ChicagoNow

» see chicagonow.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

There is a kind of writing that only exists because somebody else is paying the hosting bill. Mine was on Turkish forums, donanimhaber and frmtr, in threads I did not own and could not have exported if I had wanted to, under a signature block listing whatever hardware I had at the time. It never occurred to me to ask what happened to any of that if the forum went away. ChicagoNow is what the answer looks like when it arrives all at once.

Tribune Publishing launched it in August 2009, the same year the parent company was working its way through bankruptcy, which is either terrible timing or exactly the right timing depending on how you feel about cheap content. The offer was a hyperlocal blog network under the Chicago Tribune's roof. Anybody in the city with something to say could have a blog on it, borrow an audience the newspaper had already built, and in some cases collect a small payment based on traffic.

It worked better than the cynical reading of that arrangement suggests. At its height ChicagoNow carried more than 300 active blogs and 25 million page views a month, on subjects the Tribune newsroom was never going to staff: one neighborhood, one long fight over the school system, parenting, a police officer writing anonymously about the job. The community around it was solid enough to hold seminars and monthly meetups. Over thirteen years it published well past 100,000 posts.

On 18 August 2022 it stopped resolving. There was no announcement and no window to take anything with you. The people who had blogs there found out the same way their readers did.

~ the dossier ~

~ who turned it off ~

Alden Global Capital had bought Tribune Publishing in May 2021 for 633 million dollars. Alden's method in American newspapers is not disputed even by people who think something like it was necessary: buy the paper and cut it until the money comes out. ChicagoNow was fifteen months into that ownership when it went. Traffic had fallen about ninety percent over two years, so there was a real case for closing it. There was no case at all for the way it was closed.

Jimmy Greenfield, who had run the network, said the Tribune never reached out and never gave anybody a chance to take their content before it went offline. He called it cowardly, and the word fits the specific choice, which was to avoid the conversation entirely rather than spend a week on an export tool and a farewell post.

~ what a blogger actually lost ~

The platform was WordPress, and backend access went at the same moment as the front end, so nobody could log in and pull down their own archive. What is recoverable comes off the Wayback Machine one URL at a time, and only for the pages a crawler happened to reach. Writers who spent a decade on that site have spent the years since rebuilding it by hand out of a public archive nobody ever designed to be their backup.

That is the whole lesson of hosted publishing and every generation gets taught it again by a different landlord. The Tribune did not steal anything. It just owned the building, and one Thursday it locked the door without telling the tenants which Thursday it would be.

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