary agency that disciplines officers, may be trumped by the mayor’s diminished public credibility. A spoiler alert has hovered over the work of the task force from the beginning: Is the process legitimate, and will the mayor act on the task force’s recommendations?”

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Posted on April 15, 2016

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