• A history about Chicago daily newspapers would include the American, founded by press mogul Willam Randloph Hearst, which closed in 1975, and the Daily News, turned into a powerhouse by Chicagoan Victor Lawson It shut down in 1978. And then there’s RedEye. The Chicago Tribune launched the tabloid in 2002, offering “quick punchy features” aimed at 18-to-34-year-olds. Price? A quarter. It was a questionable idea from the start. The target audience was too wide. “These two groups speak different languages; some of the 34-year-olds are the parents of some of the 18-year-olds,” Reader media critic Michael Miner wrote at the time. RedEye was a print publication at a time when younger people were already flocking to the internet. It was free four years after it started. It tried to be hip, but often came off like your parents trying to be cool. This photo was taken in 2015, two years before the Tribune turned RedEye into a flimsy entertainment weekly. The Tribune shut it down in 2020, but the rusty newspaper boxes lingered on, empty.

    Words by TOM CORMAN, Senior Consultant at Ragan Consulting Group

  • Ah, the RedEye, that opening salvo in the war to keep young people interested in newspapers. Look at her walk through the shadows and past that box, with no cellphone to guide or distract her. How does she do it? And what’s in that bag? A book or two? Maybe she’s got a copy of the RedEye, or maybe she’s one of those diehards, still clinging to the grownup edition of the paper. Where’s she going?

    Words by JONATHAN EIG, Journalist & Author/Winner, 2024 Pulitzer Prize

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