You've got to hand it to competition. Chicago's two dailies today showed why in rollng out their Sunday best. The newly redesigned Sun-Times tabloid and the nationally under-appreciated Tribune reached to their strengths in their main news sections.
It helps that there's no compelling spot-news story that competed successfully for the front page of either paper, forcing both to show their hands in enterprise copy.
The Sun-Times gave us this front-page grabber: "The party's over, Jerry / You owe $29,627! / Chicago's top parking violators / Sun-Times special report." The package is about the 20 top parking offenders, who combined owe the city in excess of $700,000. Could there be a mlre local local local topic for the Sun-Times, whose neew motto, in speaking of Chicago, implores "Let's get into it."
Meanwhile, the Tribune covered this hemisphere literally from top to bottom. The front page feature package was on BP oil's big infrastructure challenges. The story and photos come from Trib staffers who traveled to Deadhorse, Alaska, to cover a visit to the Prudhoe Bay oil operations by Robert Malone, BP's top executive in North America. About the only place in Alaska further north than Deadhorse is Barrow. (And the newspaper's staff has visited there, too, recently.)
Meanwhile, to the opposite tip of the Americas, not far from Cape Horn, another Tribune reporter was in place to profile the city of Ushuaia, Argentina. Billing itself as the End of the World, Ushuaia's 55,000 residents are building a booming tourist trade as a center for adventure travel including embarkations for the relatively short trip to Antartica.
Lest you think the broadsheet forgets its origins, I should note that the front page also includes profiles of a South Side charter school and the excitement of a Mexican soccer star taking up residence here to play for the Chicago Fire pro soccer team. And the BP story notes that BP is big here because it purchased Chicago-based Amoco in 1999, and because problems at BP's huge refinery in Whiting, Ind., are lerading directly to Illinois having the nation's highest gasoline prices.
Home is never far away to any newspaper.
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