Does the Tribune Love Its Free-lancers?
The trouble with Chicago magazines, speculated James Warren recently in the Tribune’s Tempo section, could be “editorial ennui.” It could be a lack of “a cohesive community here of magazine editors and writers . . .”
Well, sure they do! Everyone’s a writer; we turn away the same reams over here at the Reader. They’re turned away at Vanity Fair and Esquire and Rolling Stone, too. What does that tell you about the real writers? Not much.
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Despite making huge profits, the Tribune operates on the premise that these are hard times, and that editors like Umberger with large staffs had better use them.
Other sections, though, don’t have large staffs, or any staffs at all. “I couldn’t put out Friday without free-lancers, and a lot of other sections couldn’t do without them,” Randy Curwen, who’s Friday’s editor, told us. “There are some damn good free-lancers out there. If I had the chance I’d hire them immediately. And so would a lot of other editors around here.”
“Let me tell you why I think free-lancers are important,” Dishon said. “They bring many different voices to the paper–you can go hire two people, and pretty soon those two people will find niches and do the same story over and over. If you use the same money and find different people, you’d get different voices and different stories of the community. To me, that brings to the paper something you can’t have on staff. That’s what newspapers need–they need a variety of voices.”
“Let me tell you what we’re not doing,” said Dillenburg. “We’re not having a demonstration. Demonstrations were the 60s and we don’t want to repeat anyone’s old mistakes. And we don’t expect to shut down classic rock overnight, although we would dearly love to. We’re not naive enough to think we have that kind of power.
“We had like over a hundred [media] appearances that we know of,” says Dillenburg. “We were in the New York Times, Washington Post . . . We started getting letters from Norway, so we figured, OK, something must have run there.”
