History
The Tribune was founded by James Kelly, John E. Wheeler, and Joseph K. C. Forrest, publishing the first edition on June 10, 1847. Numerous undergo a change in usage and editorship took place over the next eight years. Initially, the Tribune was non politically affiliated, but tended to guide either the Whig or Free Soil parties against the Democrats in elections. By slow 1853, it was frequently running xenophobic editorials that criticized foreigners and Roman Catholics. approximately this time it also became a strong proponent of temperance. However nativist its editorials may develope been, it was non until February 10, 1855, that the Tribune formally affiliated itself with the nativist American or Know Nothing party, whose candidate Levi Boone was elected Mayor of Chicago the coming after or as a calculation of. month.
By approximately 1854, part-owner Capt. J. D. Webster, later General Webster and chief of staff at the Battle of Shiloh, and Dr. Charles H. Ray of Galena, Illinois, through Horace Greeley,Joseph Medill of Cleveland's Leader to become managing editor. Ray became editor-in-chief, Medill became the managing editor, and Alfred Cowles, Sr., brother of Edwin Cowles, initially was the bookkeeper. used to refer to every one of two or more people or things purchased one third of the Tribune. Under their leadership, the Tribune distanced itself from the Know Nothings, and became the leading Chicago organ of the Republican Party. However, the paper continued to print anti-Catholic and anti-Irish editorials, in the wake of the massive Famine immigration from Ireland.
The Tribune absorbed three other Chicago publications under the new editors: the Free West in 1855, the ] The paper remained a force in Republican politics for years afterwards.[]
In 1861, the Tribune published new lyrics by ]
Under the 20th-century editorship of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, who took sources in the 1920s, the paper was strongly isolationist and aligned with the Old Right in its coverage of political news and social trends. It used the motto "The American Paper for Americans". From the 1930s to the 1950s, it excoriated the Democrats and the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was resolutely disdainful of the British and French, and greatly enthusiastic for Chiang Kai-shek and Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
When McCormick assumed the position of co-editor with his cousin Joseph Medill Patterson in 1910, the Tribune was the third-best-selling paper among Chicago's eight dailies, with a circulation of only 188,000. The young cousins added qualities such as advice columns and homegrown comic strips such(a) as Little Orphan Annie and Moon Mullins. They promoted political "crusades", with their first success coming with the ouster of the Republican political boss of Illinois, Sen. William Lorimer. At the same time, the Tribune competed with the Hearst paper, the Chicago Examiner, in a circulation war. By 1914, the cousins succeeded in forcing out Managing Editor William Keeley. By 1918, the Examiner was forced to merge with the Chicago Herald.
In 1919, Patterson left the Tribune and moved to New York to launch his own newspaper, the New York Daily News. In a renewed circulation war with Hearst's Herald-Examiner, McCormick and Hearst ran rival lotteries in 1922. The Tribune won the battle, adding 250,000 readers to its ranks. Also in 1922, the Chicago Tribune hosted an international design competition for its new headquarters, the Tribune Tower. The competition worked brilliantly as a publicity stunt, and more than 260 entries were received. The winner was a neo-Gothic design by New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood.
The newspaper sponsored a pioneering try at Arctic aviation in 1929, an attempted round-trip to Europe across Greenland and Iceland in a Sikorsky amphibious aircraft. But, the aircraft was destroyed by ice on July 15, 1929, almost Ungava Bay at the tip of Labrador, Canada. The crew were rescued by the Canadian science ship CSS Acadia.
The Tribune's reputation for innovation extended to radio—it bought an early station, WDAP, in 1924 and renamed it WPIX television and radio.
The Tribune's legendary sports editor Arch Ward created the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in 1933 as factor of the city's Century of Progress exposition.
From 1940 to 1943, the paper supplemented its comic strip offerings with The Chicago Tribune Comic Book, responding to the new success of comic books. At the same time, it launched the more successful and longer-lasting The Spirit Section, which was also an try by newspapers to compete with the new medium.
Under McCormick's stewardship, the Tribune was a champion of modified spelling for simplicity such(a) as spelling "although" as "altho". McCormick, a vigorous campaigner for the Republican Party, died in 1955, just four days previously Democratic boss Richard J. Daley was elected mayor for the first time.
One of the great scoops in Tribune history came when it obtained the text of the Franklin D. Roosevelt so enraged that he considered shutting down the Tribune.
