Day: October 31, 2002

Better than looking out the window

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

Chicago magazine’s Steve Rhodes has a nice round-up of the first day debut of the Tribune’s RedEye and the Sun-Times Red Streak, both aimed at the coveted 18-to-34-year-old market.

I picked up Red Eye yesterday and it is truly awful, but at least it is laughably bad. In the editor’s note, they actually write, “So instead of spending your time on the ‘L’ or the bus just looking out the window, pick up a RedEye.” Ha! It’s better than looking out the window. Rhodes picked up on that too.

Given the other popular pastime of CTA riders, how about: “RedEye: It’s better than shut-eye”? Rhodes and I are thinking along the same lines on another point. He writes, “And here’s a question for the Tribune Company: If RedEye or Red Streak succeeds in creating a newspaper habit for younger people, won’t the habit be to read a light tabloid on the train? And wouldn’t the natural progression be to ‘graduate’ to the Sun-Times?”

The Sun-Times is already a very good tabloid. It’s clever, attractive, has good entertainment and sports coverage and provocative columnists. It costs only 10 cents more than RedEye. And while I haven’t read Red Streak yet, I can’t see why anyone would want it. The Sun-Times already is a trashy tab. A tab by any other name would still stain your fingers as badly.

Organized people and organized money means superpower

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

A very good Tribune investigative story by Andy Martin & Co. about the Hispanic Democratic Organization. The nut of it:

HDO has amassed a roster estimated at more than 1,000 members using the same techniques that helped the mayor’s father, the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, build a massive patronage army: raising money for favored candidates, swarming precincts on Election Day to get out the vote, and, some members say, doling out city jobs and promotions to friends, relatives and campaign workers.

Handing out city jobs to political workers was deemed illegal by a federal court decades ago, an order that became known as the Shakman decree. The Daley administration is currently arguing Shakman is no longer required because the city’s hiring practices are so fair.

Yet about 500 of HDO’s members are city workers, mostly employed in departments where HDO lieutenants hold high-ranking posts, according to an analysis of city records by the Chicago Tribune and Exito!

No big surprise, of course. Everyone knows that, among other things, the key to Daley’s political success has been the white-Hispanic alliance he’s forged. Hand out enough city jobs and you’ll find plenty of votes, even among supposedly oppressed minority groups.

And ultimately for Hispanics, when it comes to choosing between throwing their fate in with the white ethnics like Daley versus blacks like Bobby Rush, it’s an easy choice.