James O’Shea, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, blasted his fellow journalists on Monday in a letter about the future of his current project, the Chicago News Cooperative.
The CNC is a non-profit news organization that covers the Chicago area, but O’Shea confirmed to the New York Times over the weekend that it would be suspending its website and its contributions to the Times’ Chicago edition as of Feb. 26.
News of the suspension broke on Friday, and O’Shea was none too pleased with how it was handled.
“Early stories and Twitter posts on our problems were inaccurate,” O’Shea wrote in a letter. “The reporting was sloppy and simply reinforced in my mind the need for solidly reported, well-edited journalism, the kind that professional CNC journalists have been doing on our website and in the New York Times since November 2009. I can assure you that most of the people involved worked incredibly hard and in good faith to come up with some solutions to the cash shortage that threatens our future.”
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O’Shea also explained why the CNC was suspending its operations. It failed to attract sufficient funding as compared to other non-profit outfits like ProPublica or the Bay Citizen.
“We never recruited the kind of seven figure donations from people of means concerned about the declining quality of news coverage around the country,” O’Shea wrote. “As a result, CNC never raised the resources to make investments in the business side of our operation that would have generated the revenue we needed to achieve our original goal – a self-sustaining news operation within 5 years.”
While ProPublica continues to expand – as well as win national awards – The Bay Citizen is planning to merge with the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Though the merger may still fall through, reports have suggested it is necessary to alleviate a contentious environment at the non-profit, where executives and reporters are at odds.
The long-term future of the CNC remains unclear as O'Shea has not responded to a request for comment. Thus far, the letter and his quotes to the Times are all he has said publicly.
Here is the full text of the letter:
February 20, 2012
To our readers:
As you might have heard or read by now, the Chicago News Cooperative is suspending its contributions to the Midwest pages of the New York Times and its website effective February 26 so we can reassess our operations and determine if there is a more sustainable path to the future.
Effective next Sunday, the Times pages produced by the CNC will no longer appear in the Friday and Sunday editions of the newspaper and its website. Obviously I’ve taken this step with much pride and regret – pride in the excellent journalism produced by the CNC staff over the past two and one-half years and regret that I could not raise the resources we needed to continue our current level of operations.
