The Star Goes South

Of interest to that curmudgeonly old guy who lives alone and scowls at all the kids who walk by but loves his community newspaper:

Come Sunday, the Daily Southtown and Star Newspapers will be no more. For those who don't know (which is almost everyone), these are two small, excellent, Chicago newspapers. The Daily Southtown is the more renowned of the two. It has a reputation for strong reporting, clever columnists, and general activism in the kind of public service role newspapers are meant to have. It's won a number of major awards, such as Newspaper of the Year by a suburban newspaper judging committee, the George Polk Award, and the Studs Terkel Award. Pulitzer Prize winners have worked there.
The Southtown also keeps an bureau at Chicago's city hall. Perhaps if the newspaper industry was in a better state, the Southtown could and definitely would surpass the Sun-Times and rival the Chicago Tribune.
The Star is a different kind of beast. It's a twice a week paper tending to a number of suburban middle class and blue collar regions of the Chicagoland area. Like the Southtown, the Star carries excellent journalists, and awards, who are familiar with the area -most have lived in Chicago or Illinois their entire lives. The Star's greatest success as a newspaper is its clear contribution to uniting the outlying suburban communities into one larger one.
Both the Southtown and the Star are historic newspapers that have seen major events in Chicago of the twentieth century. To save money, the two papers will unite into one this Sunday to be named the SouthtownStar. The reasoning is money and nothing else. The name change is to keep aspects of both brands alive and therefore avoid detracting complete change with people familiar with either newspaper. Part of its merging also means newsroom job cuts on both sides, a not so unusual event in the newspaper business these days.
Budget constraints are the worst part, no question about it. To a much lesser extent so is the death of both papers. So now two papers must die but did they have to merge? Could the Southtown have not kept its more prominent name and simply "acquired" -as it's called in the business- its sister paper? That might at least keep an appearance of strength. This is all secondary in importance to the real problem behind the merger though. The papers' parent company, the Sun-Times Media Group, would definitely rather just cut as many costs in its minor papers than keep entities that are going through tough times but clearly uphold the honorable jobs that newspapers were always meant for. Well, for the moment at least, it's good that some kind of south suburban community newspaper is around. The longer it lasts, the better.