Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Chicago Tribune was founded by James Kelly, John E. Wheeler, and Joseph K. C. Forrest, publishing its first edition on the 10th of June 1847. The paper went through numerous changes in ownership and editorship over its first eight years before Joseph Medill and Charles H. Ray took leading roles around 1854.
WGN stands for "World's Greatest Newspaper," the slogan the Chicago Tribune used to describe itself. The Tribune bought an early radio station in 1924, renamed it WGN, and launched WGN Television on the 5th of April 1948; both stations remained Tribune properties for nine decades.
During the 1948 presidential election, much of the Tribune's composing room staff was on strike and early returns suggested Republican Thomas Dewey would win. An early edition carried the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman," but Democrat Harry Truman won the election. Truman famously held up the newspaper in a photograph taken at St. Louis Union Station.
The Chicago Tribune endorsed Democrat Barack Obama, an Illinois senator, for president in 2008. It was the first time in the paper's history that it had endorsed a Democrat for the presidency. The Tribune endorsed Obama again in 2012 and endorsed Joe Biden in 2020.
Robert R. McCormick was the grandson of founder Joseph Medill who took control of the Tribune in the 1920s. He made the paper strongly isolationist, aligned it with American conservatism, attacked the New Deal from the 1930s to the 1950s, and blocked the Tribune from competing for Pulitzer Prizes for years. He died in 1955.
The Chicago Tribune has won 29 Pulitzer Prizes. Its first post-McCormick Pulitzer came in 1961 when Carey Orr won for editorial cartooning. The most recent was awarded on the 4th of May 2026 for local reporting on Operation Midway Blitz.
Alden Global Capital acquired Tribune Publishing in May 2021 and immediately cut the newsroom staff by 25 percent, with further reductions continuing afterward. Coverage shifted away from national and international news toward Illinois and Chicago-area stories, a departure from the paper's long tradition of overseas bureaus and foreign correspondents.