The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Shrinking journalism in Chicago

I'm sad that an urban area with 8 million people can no longer support two regional, daily newspapers. This makes me very uncomfortable:

Tronc, the parent company of the Tribune, has entered into a nonbinding letter of intent to acquire Wrapports Holdings, which owns the Sun-Times as well other assets such as the Chicago Reader alternative weekly, the Aggrego digital content business and the syndicated column The Straight Dope.

The announcement follows months of discussions between Wrapports and Tronc and after both organizations worked closely with the Department of Justice's antitrust division.

The tentative deal means Chicago would remain one of the last two-newspaper cities in the country, though those papers would operate under a single corporate owner. Terms of the potential deal were not disclosed.

We still have DNA Info (for now), and competing national newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have reporters here. (So does the Economist, for that matter.) But one corporation owning all the print newspapers in an area the size of Chicago? Scary.

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