No Place for a Writer
To test Adler’s assertion of colliding sensibilities, we made a quick and dirty study. Here are the cover stories of Chicago’s last six issues:
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Meanwhile, Adler was reflecting on the Annoyance Theatre, the death of Theater Oobleck, the state of the musical, sexual Darwinism in Chicago theater, the transcendence of saints Catherine and Therese as contemplated in a Lookingglass Theatre Company production, the focus on black issues in recent Chicago theater, and the vapid local version of Six Degrees of Separation, a play that had moved him to tears in New York.
But change it he has, toward newsier, more topical, less analytic copy. It’s a defensible shift, even though Adler had been trying to accommodate Babcock by choosing subjects with staying power. And to go on being fair to the editor, his covers are more frivolous than several of the pages within. “Service stories tend to sell better at the newsstand than news stories do,” Babcock told us, explaining his covers. Publisher Heidi Schultz says Chicago is an impulse buy on the newsstand, and a cover like “Hot Nights” can sell twice as many copies there as one that isn’t so user friendly.
Adler’s fate sheds light on the nature of Babcock’s leadership. Babcock came to Chicago from New York magazine in April 1991. We asked him about his master plan. “I wish I had one,” he said. “I want to produce an interesting, lively, important magazine that people are excited by. When it arrives, people want to dig into it and see what’s there.” Chicago has never been that magazine and isn’t about to become it. Babcock doesn’t help by driving people around him up the wall.
Trestrail thought a good long while when we asked her if the dismissal of the drama critic was the sort of action a managing editor might expect to be privy to. “I guess I’d say it’s hard for me to see a pattern in which decisions I’m involved in and which I’m not,” she said carefully. “Sometimes I am, and sometimes I’m not.”
“Neither plan is very satisfying,” Kupferman writes. “The first one (6, 20), allows for only one road trip to teams in the opposite division, a plan that would devastate some of the traditional rivalries in the game.”
