NoTV: Chicago Sun-TImes, NPR Station is Merging

[Mark Jeffries]

The board of Chicago Public Media, owners of NPR station WBEZ,  has approved acquiring the Chicago Sun-Times and reinventing it as a not-for-profit entity:

https://www.robertfeder.com/2022/01/18/chicago-public-media-approves-historic-partnership-wbez-sun-times/

WBEZ is the power in this merger--they are the number 2 news-talk radio station in Chicago, only behind Audacy's all-news WBBM, and third overall (although the last Nielsen book had iHeart's adult contemporary WLIT at the top  because they were in Christmas music mode) and beating Newsradio 780/105.9 in morning drive with "Morning Edition."  The Sun-Times, founded by the Field family as a counterweight to the Tribune's conservatism under Col. McCormick, has been ailing in recent years since the Fields sold the paper to Rupert Murdoch in 1982, who did Murdochian things to it.  He sold the paper a few years later so he could buy the Metromedia stations to form Fox, but the paper has continued to suffer under a series of owners (including the notorious Canadian press baron Conrad Black) and the problems that newspapers in general are having in an online world.  

The two entities will have separate boards and separate newsrooms and it is said that there will be no firings.  The feeling has been that becoming NFP will save daily newspapers and this will be the biggest test in the U.S. yet.