Newspaper's sale fails to stir Windy City

Chicago journalism inspired Broadway's "The Front Page" and produced icons such as Mike Royko. Reporters knew they had arrived when their bylines were laminated and posted over the bar at the Billy Goat Tavern. The local legends of journalism are immortalized there: the curmudgeons and columnists, the men -- and the occasional woman -- who struck fear into the City Hall machine and told of life in the Windy City.

But that was years ago. Many of those names are yellowed and faded now. Some have been forgotten.

Which is why this city of big shoulders greeted this week's news of Tribune Co.'s sale of its media assets with a shrug.

"The media is no longer something people care about passionately in this town," said Michael Miner, a media reporter for the Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly. "The sale of the Cubs? Huge news. The newspaper? To most people here, it's a big 'So what?' "

On Monday, Tribune announced that Sam Zell, a Chicago real estate magnate, would buy one of the nation's largest public media companies. The $8.2-billion deal would give Zell control over the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, cable TV network Superstation WGN and nearly 30 other TV stations, radio outlets and daily papers.

But as the sun warmed the city Monday and people here joined the morning rush-hour crush on Chicago's elevated train, the chatter revolved around one thing: Tribune's plans to sell the beloved -- and legendarily cursed -- Cubs after this baseball season.

Squeezed onto the blue line train in Oak Park, friends Drew Harrod and Derrick Godfrey spent their commute into the city quietly discussing the sale of a team that hasn't won a World Series since 1908 and speculating about its future in its Wrigley Field shrine.

"I'm actually hopeful for the first time in years that the team's luck could be turning," said Harrod, 31, a department store salesperson.

But, 33-year-old Godfrey worried, what if the Tribune sold the team to someone outside Chicago? "What if it's to someone worse than the Tribune?" he asked. "What if they move the team out of Wrigley?"

Harrod glared at Godfrey in horror. "No way. No way anyone's insane enough to do that."