This week in Michael Ferro - bringing his people on board, interviews and Wrapports content
This Friday, Crain's Chicago Business broke the news that Susanna Homan, publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Wrapports' Splash society, arts and culture magazine, was hired as the new editor and publisher of Tribune Publishing's Chicago magazine. The magazine's publisher Tom Conradi would get a job somewhere else in the company, but it's EIC, Elizabeth Fenner, is out of the job.
Chicago magazine is an interesting beast. It has lots of entertainment, dining, lifestyle and real estate coverage, and some society coverage. It has some of the most extensive restaurant listings of any Chicago periodical. But most importantly, at least to me, they've quietly been doing some great political and features reporting.
I say "quietly" is that they don't get as much attention as Chicago Tribune, or Chicago Reader, or even DNAinfo CHicago, but that does not diminish the quality of their reporting in the slightest. They were the ones who reported that Chicago homicide statistics don't add up. They are the ones who wrote about who shone a spotlight on a, frankly, frightening pattern of sexual abuse in a megachurch not far from Chicago's eastern border. They published one of the most comprehensive profiles of the many groups that make up Chicago's Black Lives Matter coalition.
Oh, and they published one of the most devastating exposes of Ferro's time at Sun-Times Media.
This pic of Ferro and Noman from the Chicago article got a lot of play in Chicago journalism twittersphere since the news broke.
As one Chicago staffer told me back in 2013, they are not sure if Tribune execs know they exist, and they kind of like it this way (though they wouldn't mind getting more funding).
Leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that Ferro hiring the head of his pet project to head another publication he now controls... My big concern is that Homan has no experience running a publication that deals with publisher. Before getting hired by Wrapports, she edited Michigan Avenue, one of the Chicago area magazines aimed at the city's more well-off residents. Like Chicago Social, Sheridan Road and, well, Splash, it's known for a lot of things, but political coverage and coverage of social issues isn't one of them.
Plus, as Robert Feder pointed out, Homan has a history of giving coverage to advertisers and promoting colleagues without disclosing obvious conflicts of interest.
Maybe Homan would be an ethical Publisher/EIC who would let Chicago keep doing what it's been good at. But I'm weary.
So long as we're talking about Ferro-related changes, I might as well mention something I was already posting news about before the Homan news broke. On March 10, Chicago Tribune did a profile of Ferro.In it, he touched on his vision for Tribune Publishing
Ferro's strategy for Tribune Publishing includes keeping the newspaper chain intact, focusing on "great content" and using data to build audience and monetize it more efficiently. "We have these millions of people that come through," Ferro said. "There's a lot we can learn from what people are looking at, what they are reading, what they're doing. It's very valuable and we don't do any of that today."
Which doesn't sound too bad... until you go a few paragraphs down and read what he thinks was his best initiative at Wrapports
What he called his "one great initiative," the Sun-Times Network, an aggregated national news site, was "crushing it" until the larger search engines undermined it, Ferro said.
Remember - this is the network of website that tried to establish news presence in markets where Sun-Times brand was meaningless while putting as little effort as possible into their actual content, relying on labor of underpaid interns who weren't even living anywhere near the areas they were supposed to cover.
I've said this before, and I will probably say it again many times in the future - why on Earth would anyone (who doesn't get their paycheck from an entity ferro controls) trust anything he says about good content?
In the same article, former Chicago Sun-Times Managing Editor Craig Newman points out what could well be Ferro's biggest weakness
Newman, who said he was laid off in August after 12 years with the newspaper, called Ferro a wellspring of ideas, with some truly innovative and potentially breakthrough concepts. But follow-through was often lacking, Newman said, with several key initiatives withering from lack of support within months of rolling out.
"It was just this constant churn of things, none of which were supported in any meaningful way, and none of which had his undivided attention for more than a nanosecond," Newman said.
I will give Ferro credit for one thing - later in the article, he rightfully points out that Tribune Company got a pretty bad deal when it was split off from what would become Tribune Media. The fact that he said he was going to be looking at it doesn't exactly fill me with great confidence, but who knows.
And finally - over the past two weeks or so, I noticed advertisement for Aggrego-created aggregators wedged into articles of Tribune newspapers. Turned out that it was part of a deal Wrapports made with Tribune Publishing and McClatchy newspaper chain. According to Chicago Reader's Michael Miner, the deal happened before Ferro got a stake in Tribune. The idea seems to be something I touched on before. In digital news outlets, it's about who gets the most clicks, and that means expanding one's reach as much as possible. Tribune has the greater reach than Wrapports/Sun-Times does, and so does, to lesser extent, McClatchy. But while it's clear how Wrapports benefits from this arrangement, it's not clear at all what the two bigger newspaper companies get out of it. Crain's Lynne Marek tried to get to the bottom of this, but nobody involved was willing to share much.
The most obvious answer is "Wrapports paid them for the right to post on their websites, the way any advertiser would pay for ad space." For now, we have no way of knowing if that's the case.
