Chicago Tribune

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Chicago Tribune published its first edition on the 10th of June 1847, founded by James Kelly, John E. Wheeler, and Joseph K. C. Forrest. From that modest beginning, the paper grew into something its own editors considered the finest newspaper in the world. They were not shy about saying so. For decades, the Tribune carried the slogan "World's Greatest Newspaper" in its own pages, and the call letters of its radio and television stations, WGN, were drawn directly from those three words. How a regional paper born on the Illinois prairie came to hold that kind of confidence in itself is a story of rivalries, crusades, and catastrophic miscalculations. It is also a story about what happens when the newspaper that helped elect Abraham Lincoln endorses a Democrat for president for the first time in 2008. And it is a story about what a hedge fund can do to a 177-year-old institution in just a few years.

• 2. Lincoln's Paper

  ›

  Joseph Medill arrived at the Tribune around 1854, recruited through Horace Greeley by part-owner Captain J. D. Webster. Medill came from the Cleveland Leader. Charles H. Ray of Galena, Illinois, became editor-in-chief, and Medill took the managing editor's chair. Together with Alfred Cowles, Sr., they each purchased a third of the Tribune, and the paper's direction changed sharply. The new editors pulled the Tribune away from the nativist Know Nothing party, which the paper had formally joined as recently as the 10th of February 1855, and made it the principal Chicago organ of the Republican Party. Before and during the Civil War, the paper threw its weight behind Abraham Lincoln. Medill helped secure Lincoln's presidency in 1860. The Tribune's loyalty to the Republican cause would define it for most of the next century and a half. Between 1858 and 1860 the paper was known as the Chicago Press and Tribune; on the 25th of October 1860, it took the name Chicago Daily Tribune. In 1861, the Tribune also published new lyrics by William W. Patton for the song "John Brown's Body," which arrived two months before Julia Ward Howe published her own competing version. Medill himself later served as mayor of Chicago for one term following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

• 3. The McCormick Era

  ›

  Colonel Robert R. McCormick took control of the Tribune in the 1920s, but his formal entry into the paper dated earlier. When McCormick became co-editor alongside 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 cousins moved aggressively. They added advice columns and homegrown comic strips, including Little Orphan Annie and Moon Mullins, and launched political crusades. Their first major win was the ouster of Senator William Lorimer, the Republican political boss of Illinois. By 1914 they had forced out the paper's managing editor, William Keeley, and by 1918 they had driven the rival Hearst paper, the Chicago Examiner, into a merger with the Chicago Herald. Patterson left for New York City in 1919 to found the New York Daily News. McCormick pressed on alone. In a renewed circulation war with Hearst's Herald-Examiner in 1922, the Tribune ran rival lotteries and gained 250,000 readers. That same year, the paper hosted an international design competition for its new headquarters. More than 260 entries arrived. The winner was a neo-Gothic design by New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, and the building that rose on North Michigan Avenue would carry the Tribune's name for nine decades. Under McCormick, the paper was strongly isolationist and used the motto "The American Paper for Americans." From the 1930s to the 1950s, it attacked Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal at every opportunity, was openly disdainful of the British and French, and championed Chiang Kai-shek and Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCormick also blocked the Tribune from participating in the Pulitzer Prize competition for years. He died in 1955, just four days before Democratic boss Richard J. Daley was elected mayor of Chicago for the first time.

• 4. Scoops and Scandals

  ›

  The Tribune obtained the text of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, one of the great scoops in its history. Another came on the eve of Pearl Harbor, when the paper revealed United States war plans. Then, on the 7th of June 1942, a front-page article implied that the United States had broken Japan's naval code, a story that bypassed censors and enraged President Franklin D. Roosevelt so much that he considered shutting the newspaper down entirely. The paper's reputation for bold journalism was not always earned cleanly. On the 1st of June 1997, it published a column by Mary Schmich called "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young," which became widely known as the "Sunscreen Speech." The most popular form of that essay turned out to be a music single released in 1999, credited to Baz Luhrmann. Fabrication scandals surfaced at intervals. In February 1988, foreign correspondent Jonathan Broder resigned after lifting sentences from a column in The Jerusalem Post without attribution. In March 2004, the Tribune discovered that freelance reporter Uli Schmetzer had fabricated the name and occupation of a quoted source; the paper began reviewing all 300 stories Schmetzer had filed over the prior three years. On the 6th of June 1999, a travel piece by freelance writer Gaby Plattner described a scene aboard an Air Zimbabwe flight that the airline flatly denied ever happened; Plattner later admitted she had passed along a story she heard as though it were her own experience. The paper's most famous error of all came in 1948, when an early edition carried the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman." Much of the composing room staff was on strike, early returns favored Thomas Dewey, and the Tribune printed the result before the outcome was settled. Harry Truman won. He held up that edition in a photograph taken at St. Louis Union Station, turning the Tribune's mistake into one of the most reproduced images in American political history.

