ChicagoNo: Trib unceremoniously yanks the plug on its volunteer blogging platform

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Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above.

Tribune disables ChicagoNow platform in a ‘cowardly and horribly unprofessional way.’

I sent this letter to Chicago Tribune General Manager P. Anthony “Par” Ridder at 12:46 p.m. on Monday:

I wasn’t surprised last week when Tribune Publishing pulled the plug on ChicagoNow, the company-branded blogging site that the paper launched with considerable fanfare 13 years ago this month.

Blogging as a medium has long been losing the overall battle with social media and other online sources of commentary for eyeballs and advertising dollars, and I’m assuming that, even with an all-volunteer army of writers, the company was losing money on the initiative. These are tough times in print journalism and you have to make tough decisions. Understood.

But I was surprised at how it was done — abruptly, with no notice to the writers who might have wanted to save their posts and not even a gracious “so long and thanks” on the disabled home page. Here’s what visitors to ChicagoNow.com see today:

Former site manager and my former colleague Jimmy Greenfield estimated that ChicagoNow had published well over 100,000 posts over the years. Some were deeply personal essays. Some were partisan rants. Some were highly informed and informative essays by experts in their fields. Some were amusing observations about life and the human condition. Some were — well, you get the idea. There was a lot there. In its heyday, Greenfield said the site hosted more than 300 active blogs and drew 25 million page views a month.

Ending ChicagoNow “was done in a cowardly and horribly unprofessional way,” Greenfield posted to Facebook. “The Tribune never reached out, never responded and never gave anybody an opportunity to take their content with them before taking it offline. Nobody can access the back end of the WordPress-hosted platform. It's all gone. What an awful thing to do.”

His post has been shared more than 50 times and, as you can imagine, the Tribune is taking a sound and, in my view, well-deserved beating on social media for how it handled this matter.

Yes, some old ChicagoNow blog posts can be found and resurrected through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, but that’s a time consuming process that yields incomplete results. Can’t you at least allow your bloggers — the ones who posted so much content that was often linked right off chicagotribune.com even though ChicagoNow content was not part of the newspaper— a few weeks or months of access to the WordPress platform so they can salvage their old content?

And tell me, why would a newspaper so badly in need of generating goodwill in its community operate in such a cold, dismissive fashion that hurts not just the current and former volunteer bloggers, but the newsroom journalists who continue to put out a fine product?

As of 10:42 p.m. when I put this issue to bed, Ridder hadn’t responded. But if he does, I’ll let you know in Thursday’s issue what he said. I’ll also gladly print any responses from Tribune or Alden Global Capital managers who want to put a different spin on what’s happened here.

Ridder’s old blog — which, update, is actually a parody — still lives online, in contrast.