Chicago

Newspapers

Chicago's first newspaper, the weekly Chicago Democrat, began in the same year as the city's 1833 incorporation, when it had only 300 residents. Other newspapers quickly followed. The Chicago Tribune, which survives today as a major Midwestern voice, began in 1847, although its ownership has changed several times. So has the city's other surviving major daily, the Chicago Sun-Times, which can trace its lineage even earlier (through a merger and a renaming), to 1844, and the Chicago Evening Journal.

Chicago's population shot up to nearly 1.1 million by 1890 as its rapidly expanding industrial base offered jobs to immigrants in manufacturing, transportation, smokestack industries, and related service industries. “Chicago journalism, like the city itself, is one of the wonders of the times,” Harper's magazine noted in 1883. “As newspapers, as gatherers of the details of the world's daily history, and its presentation with fullness and skill, they have no equals on the continent.”

Publisher Joseph Medill joined the Chicago Tribune in 1855, eight years after its founding, when he was hired from Cleveland to be the Tribune's managing editor. Medill bought into the Tribune's ownership, became one of the founders of the Republican Party, strongly supported Abraham Lincoln for the U.S. presidency, and used the Tribune's voice to oppose slavery. Medill became a civic leader, even serving as mayor for two years, overseeing some of the city's rebuilding after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871—including starting the city's first public library—before returning to his newspaper. Northwestern University's journalism school was named for Medill at its founding in 1921.

Robert R. McCormick, a grandson of Medill, led the Tribune as publisher and editor through much of the first half of the twentieth century. [Page 285]McCormick followed in his grandfather's civic footsteps, serving on the Chicago City Council and Chicago Plan Commission, and as president of the Chicago sanitary district. McCormick reached the rank of colonel during World War I, an honor he carried proudly for the rest of his life. For several years he ran the Tribune with his cousin, Joseph Medill Patterson, who was another grandson of Medill.

The Tribune was the city's most prominent newspaper for much of the twentieth century, but not just because of McCormick's famously conservative voice: it offered readers broad local and national news coverage, lots of comics (Dick Tracy and Brenda Starr started here), and it energetically investigated crooked politicians and gangsters. One of its sports editors, Arch Ward, thought up the idea for major league baseball's annual All-Star Game, first played in 1933.

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