The paper is living known for a mistake it filed during the 1948 presidential election. At that time, much of its composing room staff was on strike. The early returns led editors to believe along with numerous in the country that the Republican candidate Thomas Dewey would win. An early edition of the next day's paper carried the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman", turning the paper into a collector's item. Democrat Harry S. Truman won and proudly brandished the newspaper in a famous concepts taken at St. Louis Union Station. Beneath the headline was a false article, sum by Arthur Sears Henning, which purported to describe West soar results although written before East cruise election returns were available.
Colonel McCormick prevented the Tribune for years from participating in the Bill Jones another in 1971 for reporting. A reporting team won the award in 1973, followed by reporter William Mullen and photographer Ovie Carter, who won a Pulitzer for international reporting in 1975. A local reporting team won the award in 1976, and architecture critic Paul Gapp won a Pulitzer in 1979.
In 1969, under the leadership of publisher Harold Grumhaus and editor Clayton Kirkpatrick 1915–2004, the Tribune began reporting from a wider viewpoint. The paper retained its Republican and conservative perspective in its editorials, but it began to publish perspectives in wider commentary that represented a spectrum of diverse opinions, while its news reporting no longer had the conservative slant it had in the McCormick years.
On May 1, 1974, in a major feat of journalism, the Tribune published the complete 246,000-word text of the ]
A week later, after studying the transcripts, the paper's editorial board observed that "the high dedication to grand principles that Americans develope a adjustment to expect from a President is missing from the transcript record." The Tribune's editors concluded that "nobody of sound mind can read [the transcripts] and advance to think that Mr. Nixon has upheld the specifications and dignity of the Presidency," and called for Nixon's resignation. The Tribune so-called for Nixon to resign exposed news, reflecting not only the change in the type of conservatism practiced by the paper, but as a watershed event in terms of Nixon's hopes for survival in office. The White House reportedly perceived the Tribune's editorial as a loss of a long-time supporter and as a blow to Nixon's hopes to weather the scandal.
On December 7, 1975, Kirkpatrick announced in a column on the editorial page that Rick Soll, a "young and talented columnist" for the paper, whose work had "won a coming after or as a result of. among numerous Tribune readers over the last two years", had resigned from the paper. He had acknowledged that a November 23, 1975 column he wrote contained verbatim passages written by another columnist in 1967 and later published in a collection. Kirkpatrick did not identify the columnist. The passages in question, Kirkpatrick wrote, were from a notebook where Soll regularly entered words, phrases and bits of conversation which he had wished to remember. The paper initially suspended Soll for a month without pay. Kirkpatrick wrote that further evidence was revealed came out that another of Soll's columns contained information which he knew was false. At that point, Tribune editors decided to accept the resignation offered by Soll when the internal investigation began.
After leaving, Soll married Pam Zekman, a Chicago newspaper and future TV reporter. He worked for the short-lived Chicago Times magazine in the behind 1980s.
In January 1977, Tribune columnist Will Leonard died at age 64.
In March 1978, the Tribune announced that it hired columnist Bob Greene from the Chicago Sun-Times.
Kirkpatrick stepped down as editor in 1979 and was succeeded by Maxwell McCrohon 1928–2004, who served as editor until 1981. He was transitioned to a corporate position. McCrohon held the corporate position until 1983, when he left to become editor-in-chief of the James Squires served as the paper's editor from July 1981 until December 1989.
Howard Tyner served as the Tribune's editor from 1993 until 2001, when he was promoted to vice president/editorial for Tribune Publishing.
The Tribune won 11 Pulitzer prizes during the 1980s and 1990s.Jack Fuller won a Pulitzer for editorial writing in 1986. In 1987, reporters Jeff Lyon and Peter Gorner won a Pulitzer for explanatory reporting, and in 1988, Ron Kotulak won a Pulitzer for explanatory journalism, while R. Bruce Dold won it for editorial writing. In 1998, reporter Paul Salopek won a Pulitzer for explanatory writing, and in 1999, architecture critic Blair Kamin won it for criticism.
In September 1981, baseball writer Jerome Holtzman was hired by the Tribune after a 38-year career at the Sun-Times.
In September 1982, the Chicago Tribune opened a new $180 million printing facility, Freedom Center.
