Key advice for the next chief executive of Tribune

What is Tribune about? The answer should be, “Tribune is about news.” Every one of your thoughts should flow from that conviction. It’s time to revisit that old story about Colonel McCormick. He was not born with newspaper instincts. He honed his knowledge of Chicago while he was reforming the Metropolitan Sanitary District. In his head, he had a central piece of knowledge that was important to the fortunes of media in his day; he knew where development was going to be in Chicago because he knew where water was going to go. If you want to win the war this time around, you need to know where technology is going to go, where demographics are going to go, where people are going to go for news, and you need to put everything you can muster in front of them.
There is no plausible reason anymore for Tribune to be running publications in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Florida, Pennsylvania, or anywhere but Chicago. The arguments about synergies and efficiency and gigantic advertising footprints have all collapsed. They were strategies that made sense in an era that ended a decade ago.