Chicago has always been a great news town.
Its innovative journalism brought us the first live radio broadcast of a trial in U.S. history.
It brought us the first televised presidential debate.
It brought us a newspaper’s clarion call for Black Americans to migrate north from the Jim Crow South.
It helped put Abraham Lincoln in the White House and helped push Richard Nixon out of it.
Chicago journalism is still making a difference today, despite financial pressure that has left it leaner than in its heyday.
The disruption caused by the internet and the takeover of long-standing news organizations by nontraditional owners has transformed Chicago journalism. A hedge fund now owns the Chicago Tribune, which shed 82% of its newsroom staff from 2006 to 2022. The Chicago Defender, once a hugely influential newspaper for Black Americans, is holding on as an online-only product. Television stations have generally avoided the financial distress of the city’s print products, but TV and radio news operations have been downsized as well.
Many news outlets doing the best are nonprofit, as Chicago’s strong foundation community comes to the rescue. This has opened up new areas of innovation that have generated some optimism in Chicago despite the brutal job cuts at legacy outlets. Public radio station WBEZ’s parent company acquired the Chicago Sun-Times to rescue the endangered newspaper and broaden the radio station’s audience. It is too soon to judge the results a success, but this novel approach is being closely watched nationally.
The disruptions in journalism extend far beyond the border of Chicago. According to data from the State of Local News 2023 reportby the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, the greater Chicago area has lost 45% of its news outlets since 2005. There are 14 Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin counties in the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area, and nine of them have lost half of their news outlets or more in less than two decades. All of those counties are outlying: DuPage, McHenry, Will, Grundy, DeKalb and Kane in Illinois; Lake and Newton in Indiana; and Kenosha in Wisconsin.
Given those market forces, today’s Chicago-area news outlets will be hard-pressed to live up to their past influence on our democracy and our culture. But they’re taking on the challenge.
Newspapers: The cow hoax, the Colonel and the Mirage
“A newspaper is the lowest thing there is,” declared Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was often a target of newspaper criticism. Yet the city’s papers have been enormously influential, whether Daley liked it or not.
Chicago’s first paper, the Chicago Weekly Democrat, was founded in 1833, when Chicago’s population was just 350.
The Democrat closed just before the Civil War, but a newspaper that began in 1847 is still alive. That’s the Chicago Tribune, which once billed itself as “The World’s Greatest Newspaper.” The editor who established the Tribune’s reputation was Joseph Medill, an abolitionist who was such a political player that he changed the course of the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago by persuading Ohio’s delegates to vote for Abraham Lincoln. For the past century, Northwestern University’s journalism school has carried Medill’s name.
The Chicago area’s oldest surviving newspaper is not in Chicago: It’s the Joliet Herald-News, which began in 1839 as the Juliet Courier in Will County, Illinois. Another early paper in an outlying Illinois area was the Aurora Beacon, which debuted in 1846 and is still operating.
Newspapering got an early start just across the Wisconsin border when C.L. Sholes founded the Southport Telegraphin 1840. (Southport was an early name for Kenosha.) Sholes had a more prominent claim to fame: He was an early developer of the typewriter and devised the QWERTY keyboard. A newspaper founded half a century later, the Kenosha News, now serves the area.
The most defining event in Chicago history, the Great Fire of 1871, inspired both boosterism and mischief among journalists. A reporter for the Chicago Republican, Michael Ahern, made up a story that a cow had started the blaze by kicking over a lantern. Blame fell on the cow’s owner, Catherine O’Leary, and a myth was born. Reflecting the political influence of newspaper editors, the Tribune’s Medill was elected mayor under the Fireproof Party ticket and served two years.
Four years after the fire came a worthy challenger to the Tribune: the Chicago Daily News. In the late 1880s, the Daily News dropped the price of its morning edition to a penny and achieved a circulation of 200,000, tops in Chicago and one of the largest in the world. The Daily News held the city’s circulation lead until 1918, when it was overtaken by the Tribune. Among the Daily News’ writers: Carl Sandburg, whose poem “Chicago”established the city’s reputation as “Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat … City of the Big Shoulders.”
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, newspaper competition was fierce and standards were loose. The Chicago Examiner hyped a bogus story that social do-gooder Jane Addams was hiding a “devil child” with cloven hooves and a tail at her Hull House settlement house. A Chicago Times story about the hanging of criminals carried the headline “Jerked to Jesus,” which reportedly earned the headline writer a raise. When fire broke out at the Iroquois Theater, killing 602 people in 1903, Walter Howey of the City Press Associationhurried to the scene, paid a bookie $20 for exclusive use of a phone, then hired a youngster to buy a box of straight pins and stick one in the wire of every public phone in the area, making them unusable by rival reporters.
