Extreme Makeovers: Chicago Tribune edition

Updated on September 23, 2008 By Ken Begg 6 Comments

Yes, this will save the paper.  Make it look like USA Today, only with much larger pictures and even smaller articles printed in teeny-tiny print.  Genius!

Er, the ‘Chief Innovations Officer’ conducted his interview right after his morning jog, right?  I mean, before he changed into his office clothes?  Or is that just how hip and innovative the Trib is these days?  Dude.  High five.

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  • PCachu

    High fives are out. Fist bumps are in.

    That is all.

  • Chris M

    I actually think it looks fantastic, with the overlapping columns and use of 3-D cutouts instead of boxed graphics. They lost me a bit with the ill-defined “Smart” section and the hand-holding “You are here” bar at the top, and as wonderful as these splashy pages look when whole, I wonder how they’ll overpower or denegrate the ad space (which is already losing value). Still, it’s about time someone stacked a masthead, and I like the energy that radiates off the page with the new look.

    Of course, it’s all about content. This shiny bauble won’t mean much if people don’t like the articles. Including local news in the A section is a start. Maybe the Trib will even get SUPER smart and follow the Rocky Mountain News model of making local stories the main bulk of the front page content — after all, that’s the only unique function daily newspapers have anymore.

  • Just what we need, an entire newspaper that looks like the glossy Sunday supplement everyone ignores…

    And your lousy paper owns our lousy paper, so I fully expect the Baltimore Sun to look like a cheap knock off of the silly Tribune format.

    Great.

  • By the way, “Chief Innovation Officer” just bumped “Knowledge Consultant” as the silliest job title I have ever heard.

    Both actually make the title “Secretary of Partying Down” sound respectable.

  • Ed Richardson

    Looks like a glitzy version of the New York Post now.

    Ken, how liberal is the Tribune? It’s probably not at the New York Times nutjob level (the very paper of which I can claim one correction having to be issued by none other than Maureen Dowd – no lie).

    My guess is that the Tribune is probably akin to the LA Times and Washington Post.

  • The Tribune is Illinois Republican liberal, which means slightly left of center (from a national standpoint). Their reputation for being a ‘conservative’ newspaper is that they will occasionally actually endorse a Republican, particularly a moderate-left, Jim Edgar RINO type. Certainly compared to the braying mock-populism of the Sun-Times they (generally) seem (comparatively) sane.

    On the other hand, the editorial board recently fretted when the Supreme Court admitted the 2nd Amendment means what it means, and suggested that it was time to strip that amendment out of the Constitution so as to deal with the issue once and for all. The Tribune also created Barak Obama out of whole cloth by torpedoing in sequence two of his senatorial opponents with rather conveniently timed sex scandals, which in one case required them to get access and print up the details from sealed divorce papers. So if they’re not the NYT, they’re still by no stretch of the imagination in any way ‘conservative.’