What's the matter with Chicago business coverage?

Michael Miner of the Chicago Reader assesses what Chicago would be like if the Sun-Times closed and left the city with one newspaper and worries about the business coverage.

Miner wrote, “To O’Connor, last year’s top local environmental story, about BP wanting the right to pollute more at its Whiting refinery, was just a small piece of an untold economic story of huge proportions, about billions of gallons of crude coming Chicago’s way from the tar sands of Alberta. ‘Nobody covers Canada,’ said O’Connor.

“O’Connor believes the Tribune should send its staff out into the world to look for stories that matter to Chicago and explain how they do. He thinks David Greising is the paper’s ‘poster child.’ From 1998 to 2003, Greising wrote a column for the front page of the business section that had the vigor and sass of a sports column. In 2003 the Trib tried to move the column to page two, so Greising stopped writing it. The shift of pages would have changed the message from ‘you’ve got to read this guy’ to ‘he’s not so important.’ O’Connor thinks the paper lost its nerve. ‘He got his legs cut out from under him. I think there was squawking from the business side that he punched too hard, so they dropped him into the brass chipper.’

“As it is the Sun-Times ‘is creaming the Tribune on business,’ O’Connor told me. Yet at very nearly the moment he said this, Dan Miller, the business editor at the Sun-Times, resigned. He knew the paper was about to dramatically reduce his staff, and he didn’t want to work there anymore.”

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