Howey was the model for the unscrupulous editor in the 1928 play “The Front Page,” written by former Chicago newspapermen Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. The comedy, which spawned several movie versions, was over the top, but maybe not too far over. Hecht, for example, got his start at the Chicago Journal as a “picture chaser”whose job was (in the words of his biographer) “to beg, borrow, or most often steal photos of recently murdered, raped, divorced, or otherwise newsworthy people.” Another Chicago newspaperman-turned-playwright was Ring Lardner, a sportswriter for the Chicago Inter Ocean and the Tribune who became known for capturing lowbrow language with authenticity.
By 1900, Chicago had nearly a dozen general-circulation newspapers, with more foreign-language and religious publications. Papers began to embrace news photography despite the cumbersome process, which included glass plates and flash powder. A standout photographer was Japanese-born immigrant Jun Fujita, who worked for the Chicago Post and the Daily News and captured striking images of the Eastland ship disaster and 1919 race riot.
Media mogul William Randolph Hearst entered the Chicago market in 1900. His first product in the city was the Chicago American. Then he moved on to the Chicago Examiner, then a merged Herald-American, then a return to the name Chicago American. In 1956, the paper was sold to the Tribune, which tweaked its name to Chicago’s American and finally turned it into the tabloid Chicago Today, which died in 1974.
Among the reporters at the Herald-American was Wendell Smith, a Black sportswriter who was Jackie Robinson’s traveling companion when Robinson crossed the major leagues’ color line in 1947. Smith was a pioneer in white-owned media in Chicago, but Black newspapers had already established a rich history. The city’s first Black-owned paper, the Conservator, was founded in 1878 by lawyer Ferdinand Barnett and later was led by Barnett’s wife, Ida B. Wells, whose ferocious crusade against racial injustice set the standard for Chicago journalists, of all races. The leading Black newspaper was the Defender, founded in 1905 by lawyer Robert S. Abbott. While the Tribune was telling Black Southerners they were unwelcome (a 1917 editorial was headlined “Black Man, Stay South”), the Defender sent the opposite signal, publicizing lynchings in the South and job opportunities in Chicago.
In their heyday, Chicago newspapers weren’t just delivering the news. They were social service agencies and organizers of civic events. The Daily News operated a Fresh Air Sanitorium that provided health care and meals to children. The Tribune ran a Public Service Office that gave tax advice and helped military veterans apply for benefits. Tribune sports editor Arch Ward created baseball’s All-Star Gameand co-founded the Golden Gloves boxing competition. Chicago’s official flag was designed by Tribune writer Wallace Rice. The Defender organized the Bud Billiken Parade, a South Side summer tradition that has been going strong for nearly a century.
In 1890, Daily News publisher Victor Lawson persuaded his competitors to cooperate in forming the City Press Association, which covered routine news and trained reporters. Renamed the City News Bureauin 1910, it was a cradle for creatives, with such alumni as columnist Mike Royko, pop-art sculptor Claes Oldenburg and novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Melvyn Douglas was fired by the City News Bureaufor falling asleep during a big story, so he went into acting and went on to win two Academy Awards. A famous admonition to reporters — “If your mother says she loves you, check it out”— originated at the City News Bureau, which shut down in 1999.
The Tribune became a national and even international force. During the Spanish-American War, a Tribune editor telephoned the White Houseand woke up President William McKinley to inform him of the U.S. fleet’s victory in Manila Bay. The Tribune’s influence kept growing in the first half of the 20th century under the direction of Robert McCormick, who was known as “The Colonel” becase of his World War I service. The Colonel was presumptuous enough to try to streamline American English with “modern” spellings, such as altho, cantaloup, cigaret, crum, definitly, fantom, hocky, iland, jaz, lether, reherse and trafic.
The Tribune even rewrote the Constitution, sort of. The paper’s reporters caught a Chicago crook named William “The Blond Boss” Lorimer bribing his way into a U.S. Senate seat in 1909, when state legislatures selected senators. That scandal was one impetus for passage of the 17th Amendment, which provides for direct election of senators by the voters.
