Nine days before this photo was taken, I started to work in the Chicago Tribune newsroom.

Saturday, September 4, 1971, was cooler than usual in Chicago. The high temperature of 71, 10 degrees below normal, made for a pleasant afternoon trip downtown from the Northwest Side as I waited on the Belmont platform to transfer from the Ravenswood el to an Englewood-Howard train (it was not till 1993 that the various lines were rebranded with colors).

I had last been on the CTA on April 6 – as it happens, the day Richard J. Daley won his fifth term as mayor, receiving 70% of the vote against Republican Richard Friedman. My destination in both cases was the same: the Grand Avenue station, from where I could walk to Tribune Tower. In April, I was interviewing for a part-time job as a clerk – “copy boy,” as males and females of any age in that position were then called. Two days before Labor Day, I now was showing up for my second job in journalism, one of seven rude mechanicals assigned to the 3-to-11:30 p.m. shift.

30 years later, as a “McCormick veteran,” I got a copy of this front page along with a very nice watch. One similarity with 2021: “Cubs Lose Again.”

I had already done my first official assigned task: Reading the 4-Star Sports Final from cover to cover before arriving at the office. We got the 3-Star Home at my North Park College dorm (I’d be starting my freshman year the next week), so I had already invested 10 cents in my professional future.

Maybe some other day I’ll sketch out more observations about my 37 years at the Tribune: the dramatic personnel shifts; the prizewinning journalism; the march of new, and newer, and still newer technologies; the “stern stands. And bitter runs for glory,” as in the poem by Stephen Crane – who immediately pointed out that “there were braver deeds.” But for today, let me evoke the room I walked into, just four days removed from my job as a sportswriter at the Ashtabula Star-Beacon. That’s the room you see above.

Compared to a weekday, I was to learn, seven “boys” in the fourth-floor newsroom was a skeleton crew. After all, on the weekend there was no one needing help in the vacant Sunday Room, home to the features staff. The editorial board wasn’t in, either. The editor’s office was unstaffed, which meant that the lightbulb high on the west wall wouldn’t be blinking to urgently summon us. (In fact, on this day, editor Clayton Kirkpatrick was in Tokyo; his interview with the Japanese prime minister was on Page One, if overshadowed a mite by President Nixon’s visit to McCormick Place.) And although Chester Gould could have been in his 14^th-floor studio drawing “Dick Tracy” for the 600 or so newspapers that carried it, he typically didn’t need anything on the weekend.

So why we were needed at all? In an era when bits and bytes had barely begun moving across the ARPANET, someone needed to move thousands of pieces of paper around the room and between floors of the Tower.

Years later, not long before I left the Tribune for Northwestern, I stumbled across the photo at the top of this page. Blown up to 46 by 22 inches and hanging on my basement wall, it reveals that it was taken just nine days later: Monday, September 13, 1971. For a Medill lecture in a colleague’s class on editing a few years ago, I helpfully labeled it for a class full of students who would never encounter anything remotely like it:

Amid all those journalists sits a copy boy on top of a table. (We didn’t rate chairs unless we were answering phones.) He’s waiting for an editor or a reporter to summon him with one of several time-honored shouts:

“COPY!”, say, or  “BOY! BOY! BOY! BOYBOYBOYBOYBOYBOY!”

At which the nearest clerk would hop up to grab a piece of paper from one desktop tray and carry it to another, perhaps pausing to separate its carbon copies and carry them to still other trays. The job was to get the destinations right without asking.

(Another part of the job was learning who everybody else in the room was so you could be dispatched to their desks. In this photo, I for sure see Dan McCaughna, Don Agrella, Frank Blatchford, Mike Sneed, Steve Pratt, Bernie Judge, John O’Brien, Carl Sotir, Jim Hallman, Tom Moore, Mitch Dydo, Marcia Opp, Ken Simms, John Gaspar, John Stevenson, Gale Daugherty, Tom Carvlin, and Bill Jones. There are more, but many are blurry even in my wall-sized version.)

Or maybe the shout would be “COPY, DOWN!” Do you see that pillar just beyond the copy boy, the wider one with a bulletin board attached? It’s hiding a pneumatic tube system and a pulley-operated bucket. The pneumatic tube carried edited copy DOWN to the third-floor composing room to be set by a Linotype operator. The bucket carried galley proofs – inky strips of newsprint, placed in the bucket by another copy boy – UP to be proofread. Once corrected, they were lowered for line-by-line repairs, along with page dummies and other items of interest to those in the third-floor composing room.

Blown up to an even larger size on a projection screen in other Medill lectures, this photo might also be viewed as the overview of an archeological dig, in which a careful observer can quickly establish the most common artifacts and perhaps infer their purposes. In ascending order of importance, one can find

• Un-emptyable ashtrays (people just kept filling them)
• Unfillable desktop trays (we just kept emptying them)
• Uncountable newspapers (multiple editions of four competing downtown dailies)
• Push-button telephones (nothing but the latest!)
• Manual typewriters (I remember one electric)
• Large, larger, and enormous wastebaskets (the biggest large enough to hide a person, or two)

Harder to see are other important tools: metal spikes for carbon copies and proofs, scissors and rubber-cement pots for literal “cutting” and “pasting,” and the reference books that amounted to the 1970s version of Google.

What most struck me, having just come from that first job in the (ahem) smaller newsroom of the Ashtabula Star-Beacon, is less visible: the degree of specialization among these professionals. The reporters reported and wrote; the copy editors edited copy and wrote headlines; the picture editors selected photos, cropped them, and wrote captions; the news editors decided what went into the paper and where it would appear. The copy boys moved pieces of paper around, retrieved bundles of newspapers from the mailroom whenever a new edition came off the presses, and bought black coffee for editors, often at the Billy Goat Tavern on Lower Michigan.

For the sports department in Ashtabula, I had done all those things myself, plus taken game photos, developed rolls of film, and made prints by hand in the darkroom, for $1.60 an hour. But in this new joint in those days — though not in 2021, I know — there were whole staffs for each individual task,  including me, now a $2.40-an-hour clerk. (That $16 in today’s money, if you’re wondering.)

Before too long, I would decide to stay and try to make a career of it. Maybe, I thought, someday I could be in charge of something. After all, there was lots to write about in Chicago: Woodfield Mall would open in just a few days. The Bears were moving to Soldier Field and would open their season there on Sept. 19. The 100th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire was a month away. Jesse Jackson soon would found Operation PUSH. . . .

But as noted above, such stories will wait for another day. I think I hear someone yelling “COPY!”

The post Miracle on Michigan Avenue, 1971 first appeared on The next miracle (v11.2): Owen Youngman.

When I re-examine that five-year-old post, though, it isn’t at all clear to me that I have a lot more to say about the launch. Mostly I can see that March 14, 1996, was just one in a series of important interactive dates, going back to August 14, 1991.

That’s when Tribune Co. invested in Steve Case’s Quantum Computer Services, which would soon become America Online. In May, 1992. the companies jointly launched Chicago Online at the McCormick Place Consumer Electronics Show, bringing in a little ad revenue, a little subscriber revenue, and untold intelligence about the likes and dislikes of our users — not at all the same as those of our readers.

Today, in fact, I want to focus on some important early events that followed March 14.

June, 1996: Debut of Chicago Tribune Homes, the first real estate Web site to feature not just listings of new homes, resale homes, and homes for sale by owner, but also comprehensive community, schools and census data across the metro region, plus years of real estate transactions. That kind of data is the standard now, but it was different enough then to cause unhappy real estate CEOs to just plain yell at us in meetings, including a memorable one in Tribune Tower’s Campbell Hall.

August 26-29, 1996: Live coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In the print edition, we promoted that “The Internet Chicago Tribune includes OmniView bubble photograph technology . Panoramic images from the convention floor can be viewed 360 degrees up and down and left and right. Also featured are archives in RealAudio format of speeches by Jesse Jackson and Hillary Rodham Clinton.” News organizations had a smaller online presence at the convention than did progressive protest groups, but CNN and the Internet Tribune were pretty much everywhere.

January 27, 1997: Debut of Chicago Tribune Autos, featuring not only “a comprehensive new-car database that includes dealer-invoice pricing information” and “Market value and average retail prices for used cars back to 1985,” but also an interactive dream car builder, Jim Mateja car reviews back to 1985 . . . and, of course a cheerful nod to Mateja’s favorite accessory at the time: the not-yet-universal cupholder. 

(Oh, and this time it was the auto dealers who yelled at us in meetings, including a memorable one at McCormick Place during the 1997 Chicago Auto Show.) Chicago Tribune Autos stayed in the digital passing lane until June of 1998, when cars.com was launched on its own road to Super Bowl commercials.

• July, 1999: chicago.tribune.com “drops the dot” and becomes chicagotribune.com, bringing an end to a battle with a squatter who had snapped it up back in the Wild West days of URL wars. We never should have gone the subdomain route, actually.

Not too long after the momentous dot-dropping, I left my post as director of interactive media and went “back to the newspaper,” where for nearly 10 years as a vice president and senior VP I continued to take part in the Tribune’s long-standing tradition of technology innovation (one that dates back to Col. McCormick, but perhaps has slowed somewhat in the news industry’s current state of perpetual contraction).

But those are stories for other days and other times, I think. For today, it’s enough to say “happy 25th birthday” to the Tribune Web site — and thanks again to the pioneers who made it happen.

The post 25 years of the Internet Tribune first appeared on The next miracle (v11.2): Owen Youngman.

Sometimes I wonder if Leon Durham saved my life by breaking Chicago’s heart.

In October, 1984, you see, I was deputy sports editor at the Tribune, and sometimes it seemed like there was an impossible amount of planning and work to do — because we were covering an impossible number of great sports stories.

• Walter Payton of the Bears was on the verge of breaking Jim Brown’s NFL career rushing record.
• Baseball umpires had decided to strike during the playoffs.
• Two days before the first day of the World Series, no one knew where the first game of the World Series would be played . . . because there were no lights in Wrigley Field, and Major League Baseball would only stand for day games on the weekend.

For sports editors, sleep had become a rumor.

(Oh, did I forget to mention that the Cubs were on the verge of the World Series? Given that, 32 years later, they’re actually in it, I thought you probably didn’t need reminding.)

There were giants in those days, of course — not just Walter Payton and Rick Sutcliffe and Ryne Sandberg on the playing fields, but also Don Pierson and Jerome Holtzman; Bob Markus and Phil Hersh; Fred Mitchell and Bob Verdi and Steve Daley and Bernie Lincicome in the press boxes. And back in Tribune Tower, in those pre-Internet days when Chicagoans counted on their newspapers for every detail in their driveways in the morning, there were an uncountable number of moving parts to account for.

And thus the image at the top of this page. In mid-September I was trying to come up with ideas for a cover image for a special section that would undoubtedly become a keepsake for Cub fans who had been waiting for a World Series for  . . . 39 years. Not only did the illustration have to be memorable, but it also had to be ready long in advance — there’d be no way to use a news photo no matter when the National League Championship Series ended, considering how complicated it was to get a color picture of any kind into the paper.

And then I wondered: Could we do something with the bricks, and the ivy, and the bright yellow distance signs painted on the bricks? Could we, in fact, change “355” to “1984”?

Remember, it was 1984. The Macintosh computer had just been introduced. The first version of Photoshop was about five years in the future.

This would not be a question of technology. This would be a job for talented people with hard-to-duplicate skills: a photographer to create the base image on film; a darkroom technician to remove the existing numbers while making a print; an editorial artist to create a realistic rendering of the year where once the distance had appeared. And then any number of craftspeople on the production side to get it ready for the presses.

It took weeks.

Those folks produced what you see above. It is not a single image. It is four pieces of acetate overlaid on one another — the bottom one, entirely yellow; the next, magenta; the next, cyan; and on top, black. Each was required for our presses to combine the four colors of ink in order to create a color image on hundreds of thousands of pieces of newsprint, perfectly matched up so that the image would appear crisp. Those black circles you see up there helped with this “registration” process. It was going to work, it really was.

All the Cubs had to do was win three games against the San Diego Padres, and by Wednesday night, Oct. 3, it was looking pretty good: the Cubs left for the West Coast with a 2 games to none lead, and maybe with any luck they wouldn’t even be playing on Sunday — when Payton had a real chance to set that all-time record at Soldier Field against the Saints.

But by Saturday night, Oct. 6, it had become complicated. The Padres won Games 3 and 4, and the Cubs’ fate would come down to a game at 3:05 p.m. Chicago time, about 5 minutes after the Bears-Saints game concluded with Payton gaining 154 yards to set his record. Figuring on a 2 ½-hour baseball game — can you even imagine that these days? — we would have about 5 hours to put it all together (and cram the two huge stories into the experimental tabloid-sized sports section we were publishing on Mondays that year).

If the Cubs lost, I would then go home. If they won, I’d stay for the production of the special section; half of our editors were poised to drive in from home to work overnight from Sunday into Monday to prepare it — press limitations being what they were, it would have to be printed on Monday afternoon to make the Tuesday paper. And at 4 o’clock, with the Cubs up 3-0, it looked like it would be 10 days till anyone slept.

But in the bottom of the seventh inning, Tim Flannery’s ground ball rolled between Durham’s legs, the Padres turned a 3-2 deficit into a 6-3 lead that stood up as the final score, and life in Chicago — and at Tribune Tower — resumed as before. In Detroit, the Tigers, who otherwise would have hosted the Cubs on Tuesday, instead rushed to the airport and a flight to San Diego.

