Slanting Toward Suburbia
A Sunday Tribune with a strange front page landed on our north-side doorstep March 18. A dispatch from Moscow and a piece on AIDS research made up the page, along with three stories that we’d ordinarily call local.
Zwolle, Louisiana, does not figure in a big way in the Tribune’s circulation plans. Du Page County, however, is pretty much the ball game.
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“That’s our best guess at the moment of how to do this,” Jack Fuller, the Tribune’s reflective new editor, remarked at a recent forum at Northwestern University. “There is no flawless model.”
“The Los Angeles Times, in its schizophrenia, decided to go to Orange County and be an ‘Orange County Times’ and everywhere else it circulated it would be the Los Angeles Times,” Britton said. “You can’t do that. The readers, just amazingly, can see right through that quickly. I just don’t think you can out-local the locals.”
Fuller appreciates these feelings. To some extent he shares them. “How do you remain, in an increasingly diverse market–community–a general interest medium, which is what we are?” he wondered at NU. “Our social function requires that we somehow provide part of the glue, at least, that holds the whole thing together. Newspapers are increasingly important as the one aspect of our society which speaks generally about lots of different things when everything else fragments. So the balance between the centrifugal and the centripetal forces at work is what as an editor I have to try to figure out.”
We can personally vouch for the vice versa. It’s rare that we read articles all the way through about busboys in Glen Ellyn.
So we looked to the AL races to decide the ninth annual BAT competition. And the winner is Joe Goddard, who unlike Dave van Dyck, Terry Boers, Joel Bierig, Sons, and Cox chose both the Oakland A’s in the West and the Toronto Blue Jays in the East. Not to detract from Goddard’s performance, but he penciled in the Baltimore Orioles, the Cinderella story of ’89 and AL East pacesetters most of the season, for dead last. So did everyone else but Cox, who limited his picks to the first-place teams.