By 1940, the Tribune’s daily circulation was over 1 million, but all was not smooth sailing. During World War II, the Tribune revealed that one reason the U.S. military won the Battle of Midway was its knowledge of the Japanese fleet’s plans. That infuriated the White House, which figured the Japanese would realize their naval code had been cracked. A federal grand jury considered charges over the Tribune story, but nothing came of it. The Tribune is also known for the most famous error in U.S. newspaper history: the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headlinein 1948. The Tribune wanted to start its presses early because its printers were on strike, so it went out on a limb. The winner, Democratic President Harry Truman, was delighted to stick it to the pro-Republican Tribune by posing with the erroneous front page.
The paper that has most directly competed with the Tribune in recent decades is the Chicago Sun-Times. The original Chicago Times merged with the Chicago Herald in 1895, and the resulting Times-Herald dropped “Times” from its name six years later to become the short-lived Record-Herald. But a more enduring version of the Times appeared in 1929, taking over operations from the just-shuttered Journal. A Times investigation inspired the 1948 film “Call Northside 777,”in which James Stewart played a reporter whose work freed a wrongfully imprisoned man. The “Sun” part of the Sun-Times was created by department store heir Marshall Field III, who founded the Chicago Sun in 1941 to counter the Tribune’s isolationism. But just a few days later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the Tribune was no longer isolationist. The Sun found its place anyway, and it merged with the Times in 1948.
The Tribune of the mid-20th century was innovative in some ways but culturally backward in others. McCormick jumped on the new media of radio and television, and he was an early promoter of fax communications. But the paper was hostile to the civil rights movement and embarrassed itself with its coverage of the police killings of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. The Tribune swallowed the state’s attorney’s lie that the incident was a raid that had turned into a gunfight when the Panthers resisted. The Tribune ran photos that supposedly showed bullet holes from the Panthers’ gunshots, but the Sun-Times revealed that the “bullet holes” were actually nail heads. There was no gun battle. It was a police assassination.
As the Watergate scandal unfolded in 1974, Richard Nixon’s crimes became too much even for the staunchly Republican Tribune. The newspaper’s call for the president to resign or be impeached was considered a major erosion of his support that hastened his decision to resign.
In 1978, the Sun-Times came up with one of the most audacious newsgathering projects ever when an investigative team went undercover and set up a bar called the Mirage. The Sun-Times wanted to see if city officials would shake them down for bribes. Indeed they did. That same year, the Daily News closed, a victim of decreasing demand for afternoon newspapers. Daily News columnist Mike Royko moved to the Sun-Times, which was owned by the same company, Field Enterprises. Six years later, Field sold the Sun-Times to sensationalist Australian-born publisher Rupert Murdoch, and Royko moved again, this time to the Tribune. “No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in Murdoch’s publications,” Rokyo said.
Murdoch owned the Sun-Times for only two years. By 1994, the paper was controlled by Canadian-born publisher Conrad Black, who would later serve three years in prison for business fraud and obstruction of justice (and be pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2019).
The Sun-Times and Tribune both burnished their national profiles in this era because of a television show hosted by their film critics, the Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert and the Tribune’s Gene Siskel. Tribune Co. had an entertainment boom of another type when it bought the Chicago Cubs in 1981 and used its TV station WGN to promote the ballclub. But the entertainment coverage of the Sun-Times and Tribune failed to quench the public’s appetite, and that created an opening for the Chicago Reader, a free alt-weeklyfounded in 1971 that was a cash cow for decades. The Reader wasn’t just an entertainment paper; it published John Conroy’s stories exposing torture by Chicago police officers. Other small Chicago publications that made their mark in that era were the Windy City Times, serving an LGBTQ audience, and La Raza, which began in 1970 and continues to be the top Spanish-language publication in the city.
The past quarter-century has been an ugly mess for Chicago’s legacy newspapers. The Tribune took steps to respond to the challenge of the internet, acquiring about 10% of America Online in the 1990s. But there were missteps. In 2000, Tribune Co. acquired the Times Mirror news chain, including the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun. The timing was terrible, with more consumers getting free news over the internet and ad revenue — especially classifieds — migrating to the web as well. In 2007, real estate mogul Sam Zell acquired Tribune Co. in a leveraged buyout. Less than a year later, the company filed for bankruptcy protection. The Tribune became enmeshed in a scandal in 2012when it was revealed that a vendor called Journatic had supplied hyperlocal news stories written from the Philippines with fake Anglo-sounding bylines. The company sold the Cubs, emerged from bankruptcy in 2012, and in 2013 split into two companies: Tribune Media and Tribune Publishing.