Oh, and one last piece. Marek's article mentions that we still have no idea what "charitable trust" got Ferro's stake in Wrapports. That's... troubling.
Chicago magazine is an interesting beast. It has lots of entertainment, dining, lifestyle and real estate coverage, and some society coverage. It has some of the most extensive restaurant listings of any Chicago periodical. But most importantly, at least to me, they've quietly been doing some great political and features reporting.
I say "quietly" is that they don't get as much attention as Chicago Tribune, or Chicago Reader, or even DNAinfo CHicago, but that does not diminish the quality of their reporting in the slightest. They were the ones who reported that Chicago homicide statistics don't add up. They are the ones who wrote about who shone a spotlight on a, frankly, frightening pattern of sexual abuse in a megachurch not far from Chicago's eastern border. They published one of the most comprehensive profiles of the many groups that make up Chicago's Black Lives Matter coalition.
Oh, and they published one of the most devastating exposes of Ferro's time at Sun-Times Media.
This pic of Ferro and Noman from the Chicago article got a lot of play in Chicago journalism twittersphere since the news broke.
As one Chicago staffer told me back in 2013, they are not sure if Tribune execs know they exist, and they kind of like it this way (though they wouldn't mind getting more funding).
Leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that Ferro hiring the head of his pet project to head another publication he now controls... My big concern is that Homan has no experience running a publication that deals with publisher. Before getting hired by Wrapports, she edited Michigan Avenue, one of the Chicago area magazines aimed at the city's more well-off residents. Like Chicago Social, Sheridan Road and, well, Splash, it's known for a lot of things, but political coverage and coverage of social issues isn't one of them.
Plus, as Robert Feder pointed out, Homan has a history of giving coverage to advertisers and promoting colleagues without disclosing obvious conflicts of interest.
Maybe Homan would be an ethical Publisher/EIC who would let Chicago keep doing what it's been good at. But I'm weary.
So long as we're talking about Ferro-related changes, I might as well mention something I was already posting news about before the Homan news broke. On March 10, Chicago Tribune did a profile of Ferro.In it, he touched on his vision for Tribune Publishing
Ferro's strategy for Tribune Publishing includes keeping the newspaper chain intact, focusing on "great content" and using data to build audience and monetize it more efficiently. "We have these millions of people that come through," Ferro said. "There's a lot we can learn from what people are looking at, what they are reading, what they're doing. It's very valuable and we don't do any of that today."
Which doesn't sound too bad... until you go a few paragraphs down and read what he thinks was his best initiative at Wrapports
What he called his "one great initiative," the Sun-Times Network, an aggregated national news site, was "crushing it" until the larger search engines undermined it, Ferro said.
Remember - this is the network of website that tried to establish news presence in markets where Sun-Times brand was meaningless while putting as little effort as possible into their actual content, relying on labor of underpaid interns who weren't even living anywhere near the areas they were supposed to cover.
I've said this before, and I will probably say it again many times in the future - why on Earth would anyone (who doesn't get their paycheck from an entity ferro controls) trust anything he says about good content?
In the same article, former Chicago Sun-Times Managing Editor Craig Newman points out what could well be Ferro's biggest weakness
Newman, who said he was laid off in August after 12 years with the newspaper, called Ferro a wellspring of ideas, with some truly innovative and potentially breakthrough concepts. But follow-through was often lacking, Newman said, with several key initiatives withering from lack of support within months of rolling out.
"It was just this constant churn of things, none of which were supported in any meaningful way, and none of which had his undivided attention for more than a nanosecond," Newman said.
I will give Ferro credit for one thing - later in the article, he rightfully points out that Tribune Company got a pretty bad deal when it was split off from what would become Tribune Media. The fact that he said he was going to be looking at it doesn't exactly fill me with great confidence, but who knows.
And finally - over the past two weeks or so, I noticed advertisement for Aggrego-created aggregators wedged into articles of Tribune newspapers. Turned out that it was part of a deal Wrapports made with Tribune Publishing and McClatchy newspaper chain. According to Chicago Reader's Michael Miner, the deal happened before Ferro got a stake in Tribune. The idea seems to be something I touched on before. In digital news outlets, it's about who gets the most clicks, and that means expanding one's reach as much as possible. Tribune has the greater reach than Wrapports/Sun-Times does, and so does, to lesser extent, McClatchy. But while it's clear how Wrapports benefits from this arrangement, it's not clear at all what the two bigger newspaper companies get out of it. Crain's Lynne Marek tried to get to the bottom of this, but nobody involved was willing to share much.
The most obvious answer is "Wrapports paid them for the right to post on their websites, the way any advertiser would pay for ad space." For now, we have no way of knowing if that's the case.
Oh, and one last piece. Marek's article mentions that we still have no idea what "charitable trust" got Ferro's stake in Wrapports. That's... troubling.