There was no cheering in the pressbox, in the newsroom, or pretty much anywhere east or north of California. Chicago’s sports editors inserted sleep into our daily regimens. And that World Series guide, and its keepsake cover image, would never see the light of day.

But you might remember that, in those days, the Tribune Company owned the Cubs, and plenty of executives were wandering through the newsroom in October. Proofs of the cover were easily spotted in our offices and on our desks. And in retrospect I guess I shouldn’t have been either surprised or annoyed a few months later, when the Cubs’ 1985 schedule booklet started showing up on retail counters across Chicagoland.

Of course, they had a little more lead time.

The post Half a lifetime ago in Chicago first appeared on The next miracle (v11.2): Owen Youngman.

Of course, since my iPhone was still 11 years in the future, the event in question was not a retail transaction; it was a Page 1A story in The Wall Street Journal about Amazon.com and its founder, Jeffrey Bezos. Headlined “Reading the market: How Wall Street whiz found a niche selling books on the Internet,” it noted that although Bezos had “pinpointed one of the few products that people really want to buy on line: books. . .few executives in the tweedy book-publishing business know [Amazon] exists.”

Nor did I. They company didn’t advertise much, the Journal said, and I hadn’t yet seen it mentioned in Wired (perhaps too atoms-and-molecules-oriented for that magazine’s early days). I made a note to try “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” named after “the river that carries more water than any other in the world.”

It was before Google, so I probably wrote the URL down after I got to work.

I had plenty of books I needed to buy, and I was still mourning the shuttering of Kroch’s & Brentano’s the year before. But — seeing as it was only a couple of months after the launch of chicago.tribune.com — in 1996, I had absolutely no time to browse at Borders or even flip through the Book-of-the-Month Club catalog. So over the Fourth of July holiday, 20 years ago this weekend, I decided to find out whether the people and algorithms in Seattle could actually find books for me that were otherwise out of reach.

And sure enough (click to enlarge).

One of the things I did on most every vacation was browse in bookstores for books by the Canadian writer W.P. Kinsella, whose main topics are the emotional landscapes surrounding baseball and Native Americans (well, Native Canadians). There had seemed no other practical way to work my way through his oeuvre than to rummage on shelves in out-of-the-way places . . . till now. In addition, I had an urgent need for a European bird guide, since I would be singing in a choir festival in Canterbury in just a few weeks’ time and figured to have time to look up into the British trees.

It was all very utilitarian, hardly something that felt it would become a habit. It wasn’t as relaxing as a book store–hey, even Jeffrey Bezos knew that; the Journal characterized him as “quick to dismiss fears that Amazon could ever spell the end of traditional bookstores. He regularly hangs out at the Elliott Bay Book Co., a sprawling, independent bookstore in downtown Seattle which has exposed brick walls, a cafe and lots of friendly salespeople . . . ‘We are trying to make the shopping experience just as fun as going to the book store,’ he says, ‘but there’s some things we can’t do.’ ”

The good news for Seattleites is that Elliott Bay Book Co. is still there. But as I noted in that 2013 post I referenced above, I am one of the millions of people who over time looked up and saw that, good intentions notwithstanding, our cumulative actions meant that local bookstores were disappearing, shrinking, or retrenching to fewer locations; they left the malls, they left the downtowns, they left the strip malls, a sort of reverse-Churchillian litany of response to the invasion.

Were we sucked in by uncollected use taxes, seduced by Amazon swag (see left for my 1996 and 1997 Christmas presents), or made complacent by yet another delivery landing on the porch in the dead of winter?

According to my data (and perhaps your experience), it was undoubtedly Amazon Prime: Once I plunked down $79 in February 2005 for the illusion of free shipping, the lines in my purchasing-behavior graph crossed forever. The use and sales taxes are now collected routinely and the swag is long gone, but sometime this year I will place my 800th order with Amazon.com. By my count, “only” about 460 of them replaced bookstore and record/CD store purchases; the rest have replaced daunting forays to Target and frustrating trips to the office-supply store (although Target shopping has gotten easier now that I can use my Apple Watch to guide me through the aisles). And of course, without the so-called free shipping even for single items, I would have consolidated many of those Amazon orders for efficiency’s and parcel post’s sake.

There’s still a Barnes & Noble less than 2 miles from home and another less than a mile from work, but as Norman Maclean wrote in an entirely different context, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” Twenty years on and a fair number of books by Kinsella, Halldór Laxness, and Marilynne Robinson later, the Amazon river is floating its own trucks to my door instead of UPS’s. Perhaps the drones will arrive by order 1,000.

The post 20 years on, and the river runs to us first appeared on The next miracle (v11.2): Owen Youngman.