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When a revered urban newspaper morphs into "a garish, downmarket tabloid"

Interesting article recently about changes under the paper's new local owner...at the Chicago Sun-Times (via Romenesko):

Monday brings a redesign and extensive reorganization of the product that longtime readers may find disorienting and even off-putting, based on conversations with Sun-Times insiders and a memo to editors outlining the changes.

The new direction has been evident in recent weeks with the makeover of the paper's gossip pages, an emphasis on not-necessarily-local celebrity news, and a rigid, sophomoric formula for page one that harkens to the disastrous, short-lived era of Rupert Murdoch, who owned the Sun-Times in the mid-1980s (and still owns the New York Post).

Almost the entire front page of Friday's Sun-Times consisted of a photo of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian together in New York under the headline LOVE SONG. Other front-page headlines last week screamed: MOB SCENE, GRANDPA WANTS NEW GUN, FACE OF HOPE, SHE'S A WINNER and LET'S GO!

I'm glad that such a thing couldn't happen here in Philadelphia. The Daily News owns local coverage of crime, politics, corruption and the things that city folks actually care about. It would be tragic if some future owner tried to turn us into a cheap copy of the New York Post or now the Chicago Sun-Times. Today's amazing coverage by our downsized but determined staff of the Kensington fire tragedy (stories here here here here here and here) is what the Daily News is all about. A day in which stories like this are shunted aside for news of Kim Kardashian would be the day that journalism died in Philadelphia.

This is what a real newspaper front page looks like: