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Charles Storch worked for the Tribune for 30 years. Years ago he gave me more competition than I could handle as a media writer. His most recent assignment has been covering the arts and philanthropy. He wrote an item recently about the MacArthur Foundation giving $250,000 to Pro Publica, the not-for-profit news room created last year in New York City to do investigative journalism. If he'd stayed on the beat, Storch would have been writing more and more about journalism's emerging business model -- not-for-profit and financed by grants and subscribers, after the fashion of public radio.
But the Tribune is very much the old model -- sell ads, sell papers, or die. On Wednesday Storch was laid off, one of about a dozen newsroom employees to lose their jobs. Worse is to come. Earlier in the week, editor Gerould Kern and publisher Tony Hunter warned the staff that a "dramatic right-sizing" was necessary and would be imposed at the end of the year.
In addition to Storch they include national correspondents Stevenson Swanson and Lisa Anderson. The Tribune is pulling in its horns.
As we talked by phone today, Storch looked around him in the features section. "Terry Armour used to sit on my right -- it's been almost a year since his death. Alan Solomon used to sit in front of me. Ever since he left [earlier this year] we have a little cut-out of him with his face plastered on it and a Hawaiian shirt on him."
Solomon was a travel writer. The interesting thing, I said, is that his desk is still empty. "Yeah," said Storch, "there are a lot of empty desks around and one more as of tomorrow." I said that maybe they could clear some of those desks out and lay down a shuffleboard court. He had a better idea. "Maybe they could bring in another pinball machine," Storch said. "That was one of the early things Sam Zell brought to the company -- he put a pinball machine in the cafeteria."
Can't say Zell hasn't tried.
Meanwhile, Gannett's laying off 2,000 or more people, and this independent blog has become the forum that keeps track of the numbers and gossip while letting victims grieve among friends.
In all of that time he was one of the hardest-working and most thoughtful reporters I knew, with a very enviable record of accuracy and integrity in his work. He was a model colleague and "competitor." His "layoff" is a loss for journalism and for the arts, not-for-profit, philanthropic worlds in Chicago and for the larger Chicago community as a whole. Sad times indeed.
When the San Francisco Chronicle first laid off a bunch of folks a year or so back, they established a good-bye blog on their main site -- where staff put memories for each person let go, be they reporter, photographer, editor, tech person, whomever, and let readers add comments. I thought it was a great idea -- they knew they were a part of the community where these folks had touched their readers, and they knew there were humans being affected by the layoffs, and they wanted to give colleagues and readers a place to celebrate those who served well. One of the few times where commenters remained respectful -- sure, the Chron took some hits, but no one slammed the folks who left, even those who were lightning rods with their work.
Deborah Horan, photographers
Milbert Brown and Jim Prisching, and assistant travel editor
Phil Marty. That's not the complete list.
All were, and remain, quality people who will be missed -- none more than my onetime cubicle neighbor Mr. Storch, whose skills, integrity and work ethic were exemplary. Compared to Charlie, even when I was actually there I was just a cardboard cutout in a Hawaiian shirt.