Back in Action
Last November, the Sun-Times stopped being such a do-gooder. The paper dropped its Action Time service, which was deemed expensive, anachronistic, and a bore–each letter seeking a long-lost Army buddy, or satisfaction from a mail-order house, sounded an awful lot like every other.
To be fair, the Sun-Times might have been the last large paper in the country to abandon the “action” format, once a staple of American papers. The Tribune spiked its equivalent, Action Line, eight years ago. But however conventional the decision, what the Sun-Times did flew in the face of the way it wants to be perceived. “Our desire is to be as reader-oriented as any paper has been on the face of the earth,” says Sam McKeel, president of the paper; yet McKeel personally eliminated Action Time while the Sun-Times was between editors.
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Assistant to the editor Tom Sheridan has kept tabs on the reaction. “We’ve probably had several hundred letters,” he reported, “and there at the beginning we were getting several hundred calls a day.”
“The Sun-Times is a healthy newspaper,” Sheridan went on, “but by the same token we’ve never had the kind of staff that we can waste people. And that’s not to indicate Action Time was ever a waste.” When Sheridan moved on, he was not replaced. Even so, “one reporter and two editorial assistants is a chunk of people. It’s 1 percent of our editorial staff. . . .
“Yeah, the reason is twofold,” he explained. “The first is that it costs money. Ultimately it takes manpower to do it [even] the laziest possible way. Second, the stepchild issue comes to bear. Editors want things in the newspaper that work and that they get credit for. To continue to maintain somebody else’s idea at a high cost, it’s really got to be something.”
In a harrowing scene, Ms. Berman handed an Evanston postal clerk a stack of mail too thick to slide into the first-class chute. A self-described “bleeding liberal,” Ms. Berman leads a life largely given over to opening letters of solicitation to which she cannot afford to respond. As a result, she has collected hundreds of self-addressed return envelopes. She recycles them.
“I’m writing you,” the plea begins, “on behalf of BRM-envelope users everywhere. We’re trying to recycle, and yet we can’t do it w/o breaking the law. See Enclosed . . .”
