Posted by Bud on December 05, 2009 at 07:46:54:
On his Tower Ticker blog, Phil Rosenthal is reporting that Chicago Tribune sports columnist Rick Morrissey has left that paper and joined its chief rival, the Chicago Sun-Times.
At first glance, it seems like nothing more that a second writer switching papers in the last week. However, this story signifies the first time in years that the Sun-Times is hiring, not firing! The Sun-Times has not hired any new significant columnist or contributor for a couple of years now, but has lost many. Any hole that needed filling was done by moving current staff members around. This may now signal a new day at the Sun-Times. This may also indicate that the two main Chicago papers are gearing up for a more fierce rivalry.
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Rick Morrissey leaves Chicago Tribune for Sun-Times
Sports columnist Rick Morrissey has left the Chicago Tribune for the rival Chicago Sun-Times, the Tribune's staff was told Friday night.
Word of Morrissey's exit came in a note from Mike Kellams, the paper's associate managing editor for sports. "Rick has been a great colleague at the Tribune, and we wish him well in this new chapter of his career," Kellams wrote.
The Sun-Times later announced the hire. "Nobody competes in this market as hard as we do," Sun-Times Editor in Chief Don Hayner said in a story eventually posted to his paper's Web site.
Morrissey did not return a call for comment.
As significant as the move is by virtue of a top-line columnist switching papers, it looms even larger as a statement by Sun-Times parent Sun-Times Media and the way the change runs counter to recent trends.
Only a couple months ago, the Sun-Times and its sister papers teetered on the brink of liquidation but were rescued by a new ownership group led by businessman Jim Tyree and other local investors including Chicago Blackhawks owner Rocky Wirtz.
The new owners obviously are looking to make a splash. Hiring Morrissey does that because the flow of the city?s best-known journalists in recent decades has primarily been from the Sun-Times to the Tribune, not the reverse.
"Traffic between the two papers is steady, and it moves in one direction only," Chicago Reader media columnist Michael Miner wrote in 2005, when a television critic and former sports columnist left the Sun-Times to become the Tribune's media columnist. "Just about every passing pilgrim is of a certain age and has a certain nervous concern about what their lives will look like 20 years down the road."
On the other hand, apart from the fact that Morrissey could be lured by the promise of a pay raise, just how highly the Sun-Times esteems him -- or any other Tribune columnist -- is open to debate. The tabloid's recent marketing campaign has touted the fact that, as the paper of Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper, it has "columnists you've actually heard of," implying the Tribune doesn't.
Although newspaper wars tend to be won and lost in the trenches by beat reporters and those who work behind the scenes to plan and edit coverage, Morrissey's switch is far more noticeable to the public than that of, say, Sun-Times Sports Editor Stu Courtney's jump last month to become editor of the Tribune's chicagobreakingsports.com site.
Not even the move of WSCR-AM 670 host Dan McNeil's weekly column from the Sun-Times to the Tribune this week really compares.
"In this business, there's nothing better than a good, old-fashioned newspaper war," former Sun-Times baseball writer Chris De Luca wrote in a note introducing himself to that paper's readers as Courtney's successor, promising "an invigorated Chicago Sun-Times is ready to flex some muscle once again."
Morrissey now ostensibly slides into the same co-lead sports columnist slot next to Rick Telander that's been vacant since Jay Mariotti resigned after 17 years in August 2008. Mariotti, a regular on ESPN's "Around the Horn," has since moved to AOL's Fanhouse.com site.
One of the Tribune's sports section's two lead sports columnists, Morrissey most recently has shared proprietorship of the century-plus column "In the Wake of the News" with David Haugh, who was promoted in September.
Morrissey had been a Tribune columnist since 2000 and joined the paper a dozen years ago after a decade at Denver's now-defunct Rocky Mountain News. He has written movingly about surviving a 2006 bout with colon cancer.
A graduate of Fenwick High School and Northwestern University, Morrissey worked for the Charlotte Observer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette and Chicago-area south suburban Star Publications, which since have been combined by parent Sun-Times Media with the Daily Southtown to become the SouthtownStar.