In 2009, the Sun-Times’ owner filed for Chapter 11 protection. That meant both of Chicago’s top legacy newspapers were in bankruptcy at the same time. It’s been a constant struggle since then for both news organizations, which have undergone multiple ownership changes. The Tribune is now owned by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fundknown for slashing staff at its news outlets. Meanwhile, the Sun-Times, whose demise had been predicted for decades, got new life in 2021 when it was acquired by WBEZ’s parent, Chicago Public Media.
The turmoil for Chicago newspapers in the past quarter century did not prevent them from making a huge impact. The Tribune has won nine Pulitzers in that time and has been a finalist more than 20 other times for work on topics ranging from the death penalty to unfair tax bills. The Sun-Times has served the public with many projects, including a Pulitzer-winning deep dive on gun violence and an investigation into the city’s corrupt Hired Truck Program.
Strong “newspapering” still happens in Chicago, though it often doesn’t happen on paper. Digital outlets such as ProPublica, the Better Government Association (BGA), Injustice Watch, the TRiiBE and Block Club Chicago are making names for themselves. An encouraging trend is news outlets pooling resources. The Tribune and BGA shared a Pulitzer in 2022 for a joint investigation into failures in safety code enforcementthat led to fire deaths. And in 2024, Chicago’s City Bureau and the Invisible Institute shared a Pulitzer for their joint investigation of missing person cases involving Black women and girls. It was a sign of the growing impact of nonprofit startups. The Invisible Institute won a second Pulitzer for a podcast about a 1997 hate crime.
Radio: The ether, the Cool Gent and, oh, the humanity
In the early days of commercial radio, the science of beaming audio into people’s homes was a mystery to many in the public and the media. Some thought radio signals traveled through an invisible ether, and in 1930 the Tribune expressed wonderthat “no matter how many millions tune in there always seems to be sufficient energy in the ether for all.”
Whether journalists understood the science, they certainly saw the opportunity. The Tribune owned WGN, for “World’s Greatest Newspaper.” Sears Roebuck & Co. sponsored WLS — “World’s Largest Store.” Chicago once had a station called WJBT — “Where Jesus Blesses Thousands.” The Daily News asked U.S. Commerce Secretary (and later president) Herbert Hoover to choose the call letters for its radio station. He picked WMAQ — “We Must Ask Questions.” WMAQ benefited from the strong leadership of Judith Waller, who was known as the “First Lady of Radio” after putting Chicago Cubs games on the air and setting up educational shows with the University of Chicago, the American Medical Association and other groups.
At first, news broadcasts often consisted of simple readings of newspaper stories. But ambitions soon grew. In 1925, WGN became the first U.S. station to broadcast live from a criminal court when it covered the Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a Tennessee teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution. Perhaps the ultimate example of eyewitness reporting came when Herb Morrison of WLS went to New Jersey to cover the arrival of the dirigible Hindenburgin 1937. As the airship went up in flames, the Chicago radio reporter exclaimed: “Oh, the humanity!”
That same year came another milestone. The start of Chicago’s school year was delayed three weeks because of the spread of polio, so the district instituted an early version of remote learningover half a dozen radio stations. The experiment was so successful that the district kept doing lessons on radio and in 1943 created WBEZ as its own stationto broadcast them.
Traffic reporting became a valued function of radio news. WGN began putting police officer Leonard Baldy in a helicopter in 1958. Baldy died two years later when his copter crashed on the West Side. Officer Irv Hayden took over the job and did more than just report on traffic. If he spotted a major problem, he would tell the pilot to land so he could get out and direct traffic. Hayden died in 1971, when his helicopter crashed in west suburban Bellwood.
The art of the interview became a signature of Chicago radio. Studs Terkel hosted an interview show on WFMTfor more than 40 years. Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes” television fame earned his stripes with an interview program for Chicago’s WMAQ.
One of the nation’s most popular radio news hosts, Paul Harvey, was based in Chicago. After joining Chicago’s WENR, an ABC affiliate, he began hosting a national ABC radio program called “Paul Harvey News and Comment” and later added a second one, “The Rest of the Story.” After Harvey’s death, it was revealed that he submitted radio scripts to his friend, J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI, for approval. Another seminal figure of American conservatism came from radio in Kenosha, Wis. Paul Weyrich worked at WAXO and WLIP before co-founding the Heritage Foundationand being credited with coining the term “moral majority.”