• 5. Broadcast, Sports, and the WGN Brand

  ›

  WGN radio began as station WDAP, which the Tribune bought in 1924 and renamed to match its own slogan. WGN Television launched on the 5th of April 1948, and both broadcast stations remained Tribune properties for nine decades, among the oldest newspaper-broadcasting cross-ownerships in the country. The Tribune's sports editor Arch Ward used the paper's platform to create the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in 1933, timing the inaugural game to coincide with Chicago's Century of Progress exposition. Ward's invention has been played every year since. The Tribune also had a direct hand in polar aviation. In 1929, the paper sponsored an attempted round-trip flight to Europe via Greenland and Iceland in a Sikorsky amphibious aircraft. The plane was destroyed by ice on the 15th of July 1929, near Ungava Bay at the tip of Labrador, Canada. The crew was rescued by the Canadian science ship CSS Acadia. Film critic Gene Siskel, described by the paper's own editor as the Tribune's best-known writer, was demoted in 1986 after he and Roger Ebert moved production of their weekly movie review show from Tribune Entertainment to Buena Vista Television. Siskel remained in a freelance capacity until he died in 1999, when he was replaced as film critic by Dave Kehr. Tribune columnist Mike Royko, who had been hired away from the rival Sun-Times in 1984, died of a brain aneurysm on the 29th of April 1997.

• 6. The Pulitzer Record

  ›

  Colonel McCormick's long resistance to the Pulitzer Prize competition meant that the Tribune's first post-McCormick Pulitzer did not arrive until 1961, when Carey Orr won for editorial cartooning. The paper went on to accumulate 29 Pulitzers in total. The 1980s and 1990s were particularly productive: editorial cartoonist Dick Locher won in 1983, Jeff MacNelly in 1985, Jack Fuller for editorial writing in 1986, Jeff Lyon and Peter Gorner for explanatory reporting in 1987, and Dean Baquet, William Gaines, and Ann Marie Lipinski for investigative reporting in 1988. In 1989, both Lois Wille and Clarence Page won in the same year, for editorial writing and commentary respectively. Paul Salopek won for explanatory writing in 1998 and then again for international reporting in 2001, making him a two-time Tribune Pulitzer winner. Julia Keller won in 2005 for feature reporting on a tornado that struck Utica, Illinois. On the 4th of May 2026, the Tribune won again for local reporting, for its coverage of Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration's immigration enforcement mission in the Chicago area. That award arrived while the paper was operating under ownership by Alden Global Capital, which had cut the newsroom by 25 percent following its acquisition in May 2021.

• 7. Bankruptcy and Ownership

  ›

  In December 2007, Chicago real estate magnate Sam Zell bought out the Tribune Company in an $8.2 billion deal and became the company's new chairman. Zell originally planned to convert the company into an employee stock ownership plan, but the strategy unraveled. After a $124 million third-quarter loss, the Tribune Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on the 8th of December 2008, reporting a debt of $13 billion against assets of $7.6 billion. The bankruptcy filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware triggered years of legal battles. Claims of fraudulent transfer were filed against 33,000 to 35,000 former stockholders. The Tribune's bankruptcy-related legal and professional fees reached $500 million, more than twice the typical amount for a company of that size. The company emerged from bankruptcy in January 2013, partially owned by private equity firms. In August 2014, Tribune Publishing, which held the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and eight other newspapers, was spun off as a separate publicly traded company. It began life with a $350 million loan. In May 2021, Alden Global Capital acquired Tribune Publishing and immediately cut the newsroom staff by 25 percent. A former reporter described the paper as being "snuffed out, quarter after quarter after quarter." Coverage has since shifted away from national and international news toward Illinois and Chicago-area stories, a narrowing that marks a sharp departure from the network of overseas bureaus the Tribune maintained through much of the 20th century and into the early 21st.

• 8. Spelling Reform and Editorial Voice

  ›

  Beginning in 1934, the Tribune under McCormick compiled lists of common words whose spelling could be made, in the paper's view, "saner." Double letters were dropped, and "-ogue" endings were shortened to "-og." In 1939, some of the more extreme experiments were abandoned because readers rejected them: "crum" for "crumb" and "sherif" for "sheriff" disappeared from the pages. More durable substitutions took hold, including "altho," "tho," "thoro," and "thru," which stayed in the Tribune's pages for decades. A stylebook update in 1975 finally adopted Webster's Third as the paper's authority on spelling, with an editorial that noted the paper did not want to cause more trouble between schoolchildren and their teachers. A few holdouts, including "cigaret" and "dialog," persisted until 1981. On the editorial side, the paper published a major statement of principles in 2007 describing its belief in limited government, free markets, and maximum individual responsibility, while calling itself suspicious of untested ideas. In 2008, the editorial board endorsed Barack Obama, an Illinois senator, for president. It was the first time in the paper's history that it had endorsed a Democrat for that office. The board endorsed Obama again in 2012, endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, and in 2024 chose to abstain from any presidential endorsement entirely.