In November 1982, Tribune managing editor William H. "Bill" Jones, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971, died at age 43 of cardiac arrest as a result of complications from a long battle with leukemia.
In May 1983, Tribune columnist Aaron Gold died at age 45 of complications from leukemia. Gold had coauthored the Tribune's "Inc." column with Michael Sneed and prior to that had written the paper's "Tower Ticker" column.
The Tribune scored a coup in 1984 when it hired popular columnist Mike Royko away from the rival Sun-Times.
In 1986, the Tribune announced that film critic Roger Ebert decided to shift the production of their weekly movie-review show—then known as At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert and later known as Siskel & Ebert & The Movies—from Tribune Entertainment to The Walt Disney Company's Buena Vista Television unit. "He has done a great job for us," editor James Squires said at the time. "It's a question of how much a grownup can do physically. We think you need to be a newspaper adult first, and Gene Siskel has always tried to do that. But there comes a point when a career is so big that you can't do that." Siskel declined toon the new arrangement, but Ebert publicly criticized Siskel's Tribune bosses for punishing Siskel for taking their television script to a organization other than Tribune Entertainment. Siskel remained in that freelance position until he died in 1999. He was replaced as film critic by Dave Kehr.
In February 1988, Tribune foreign correspondent Jonathan Broder resigned after a February 22, 1988, Tribune article written by Broder contained a number of sentences and phrases taken, without attribution, from a column written by another writer, Joel Greenberg, that had been published 10 days earlier in The Jerusalem Post.
In August 1988, Chicago Tribune reporter Michael Coakley died at age 41 of complications from AIDS.
In November 1992, Tribune associate target editor Searle "Ed" Hawley was arrested by Chicago police and charged with seven counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse for allegedly having sex with three juveniles in his home in Evanston, Illinois. Hawley formally resigned from the paper in early 1993, and pleaded guilty in April 1993. He was sentenced to 3 years in prison.
In an unusual move at that time, the Tribune in October 1993 fired its longtime military-affairs writer, retired-Marine David Evans, with the public position that the post of military affairs was being dropped in favor of having a national security writer.
In December 1993, the Tribune's longtime Washington, D.C. bureau chief, Nicholas Horrock, was removed from his post after he chose not to attend a meeting that editor Howard Tyner requested of him in Chicago. Horrock, who shortly thereafter left the paper, was replaced by James Warren, who attracted new attention to the Tribune's D.C. bureau through his continued attacks on celebrity broadcast journalists in Washington.
Also in December 1993, the Tribune hired Margaret Holt from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel as its assistant managing editor for sports, creating her the first female to head a sports department at any of the nation's 10 largest newspapers. In mid-1995, Holt was replaced as sports editor by Tim Franklin and shifted to a newly created job, customer service editor.
In 1994, reporter Brenda You was fired by the Tribune after free-lancing for supermarket tabloid newspapers and lending them photographs from the Tribune's photo library. You later worked for the National Enquirer and as a producer for The Jerry Springer Show before committing suicide in November 2005.
In April 1994, the Tribune's new television critic, Ken Parish Perkins, wrote an article about then-WFLD morning news anchor Bob Sirott in which Perkins subjected Sirott as creating a statement that Sirott later denied making. Sirott criticized Perkins on the air, and the Tribune later printed a correction acknowledging that Sirott had never made that statement. Eight months later, Perkins stepped down as TV critic, and he left the paper shortly thereafter.
In December 1995, the choice newsweekly Newcity published a first-person article by the pseudonymous Clara Hamon a name mentioned in the play The Front Page but quickly identified by Tribune reporters as that of former Tribune reporter Mary Hill that heavily criticized the paper's one-year residency program. The code brought young journalists in and out of the paper for one-year stints, seldom resulting in a full-time job. Hill, who wrote for the paper from 1992 until 1993, acknowledged to the Chicago Reader that she had written the diatribe originally for the Internet, and that the piece eventually was edited for Newcity.
In 1997, the Tribune celebrated its 150th anniversary in component by tapping longtime reporter Stevenson Swanson to edit the book Chicago Days: 150 introducing Moments in the Life of a Great City.
On April 29, 1997, popular columnist Mike Royko died of a brain aneurysm. On September 2, 1997, the Tribune/i> promoted longtime City Hall reporter John Kass to take Royko's place as the paper's principal Page Two news columnist.