Black radio has been vibrant in Chicago. Jack L. Cooper, who started at WSBC in the late 1920s, has been described as the nation’s “first African-American disc jockey with a commercially sustained radio show.” Cooper offered an on-air missing person’s service so people could reconnect with family and friends. Another major figure in Chicago’s Black radio was Herb “The Cool Gent” Kent, who worked at a number of stations, including WVON.
In 1964, Chicago radio station WNUS became an all-news station, the first such station in the country. Bernard Shaw, later an anchor at CNN, got his journalism start at WNUS. But the station discontinued the format after four years and went back to music, eventually becoming today’s WGCI. A few days after the rioting that followed the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, WBBM went all-news, and it became dominant in the city’s radio news scene. Its first news director was John Callaway, who later founded the “Chicago Tonight” news affairs show on public television station WTTW. The all-news format was so popular — for a while — that WMAQ adopted it in 1988, going head-to-head against WBBM. But WMAQ disappeared in 2000 when its owner gave its frequency to WSCR sports talk radio.
WBBM still delivers 24-hour news, but like a lot of radio journalism in Chicago, its resources and reach have slipped. Many people get their traffic reports from apps these days. Still, radio remains a key part of Chicago’s journalism ecosystem, owing largely to WBEZ, home for such widely honored journalism as “This American Life.”
Television: Angry clouds, happy talk and a presidential debate
“TELEVISION! It’s here! Telephone and telegraph wires, and even the free air, are transformed in giant telescopes through which might be viewed the actions of persons hundreds, yea thousands, of miles away. Another modern miracle is wrought.”
Chicago’s WCFL Radio Magazine made that declaration in 1928, when television was “here” in a technological sense — but not in a commercial way. The first commercial TV station in Chicago was WBKB, the forerunner for today’s WBBM-Channel 2. Its first programming came in 1941, when there were only 50 to 100 television receivers in the city.
Sports was a higher priority than news. In the late 1940s, Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley gave WBKB a two-year contract to televise the games for free. But it wasn’t exclusive. The new Tribune-owned WGN-Channel 9 also broadcast the Cubs, and it aired White Sox games as well.
The city’s TV stations produced national entertainment shows such as “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” and “Garroway at Large” that were distinctive in their spontaneity and were categorized as “the Chicago School of Television.”School was soon out of session, however, as national TV shows left Chicago for the coasts. But one of the medium’s landmark moments occurred in Chicago in 1960, when, as the Tribune put it, “a Chicago television studio briefly became a hectic center of American politics.” The first televised presidential debatebrought John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon to WBBM’s studios at 630 N. McClurg Court.
Television’s potential to inform people was embraced by a nonprofit group that started WTTW-Channel 11in 1955. The next year, WTTW launched “TV College,” the nation’s first program in which students earned college credit from “telecourses.” As immigration from Mexico and other Hispanic countries grew in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, Spanish-speaking news became increasingly vital. In Chicago, that market is served by Univision’s WGBOand Telemundo’s WSNS.
Considering how much news coverage defines the images of Chicago’s local stations today, it is remarkable what a low priority it was in the early days. It was the 1960s before WGN became the first Chicago TV station to expand its nightly newscastto a half-hour.
But since that time, the personalities on Chicago newscasts have been among the city’s biggest celebrities — people like Fahey Flynn, Carol Marin, Walter Jacobson, Lester Holt and Bill Kurtis.
The style of local TV news has long been subject to debate, with critics complaining about vacuous news shows that they label “happy talk.” That term has been attributed to Morry Roth, a Chicago-based correspondent for Variety who was supposedly referring to WLS. One example of a backlash came in 1997 when Marin and Ron Magers quit as anchorsat WMAQ after trash TV host Jerry Springer was given a commentary slot on their Channel 5 news.
Over the decades, Chicago TV has produced many hard-news highlights. After Mayor Harold Washington’s death in 1987, local TV coverage of the city’s shock and the maneuvers over his successor was spectacularly strong journalism. The immediacy of local TV news was also evident when Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested in 2008 for trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated when Barack Obama was elected president. WFLD won a Peabody Award in 2010 for coverage of the beating death of South Side student Derrion Albert, a case that drew attention from the Obama White House. In 2020, WBBM won a Peabody for its reporting on Chicago police raiding the homes of innocent people.
Recent decades have been a growth period for local TV news if measured by the number of hours devoted to it every week. But with streaming and startups, the market is fracturing. Even so, the public remains hungry for reliable information delivered in real time. When there’s major news — especially a weather event — one of their first impulses is to turn on the TV.
