Sun-Times Picks a Critic
As soon as Ruth’s beat opened up ten staffers asked about it, and eight of them went on to fight for the position. The Sun-Times set up a competition in which writing played a smaller part than you might think. Features editor Steve Duke asked everyone to review the 200th Cheers show and a new sitcom, The Fanelli Boys, and to write a memo telling how the job should be done. Then Duke interviewed the candidates for an hour each and came up with three finalists: reporter Neil Steinberg, entertainment editor Lon Grahnke, and Ginny Holbert, a feature writer for the Sunday At Home section.
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And now it was 1991, and the bake-off–as the contest came to be known inside the paper–was more than two months old. So much time had gone by that Ruth–having tested the waters of syndication and found them ice cold–had sent Duke a memo observing that since he wasn’t about to become a major TV personality anytime soon, could he please have his job as critic back?
But Grahnke was understood to have the inside track. A tireless worker, whose job it was as entertainment editor to see that TV continued to be reviewed in Ruth’s absence, Grahnke had parceled out assignments among staff writers and saved many for himself. Last Friday’s paper, for example, carried four reviews written by Grahnke.
Holbert is 32 years old and her children are 7 and 5. “What is TV?” we asked her. She groaned. “I’ve been through this process already in my job interviews. What is TV? TV is a medium, which means there’s good TV and there’s bad TV. There are questions about whether it’s a neutral medium or not. Whether TV is innately good or bad, I don’t know. It’s a very important expression of our culture.”
The TV critic is one of the few writers on a newspaper that some people might actually buy the paper to read. We hope Holbert brings more than a “breezy style” to her new assignment, and we wish her well.
In 1977, the bosses of the failing Daily News created Sidetracks to appropriate a new generation of readers. Cartoonist Skip Williamson remembers the occasion; he writes:
