Chicago Public Square Podcasts

The American Dialect Society’s 2023 word of the year? Enshittification. And our guest on this edition of Chicago Public Square Podcasts, Cory Doctorow, is the guy who coined it.
Hear him define it—and his harrowing explanation of how he, one of the world’s most tech-savvy authors and journalists, got scammed out of $8,000 before he could figure out what was going on. Also: The one “ironclad” rule you should follow to avoid a similar fate.
And then, in this—our first conversation since this podcast from 2019—you’ll learn, among many other things, why he thinks Amazon embodies enshittification and why so many major publishers refused to consider one of his books.
Listen here, or on Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers or Apple Podcasts.

Or if you prefer to read your podcasts, check out the transcript below.
And if you’re a completist, here’s the original, mostly unedited, behind-the-scenes raw audio and video from the recording of this podcast via Zoom on YouTube.
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Now, here’s a roughly edited transcript of the interview, recorded March 7, 2024:

[00:00:00] Charlie Meyerson: The American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year? Enshittification. And our guest is the guy who coined it:

[00:00:10] Cory Doctorow: What I think is going on is that this bad idea, right?—“Let’s make things worse for our customers and our suppliers and better for ourselves”—is omnipresent in every firm.

[00:00:21] CM: Cory Doctorow’s a science fiction author, activist, and oh, I’d say a very active journalist with an email newsletter he publishes daily. His new book is The Bezzle, a high-tech thriller whose protagonist is … an accountant. More on that to come. I’m Charlie Meyerson with ChicagoPublicSquare.com, which, yes, is also an email newsletter. And this is a Chicago Public Square Podcast. Cory, it’s great to see you again. What’s new since the last time you and I recorded a podcast—almost exactly five years ago this month, back in 2019?

[00:00:55] CD: Well, there was a pandemic, and you know, lucky for me the way that I cope with anxiety and stress is by writing. And so I wrote nine books, which are all coming out in a string, which has left me pretty busy—but in a good way. My friend Joey Dilla says, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. So that’s definitely where I’m at now.

[00:01:18] CM: You have a daily email newsletter, you have a podcast, and you’re on this nationwide book tour now, although you’re home now in California. When do you rest, huh?

[00:01:27] CD: Well, when I rest, I think about how terrible everything is, and so I try to do as little of that as possible. I mean, my family and I go off and do things from time to time. But, yeah, I have always written as a way of processing the world, and the world needs a lot of processing, so I’m doing a lot of writing.

[00:01:48] CM: Did your, uh, restlessness contribute to an unfortunate happening that I think shocked a lot of readers on February 5, 2024, when it was the most-tapped item in Chicago Public Square? And I’m gonna quote you here, “I was robbed $8,000-plus worth of fraud before I figured out what happened, and then he tried to do it again a week later.” What happened?

[00:02:11] CD: Yeah, that was while I was taking a rest as it happened. So for Christmas break, my wife and I, and then my daughter and my parents joined us, went to one of my favorite places in the world, New Orleans. So, we landed and needed cash. So I went to an ATM in the French Quarter, was like a, a chase ATM, and the whole transaction ran and then it threw an error and said, we can’t give you your money. I was like, Ugh, what a pain. And later on, we were walking through town and we passed a credit union’s ATM branch.

I bank with a one-branch credit union. And most credit unions don’t charge fees to each other. So I was like, oh, we’ll just use this one. So I got some money up. A couple of days go by, it’s time to leave, my folks have already gone, my wife and daughter are at the hotel, and I’ve gone out to get my very favorite sandwich just before we go. And my phone rings and it’s the caller ID for my bank.

And they say, “Mr. Doctorow, this is your bank calling. Uh, did you just try and spend a thousand dollars, uh, at an Apple store in New York?” And I was like, Ugh. One of those ATMs turned out to be dodgy. Either was the one that threw that error. And the reason was that it had, like, a skimmer mounted on it and they captured my card number.

Or maybe it was that cheap Chinese ATM that the one-branch credit union I went to was using one or the other. I was definitely skimmed. So, you know, I make my peace with it and I start talking with this guy and you know, when you bank with a little one-branch credit union, they don’t have their own after-hours fraud unit. They just contract out. And so these guys, you know, they’re a little clumsy. They’re a little amateurish. They ask you a bunch of questions your bank should know the answer to because they’re not really your bank, they’re their fraud center partner.

I’m just going through this whole thing and it’s going on and on, and I can see the store that sells my sandwich, and I can see the time ticking down.

And finally, I said like, “Look, fella, you’ve already frozen the card, you’ve gotten most of the recent transaction data. I’m gonna go. When I get to the airport after I clear security, I’ll call the bank’s after-hours number,” and he got really surety and I was like, you’re just gonna have to suck it up.

This is how it goes. You know, whatever losses you’re experiencing have nothing compared to the losses of me missing my flight with my wife and daughter. So go back and go to the, go to the airport and on the way I look at my phone and I find out that DC-737 Max Boeing Aircraft has just lost its door plug and all the 737 Maxes in the U.S., they’ve just been grounded. And we get to the airport and it’s a zoo. Everyone’s trying to rebook. By the time we get to the gate, we’ve got five minutes. ’Cause there’s just the lines, you know. Massive.

So I call the bank’s after-hours number and they say, “Sorry, sir, you pressed the wrong button. This is lost cards. Fraud’s a different number, but it sounds like you told the guy to freeze your cards. So it should be fine. Just come in on Monday and get your new card.”

So, uh, Monday morning I print out the list of all the fraudulent transactions, about $8,000 worth, and I go into the bank. And the cool thing about the one-branch credit union is that the person who helped me out was a vice president there and she was pissed about this $8,000 fraud. ’Cause if Visa wouldn’t cover it, then we’d have to eat it. You know—not me, but the credit union and, and so she’s pissed. I’m pissed. And I say, “Look, you know, some of this has to do with that crummy after-hours fraud center you guys use. ’Cause I told them to freeze my card on Saturday and all this fraud took place on Sunday.”

And she said, “Ugh, that’s no good. I’m gonna call them up now and find out what’s going on.”

She comes back five minutes later and says, “They never called you on Saturday. That was the fraudster.”

My card hadn’t been skimmed at all. So it turns out that guy—I’m like thinking about all the information I gave him: “Well, I gave him my name, but that’s in my Wikipedia entry. Gave him my date of birth; that’s in my Wikipedia entry. I gave him where I live; that’s in my Wikipedia entry. I gave him the last four digits of my credit card, and that’s not an—and then I was like, “Wait a second. He didn’t ask for the last four digits. He asked for the last seven digits”

And I said to the vice president of the bank, “You guys only have a single VISA prefix, right? The first nine digits are the same for every card you issue?”

She’s like, yep.

And I’m like, “OK. So I gave him the last seven digits and that was enough. Then he had the whole card number. And that’s how they robbed me.”

And he did it again the following Friday just before MLK weekend. And he called at 5:30 just before the bank’s closed for a three-day weekend or just after the bank’s closed for a three-day weekend, which is like the fraud golden hour.

And, you know, I recognized who it was and, and he said, “You know, your car’s been compromised. It’s so and so.” And I’m like, “No, it hasn’t. Card’s still in my wallet. Hasn’t left my wallet since I picked it up on Monday. Why don’t you tell me what the after-hours number on my card is? ’Cause I’m looking at it now. You tell me what number I call back to speak to you.” And he is like, “Mr. Doctorow, this is not a game. I have told you that there is active fraud on your card. If you don’t complete the anti-fraud protocol with me right now, then any losses will be yours to bear. The bank will not identify you.”

I’m like, “That’s adorable.” So I hang up on him and he calls me back and I’m like, oh, this guy is like definitely a fraud, right? Any doubt I had is immediately dispelled. So I just hung up with him and blocked his number. And then I called the risk management person at the bank when they reopened on Tuesday—’cause again, small bank, you get to talk to the person, and it turns out that there’s some a leak somewhere in America’s credit union supply chain. And somehow fraudsters are calling people knowing what bank they bank at, and knowing their phone number, neither of which is a matter of public record for me.

And that was the convincer for me. So even though I go to Defcon, the big hacker conference every year, and I go to those social engineering competitions where people get in a little soundproof booth in front of an audience and try to trick store clerks into giving them sensitive information, usually the store management has given them permission to try this out.

And I’m an expert on this stuff and I’ve written multiple novels about it. I got fooled. I got fooled using Swiss cheese security, which is where you have all these different layers of security. They’ve all got their little holes in them, like slices of Swiss cheese. Most of the time the holes don’t overlap and there’s no way to go all the way through the defenses.

But I was on vacation on the day the DC-737 Max, you know, had its door plug fall outta the sky. An hour before I was leaving, right after I used not one but two dodgy ATMs in one of the property crime centers of the world. You know, as all of these things all lined up, all the holes of the Swiss cheese lined up, I got fooled.

You know, there are lots of lessons here, but one of them is if you think you can’t get fooled, that’s the guarantee that someday you’re gonna get fooled.

[00:08:35] CM: Well, you’re certainly one of the most tech-savvy humans I’m aware of in this world. Is there any lesson that you gather from this? For the rest of us?

[00:08:43] CD: So the ironclad rule should be, and the rule that I normally follow is when your bank calls you, you say “Thank you very much. Do you have an operator number or anything so I can speak to you? ’Cause I’m gonna call back the number on my card.” That is complete proof against the fraud.

Now, the banks could do something about this ’cause the reason that I didn’t do it that day is ’cause I wanted to get that goddamn sandwich and calling and speaking to someone like a rando in their voicemail tree and trying to tell them, you know, like, give them all my account information, a lot of which I didn’t even have ’cause it’s just, it’s in my laptop back in the hotel—going through all of that with a stranger would’ve eaten up all the time I had. So I was like, “Oh, I’ll just deal with this guy. He knows my number, he knows my name, and he knows where I bank. It’s clearly from my bank.”

But if they were to call you up and say, “Mr. Doctorow, this is your bank, this is my operator number, or a unique five-digit code, or whatever, write it down. Call the number on your card. And give that number to the interactive voice response system. The bank is gonna pay me to sit here idle for 15 minutes waiting for you so you can find a quiet place to sit down and call, and you will speak directly to me. We won’t have to go through a long process where you have to get me up to speed on the thing I’m getting you up to speed on, and we’ll just, we’ll just make it work.”

You know, we haven’t found out yet whether or not Visa’s gonna honor this claim. But if my bank loses $8,000 this year because of me—and it’s a credit union, so I’m a member of it, right? I’m co-owner of this bank, as are all the other customers of it—that’s all the money they’re gonna make for me this year, including the interest on my mortgage, right?

Like they’ve just zeroed out one of their most valuable customers. Paying the after-hours fraud center or an in-house fraud center to have a little bit more idle time at the margin so that you can have a higher fidelity of anti-fraud is something absolutely worth it. And you know, this is emblematic in some ways of what happens when you squeeze all the slack out of the system—is that you kind of groom people to cut corners because they know the process sucks.

So I think that it could be improved, and you know, clearly a lot of the blame here is on me, but not all of it.

[00:11:01] CM: You’re generous to accept even some of the responsibility.

[00:11:04] CD: Well, I should have known to call them back. But I didn’t.

You know, I spoke with that risk management officer, and I was like, “Let’s go through the way your interactive voice response system characterizes each of the options when you call after hours,” because I had missed the anti-fraud. ’Cause it’s not called “anti-fraud.” Like “If you suspect fraud on your card, press 2.” It was something else. Right? It was like, “If you have a problem with your account,” and I was like, “That’s something else.” I didn’t even press it.

So we discussed new wording and they’re gonna put new wording in. Also, I’m speaking at DEFCON this year again. This year’s theme is “Enshittification,” and so they’re giving me a keynote slot, and that always comes with a bunch of free speaker’s badges. What I usually do when I speak there is I go to the people in line waiting to buy a badge and I just pick five people and give them badges. But I’m saving one for my bank’s risk management officer, and she’s gonna get in for free and she can go to those social engineering competitions.

[00:12:00] CM: Well, I’ve fallen in love with this word that you coined, enshittification, and I need to note for our listeners that there are two T’s in the middle of enshittification.

CD: Mm-hmm.

CM: How did you decide on two T’s?

[00:12:13] CD: You know, the first time I used it, I only put in one.

CM: Did you? Okay.

CD: Two T’s is better.

CM: You think so?

CD: It makes shit an infix and it makes -tification the suffix instead of -ification.

CM: OK.

CD: So en is the prefix, shit is the infix, -tification is the suffix, and that second T is doing some work there. The American Dialect Society, when they gave the word the honor—and it’s not just their word of the year, it’s like their digital word of the year, and, I don’t know, like their sweary word of the year; it, like, took top honors in a bunch of categories—they are actual cunning linguists, and they went ahead and dissected the word and figured out what all the things meant. I couldn’t diagram a sentence if you paid me.

[00:13:01] CM: I knew you’d have a reason for the double-T, and thank you for fulfilling my expectations. Yeah. But let’s back up for people. I imagine there are a few who do not yet know about enshittification.

CD: Sure.

CM: What is it?

[00:13:15] CD: It’s a term I coined to describe a specific pathology of late-stage internet platforms. Platforms are the unlikely endemic form of the internet. You know, for a medium that was supposed to disintermediate everything, the fact that the biggest form of business on the internet is intermediaries is pretty wild. And—if you wanna think of it as, like, a pathology—it describes the natural history, like what happens when a platform unifies and it has a very specific kind of decaying model where first it allocates value to end-users; those end-users flock in and get locked in somehow, so that when the company then starts to take away some of that value to give it to business customers, the users don’t leave, can’t leave. Then those business customers come in because of the attractive proposition that’s being made to them. And then they get locked in because they’re there for the end users who are also locked in. And then once everyone’s locked in, all the value is drawn out and given to the firm, the platform. And then the whole thing turns into a pile of shit, hence enshittification.

Um, but it also describes like the underlying mechanism, like what’s going on inside the firm? Why are digital firms so able to enshittify? And it’s because digital is very flexible. I had someone email me this morning and say, well, Panera Bread is steaming towards, its IPO and there’s this investigative report that says that they’ve cut back on their ingredients, their ingredients aren’t very good anymore.

That’s enshittification too, and it’s not quite. Because enshittification involves this process I call twiddling. It’s when the platform can change the business rules from moment to moment. So a really good example is an Uber driver who’s the business customer in that two-sided market riders and drivers.

So Uber practices this thing called algorithmic wage discrimination, which is a violation of labor law that they say doesn’t violate labor law. ’Cause they do it with an app. And what they do is if you are a driver who’s selective about which rides you take, if you only take the highest dollar value rides, then each ride that’s offered to you comes at a higher dollar value than it would if you were less selective.

The less selective you become, the lower the return per mile and minute becomes in small increments that are very hard to notice, and if you become more selective, they toggle back up again. And so the rate is going up and down and up and down in response to your perceived selectivity in a fully automated way.

And this is a kind of game of exhaustion because at a certain point, you take your eye off the ball and you start taking rides that are worse and then the rides get worse and worse and worse. Meanwhile, you’re jettisoning those things that you used to do as side hustles that let you be more selective.

That’s what it means when you’re taking worse rides as you’re taking more rides. And at a certain point, you’re just like fully locked in. You have a car lease to meet because you’ve bought a car just to drive for Uber. You’ve got some other overheads that you’re trying to meet, and your wages sunk to the very bottom that algorithmic wage discrimination is a term vena dubo coined is a thing that Panera Bread would love to do.

It’s a thing that like. You know, the black-hearted coal bosses of Tennessee Ernie Ford songs would love to do. But you know, like doing that manually with an army of guys in green eyeshades is not practical. And digital firms can alter the business logic from second to second in ways that offline firms or firms that have some physical component struggle to do.

And so that’s the underlying mechanism. And then the next question is, why is it happening to everyone all at once? Why are all these platforms enshittifying now? That’s kind of the epidemiological question, right? Where’s the contagion coming from? Because when a lot of firms start doing something all at once.

In the same way, it’s unlikely to be related to something endogenous to the firm. It’s not just that like a bunch of people had the same bad idea at the same time in all these companies, right? What I think is going on is that this bad idea, right? “Let’s make things worse for our customers and our suppliers and better for ourselves” is omnipresent—in every firm, right? Every firm is trying to find the equilibrium between apportioning value to say employees or suppliers and to customers and to themselves. And there are some constraints, right? One is competition. If you know, if you offer a substandard product and there’s somewhere else your customers can go, they’ll go there.

If you pay substandard wages and there’s somewhere else your employees can go, they’ll go there. You know, all of this stuff about “Nobody wants to work” is hilarious because I guarantee you they’ll work if you offer double the wage, right? “Nobody wants to work at the wage you’re offering” is like, “Nobody wants to sell me a plane ticket at what I think it’s worth.”

That sounds like a me problem, not like an American Airlines problem. Right. So, you know, the competition acts as this check on firms, but competition has been in free fall for 40 years. And I think that across the threshold, right? We allow companies to buy their major rivals. We allow them to engage in predatory pricing, to exclude new market entrants.

We allow them to buy nascent competitors before they can grow to be threats and then extinguish them. We allow them to do all the above, right? You have Amazon, which tried to buy Diapers.com—Diapers.com, which, you know, as is implied by the name, was an e-commerce platform that sold diapers. They were doing a really good business and they didn’t wanna sell to Amazon.

So Amazon first tried to do an anti-competitive acquisition, right? To take a firm that was its rival in a certain vertical and, and buy it. So the firm wouldn’t do that. So then they did predatory pricing. And buying the nascent rival and predatory pricing would’ve been illegal until the Carter administration.

Carter removed some Jenga blocks from the antitrust tower. Reagan started pulling them out by the fistful, and every administration since has lowered the amount of antitrust enforcement we do—to the point where now companies can just get away with murder. And so Amazon said, all right, we’re gonna start selling diapers below cost. They sold diapers below cost to the tune of a hundred million dollars in losses—which, put Diapers.com outta business. Right? So that’s predatory pricing. Then they acquired Diapers.com at pennies in the dollar. So that’s the anti-competitive acquisition, and then they shut them down. That’s, a catch and kill, right? All of this was, is illegal under the black letter of competition law.

None of it was enforced against. Amazon also derived a secondary benefit from this. And that secondary benefit was informing every other source of capital that if you invest in a company that competes with Amazon, the best you can hope for is an acquisition. But what’s probably gonna happen is you’re just gonna get driven outta business.

It’s what venture capitalists called the kill Zone, and it’s why people don’t compete with Amazon. And so we lost the constraint of competition and we lost the constraint of regulation. Because when a sector dwindles to a handful of firms, they find it very easy to agree on a single lobbying position, and they can make their will felt in Congress, in the expert agencies and in court, and they can get away with whatever they want.

[00:20:25] CM: What is your cure for enshittification?

[00:20:27] CD: So if you take each of these constraints, right—the first one being competition—restoring that constraint will reduce the power of firms to enshittify, right? If they have to worry about you quitting or leaving as a customer, then they have to treat you better. And if they don’t get the message, then you can go somewhere that treats you better.

So we are in a historic moment for antitrust enforcement. As we record this today, the European Union has just started enforcing the Digital Markets Act. Here in the United States, we have generationally significant leaders at the Department of Justice Antitrust Division—with Jonathan Kanter at the Federal Trade Commission with Chair Lina Khan, and at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau with Rohit Chopra.

No coincidence that there is a bipartisan effort to slash all of their budgets working their way through the mini budget right now. Right? But reinvigorating antitrust is a way to restore the disciplinary power of competition. It also restores the power of regulators because it’s not just antitrust that regulators do—it’s everything.

And if you want a company not to rip you off, say the way Amazon does. So if you go to Amazon, you click the first link on an Amazon search, on average, you pay a 29% premium relative to the best item. ’Cause Amazon makes $38 billion a year selling payola the right to make the top search result.

If you walked into a Corner store or Target and said, “Sell me your cheapest batteries,” and they sold you batteries that were 30% more expensive than their cheapest batteries, That would be fraud. Amazon’s regulatory capture allows it to say, “It’s not fraud when we do it with an app,” just like Uber says, “It’s not a labor violation when we do it with an app” or Google says “It’s not a privacy violation when we do it with an app.” Make those companies more fragmented and you starve them of the capital they need to suborn their regulators, and you also introduce a collective action problem where they just become too many companies to agree on what it is they’re gonna tell their regulators.

CM: Are you available for federal office?

CD: Uh, no. I wrote nine books during lockdown and I just agreed to write a 10th one about unification. I’m busy till 2027.

[00:22:35] CM: Cory and I have something else in common—decades apart from one another. We’ve both been contributors to the Venerable Journal of Science Fiction Locusts, although my main contribution consisted of a series of cartoons I drew as a teenager. What do you make of the state of science fiction these days? Text, TV, motion pictures.

[00:22:53] CD: Well, it’s certainly at an interesting moment. I mean, there’s one way in which the most salient fact is that it’s dominated by five companies—five major publishers that sell to one national brick-and-mortar chain owned by a private equity fund, Barnes and Noble; and one rapacious monopolist e-commerce platform, Amazon.

Ninety percent of the audiobooks are controlled by Amazon subsidiary Audible. There’s a single national distributor, which is Ingram. All the other distributors are owned by the Big Five publishers. So I published a book in 2020 with my colleague Rebecca Giblin about how monopolists rip off creative workers.

None of the Big Five publishers wanted to publish it ’cause it was really critical of them. So we published with a wonderful independent press called Beacon that’s 150 years old, owned by the Unitarian Universalists. Albert Einstein once very famously said, “If there is hope in this world, it the Unitarian-Universalists and Beacon Press” (Editor’s note: Not quite, but not far off in spirit.) Beacon is distributed by Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the world who got a dollar every time we sold a book explaining why they were an evil monopolist.

Right? So. That’s one way in which science fiction is just on the ropes, right? You have four major studios, thankfully, uh, thanks to our friends in the federal government, Paramount did not just sell to Disney, but they’re looking for another suitor. And so, you know, in every way we are struggling.

You have HBO Warner, which is cutting shows they have—and not because no one wants to see them, but because David Zaslav—the villain from central casting who runs that business—has figured out that he can get more in a tax credit for writing off a show than he can for releasing it—taking stuff that people, like, miss their parents’ funeral to work on and just flushing it down the toilet. So in those ways it’s very bad. In terms of the work being produced, it’s never been better. I mean, we’re in an amazing moment for the field. People are writing incredible things—notwithstanding the massive scandal at the Hugo Awards last year, which is a whole different story about the difficulties of hosting the Hugos in China and the mistakes that the non-Chinese Hugo administrators made.

[00:25:07] CM: I missed that. Give us the short version of that.

[00:25:09] CD: Oh my gosh. So after the Hugo Awards are awarded as you leave, they’re handing out sheets of photocopied paper with all the vote tallies and nomination tallies—that didn’t happen at the WorldCon China, which was the first ever held in China, which has more science fiction fans than all the rest of the world combined, and, you know, more than deserves a world con. Instead, the committee that oversaw the Hugos waited until the very last minute permitted by the bylaws to release the numbers, whereupon everyone realized that something was up. And it turns out that they had unilaterally disqualified innumerable works both Chinese and also a number of works by American and European Chinese writers of Chinese descent. And they had done this—it transpired after lots of memos leaked and so on ’cause they stonewalled when people asked about this—they’d done this not because anyone in China had asked them to, but because they thought that the Chinese government would get upset if they didn’t.

And they went so far as to assemble dossiers on people nominated for awards and disqualify them if they thought they had been to Tibet. It turns out the person that they disqualified for having traveled to Tibet, had traveled to Nepal, which is not Tibet …

CM: Easy mistake to make.

CD: These were Americans and Canadians, not Chinese fans. And they disgrace themselves. They disgrace the award. The people who won the award now have an asterisk next to their name. When they were fighting for their reputations and stonewalling, they were gratuitously insulting to these writers, most of them of Chinese descent. You know, Chinese Americans primarily when they question this and they are fans of very longstanding people who have volunteered to run this award for decades.

And this is the way they’re going to end their careers in fandom. It’s quite sad.

[00:27:05] CM: One of the things Cory told me, back when we talked in a previous podcast in 2019, was that one way to spot terrible technology in our future would be to take a look at what the powers that be are foisting on prisoners. And now five years later, his new book The Bezzle offers a look at just that. But why did you set it to open in 2006?

[00:27:28] CD: Well, for that you need to understand these nine books I wrote during lockdown. So one of them was a book called Red Team Blues, and the conceit behind Red Team Blues is, it’s like a detective thriller about a hard-charging, two-fisted but lovable forensic accountant—67 years old, spent 40 years in Silicon Valley undoing every bit of mischief that a tech bro ever thought to do, finding all the money that people use spreadsheets to hide. And the conceit was, it’s like the last volume of a beloved detective series you have read for 25 years and grown up with.

Except I’m not gonna bother writing the other books; it’s just the last one. And it was pretty successful. I sent it to my editor who I love dearly. I met him on a bulletin board system when I was 17 years old. He’s edited all my novels, and he will not think that I am being overly critical of him when I tell you that he’s not the world’s most reliable email correspondent.

And so when I sent him the manuscript after finishing the first draft, I finished it in six weeks from the first word to the last. In that first draft, I sent it to him and I expected months to go by. And instead the next morning there was an email waiting for me that was just, that was a fucking ride.

Whoa. And he bought three of them. And there’s a problem because this is the last adventure of Martin Hench forensic accountant. There is some precedent for bringing a detective out of retirement. Very famously, Conan Doyle brings Sherlock Holmes back over Rickenbacker Falls because Queen Victoria offered him a knighthood.

My editor is a very powerful man in New York publishing. He is a vice president in the McMillan company, but he cannot knight me, so I was not gonna bring poor old Marty out of retirement. And so I had to come up with something else. And it occurred to me that I could write these books out of order. I could write them in any sequence.

He’s like the Zelig of high-tech finance fraud. He’s been at every place where someone ripped someone else off with a computer. If I wrote them out of order, I wouldn’t have any continuity problems ’cause when the series goes backwards, you’re not foreshadowing—you’re backshadowing. And the more detail you throw in, the more of like a, you know, absolutely premeditated motherfucker you appear to be—even if you’re just winging it.

So this is the second book. The first one is set in the 2020s. It’s a cryptocurrency heist novel. This one is about the era where Yahoo is buying and destroying every successful Web 2.0 company. It’s a time I know very well. I was there. I founded a startup that, you know, Microsoft tried to buy—that our investors then stole from the founders and then the deal fell through and the chaos that ensued.

And so I’ve lived through it. And so it was a moment I really wanted to write about in particular because. It’s the moment that represents the time between the dot-com bubble bursting and the subprime bubble bursting, and it’s this period that you can think of as the bezzle. The bezzle, B-E-Z-Z-L-E, not B-E-Z-E-L.

Not the rectangle around your phone screen, but this term that was coined by John Kenneth Galbraith to describe what he calls the magic interval. After the con artist has your money, but before you know it’s a con. And in that moment, Galbraith says everybody feels richer, everybody is happier. The national stock of happiness goes up for so long as the bezzle is going.

The longer the bezzle goes, the more unhappiness debt you accumulate because the more money gets pumped into the fraud. Right? And so the irony of the bezzle is that the people who are in it don’t want you to rupture it, even if that will save them from losing everything, because it’s when the unhappiness starts. It’s like continuing to drink so that you don’t get hungover.

The more you do that, the worse the hangover becomes, and that moment, those charmed and difficult years from 2002 to 2006, are really an ideal time to tell a story that I think of as Panama Papers fanfic.

[00:31:49] CM: The Bezzle has a few Chicago connections. One is a name well known to people in Chicago: Wrigley. Give our listeners a taste of how that comes into play.

[00:31:59] CD: Yeah, so that same editor of mine, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who I love dearly but is not the world’s most reliable email correspondent—when he edited my first novel, now almost 25 years ago, he gave me this piece of advice with his editorial note that I’ve never forgotten: He said a science fiction novel has the world and the character, and they’re like a big gear and a little gear. And the point is to turn the world all the way around so the reader can see what’s going on in the world.

And the way you do that is by having the little gear, the character, turn around as many times as it takes to spin the world one complete revolution. And the teeth have to match for that to happen. The world has to be a macrocosm of the character. And the character has to be a microcosm of the world. And when the books don’t work, check your micro-macro correspondences, see if they’re, if the one is the miniature of the other.

So one of the things that I do in these novels about scams is I try to start with a small scam that’s a kind of microcosm of the big scams. So the big scam in this book is about prison tech, but the small scam in this book is a Ponzi scheme and it’s set on Catalina Island, and Catalina is a place I’ve fallen in love with since I moved to Southern California.

And it’s for people who don’t know, it’s this kind of storybook island across the channel from Long Beach. It’s the deepest channel in the world. And this island was owned by the Wrigley family. It’s where the Cubs used to have their spring training.

It’s where Marilyn Monroe was a child bride. It’s where the CIA was founded. It was home of the largest ballroom in America and every week the most popular dance music program in the world used to broadcast live from high atop Avalon on beautiful Catalina Island. It’s home to—originally—13 male bison that got loose after shooting a Zane Gray movie. But then old man Wrigley decided it would be un-Christian to have 13 bachelors. So he imported 13 cows for them—not understanding that, uh, bison form harems. And they have ever since struggled with an out-of-control bison population.

It’s a remarkable place and one of its peccadillos leftover from Old Man Wrigley is that when he gave the island to a land trust, he decreed that there would never be a fast-food chain on the island, which, you know, whatever. In terms of folly pursued by billionaires, it barely registers. I’m not a big fast-food eater myself, but for the people on the island, fast food has become a kind of forbidden fruit.

And if you go to the little K to 12 school and you go for an away game with your football team, everyone expects you to bring back a sack of sliders because everyone wants to try, you know, the fast food they can’t get on the island. And so I made up a little Ponzi scheme involving hamburgers brought over from the mainland and flash-frozen … to be traded as futures in the same way that housing and luxury tower blocks—only incidentally, a place where someone might live—is primarily a source of leverage and a safe deposit box in the sky, which, you know, in the runup to the 2008 crisis was, you know, often bought and sold several times before it was built, had multiple, uh, collateralized debt obligations and synthetic collateralized debt obligations hanging off of it and could be inflated into paper worth 10 or 20 times its value, which is exactly what happens to these deep-frozen hamburgers on the island.

Thanks to a wicked real estate baron, who it turns out is doing the same thing with real estate as he is with hamburgers and who becomes so enamored of his own cleverness that he begins to relish the moment when the whole thing bursts and the island’s economy tanks. And that’s where Marty Hench and his friend come in and they decide to do a controlled demolition of this Ponzi before it can take down the island.

[00:36:16] CM: You know, as I read The Bezzle, I thought. Boy, there’s a lot of food in this book. How important is food and cooking in your life? Or was that just you writing about people for whom it is a big deal?

[00:36:28] CD: I mean, I love to cook, but Marty Hench is a better cook than I am. I love books that have delicious food in them. And I love books that have delicious food that’s well appreciated. You know, the Hemingway hamburger of, you know beef, salt, pepper, turn it once, don’t touch it again, is actually pretty goddamn good advice for making a hamburger. I put a little butter in the pan depending on the fat content in your ground beef, but it’s not bad.

I find these books to be a really fun way to kind of do the adult version of what I did in the Little Brother books. So in the Little Brother books, it’s kind of like that cool uncle or your friend’s older brother puts an arm around your shoulder and says, “Lemme tell you how the world really works, kid.”

And just opens your eyes. And these books are more like, let me tell you how the worst things in the world are done. And counter sinking that with the great pleasures of life, I think makes these books more balanced.

[00:37:41] CM: Your books were some of the first that I read on mobile devices—a Blackberry in my case—and I know you’ve continued to champion that technology. Digital rights management—DRM, the fences around the use of people’s electronic content—has been a longstanding concern of Cory’s. How’re we doing?

[00:38:01] CD: Well, again, back to that, you know, generational moment for tech and antitrust. There is, for the first time in the whole time that I’ve been working on this, some real energy to do something about it—some sense that it is iniquitous.

So, to give you a sense of how screwed up this whole system is: In 1998, Bill Clinton signed this law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Section 1201 of that makes it a felony to traffic in, quote, a circumvention device for effective means of access controls to copyrighted work.

So if there’s a thing that stops you from accessing a copyrighted work and someone makes a tool that allows you to access it. That tool is illegal and the person who who gives it to you as a felon can go to prison for five years and pay a $500,000 fine for a first offense. So what that means, very practically speaking, is if I want my audiobook sold on Audible, which requires digital rights management—a lock on every book that ensures that it can only be played on a device that Amazon has approved of—then I can’t leave Amazon and take you with me. If I decide that Amazon is abusing me, and they really do abuse their suppliers, especially in the audiobook world.

There was a ghastly scandal last year called Audiblegate, which involved at least $100 million in wage theft from independent audiobook authors that Amazon did with a scummy accounting trick. So if I go, look, I’m gonna leave and I’m gonna take my readers with me, and I’m gonna give them a tool so they can unlock their books, take them to whatever app the next store I decide to sell on uses, I commit a felony. Not only do I commit that felony, but the felony carries a harsher penalty than you would pay if you were to go to a pirate website and download the book. But it’s also like a higher penalty than you would pay if you were to go into a truck stop and shoplift the CD of the book, and it’s probably a higher penalty than you would pay if you stuck up the truck that delivered the CDs and stole the truck.

Right. So for me to allow you to access the book that I wrote maybe that I financed the audiobook for, that I read the audiobook for is a crime that exceeds the penalties then that you would pay for even really serious property crimes involving other people’s property. And this just gives Amazon enormous leverage.

People are getting sick of this in Oregon. They’ve just passed a right-to-repair bill. That prohibits companies from using this technology to lock parts to their devices. So if you take a screen outta one iPhone and put it in another iPhone, right? If you’re an independent repair shop, and Apple won’t sell you parts, but you’re buying broken phones and harvesting dead parts out of them, you have to do something called parts pairing, where you enter an unlock key, and the same law—this law that prevents you from unlocking your audiobooks—also prevents someone from giving you a tool to do the parts pairing. And so the screen won’t work on the phone. Oregon’s just banned using that technology, so they can’t overturn this law. It’s a federal law, but they can ban you from using technology that implicates it.

Um, I think that. You know, we are in a moment where enough is enough. People are getting really pissed off about it. They’re no longer getting duped by the story that this stuff is anti-piracy technology that stops people from stealing from you. And they’re realizing that the thing that you have to worry about is not that your readers might.

Read or listen to your book the wrong way, but rather that the companies that distribute your books might rip you and your readers off that you are class allies in the fight against monopolies.

[00:41:55] CM: Back to your daily newsletter, in which you deal with issues like this every day. It reads typographically like an email newsletter circa the turn of the century. You run full web addresses …

CD: Mm-hmm.

CM: … URLs. You don’t hyperlink words or phrases. Why is that?

[00:42:15] CD: So I want it to be future-proof. So I want you to take something out of your inbox from 20 years ago that I wrote and copy and paste it into some other format that doesn’t exist yet. I. And for you to be able to know what all those links were.

So there’s no tracking redirect, you know, like the t.co redirect that Twitter uses or I think it’s HREF that Tumblr uses, and so on. They all have their own little redirects. I want the link to be live. I want you to be able to see the semantics of the link before you copy it or before you click on it.

I want you to be able to see whose link you’re going to without having to sort of glance around somewhere on the screen for a link preview. And I want you to be able to copy and paste it between programs—even programs that don’t carry over the style information or the link information—and have it all carry over.

And so that’s why putting it all in that plain text format is, is so important to me. I do every now and again, shorten a URL if it’s very, very long. So sometimes I’ll, I’ll link a gift link from the New York Times, from my subscription to the New York Times in the thing. And those NYT gift links are obnoxiously long, like hundreds of characters.

So I have my own URL shortener, and so I’ll sometimes do a little URL shortener in there, but for the most part, I don’t shorten URLs.

CM: Closing thoughts, Cory?

CD: We’re emerging from a 40-year neoliberal period incubated at the University of Chicago—thank you very much— …

CM: Yeah, sorry about that.

CD: … Where we only talked about economics and never about power. I got an email from someone yesterday saying that it’s not price gouging. If profits go up when gas price inputs go up at the pump, right? If the cost of oil goes up, then the cost of gas goes up because the investors, I.

Want the same margin. So if gas is a dollar a gallon coming into the gas station and they’re getting a 50% margin, then it’ll be a dollar 50. If it’s $2 a gallon, then they’ll get $3 and so on. And that’s not price gouging, that’s just maintaining a constant a constant margin. The thing is no one came down off a mount with two stone tablets and said, you are guaranteed that margin that it is power.

That determines whose end that margin comes out of. Does it come out of your end as the retailer? Does it come outta your distributor’s end because the retailer refuses to buy it at that price? Does it come out of the consumer’s end because the price goes up? If those questions aren’t contestable, you are not operating in a market.

You are getting a guaranteed margin. That’s a planned economy, and you know, I’m a red diaper baby. Planned economies don’t scare me. But if we’re gonna have an economy that’s planned, I’d rather have it planned by democratically accountable lawmakers who deliberate in public than by shareholder-accountable monopolists who deliberate in boardrooms.

[00:45:23] CM: My closing thought: I find Cory’s email newsletter must-reading daily and his books are always gripping. Sign up for his [email protected]. Our guest on this edition of Chicago Public Square Podcasts—recorded via Zoom March 7, 2024—has been Cory Doctorow, whom you can find at bookstores everywhere and also at craphound.com. And you can join me for a roundup of the news weekday mornings at ChicagoPublicSquare.com. I’m Charlie Meyerson. On behalf of my friends and co-conspirators at Rivet360 in Chicago, thanks for listening.

[Original transcript via of Descript.]

She’s worked for Chicago’s biggest newspapers and he’s worked for Chicago’s most successful radio stations. And now … they do email.Joining Charlie Meyerson for this edition of the Chicago Public Square / Rivet360 podcast, Chicago Media Talks: Axios Chicago newsletter authors Justin Kaufmann and Monica Eng.
Listen on Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers or Apple Podcasts.
Or if you prefer to read your podcasts, check out the transcript below.
And if you’re a completist, check out the behind-the-scenes raw audio and video from the recording of this podcast via Zoom on YouTube—including deleted segments like Eng and Kaufmann’s answers (at 34:50) to the question, “How did Charlie most annoy you?”

■ Enjoying these podcasts? Help keep them coming by joining The Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.■ And consider subscribing—free—to the daily Chicago Public Square email newsletter._____

Now, here’s a roughly edited transcript of the interview with Eng and Kaufmann.

Charlie Meyerson 0:00 She’s worked for Chicago’s biggest newspapers, and he’s worked for Chicago’s most successful radio stations. And now, they do email.
Monica Eng 0:08 At WBEZ they kept saying, “Would you like to write our newsletter?” And I’m like, “Are you kidding me? I’m a reporter! Stop with the insulting questions.” And now, like, I love it.
Meyerson 0:20 Monica Eng is a longtime Chicago reporter who’s covered food, culture, health and the environment for the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune and, yes, also at a radio station, WBEZ. Justin Kaufmann’s a former talk show host and producer in Chicago at WBEZ and WGN Radio. They’ve teamed up to create the Axios Chicago newsletter, rounding up the day’s biggest Chicago news plus coverage of their passions, including food and sports.
Justin Kaufmann 0:44 Chicago is a different place. It is going to be a different newsletter than Denver. It should be a different newsletter than San Francisco.
Meyerson 0:52 Coming to you despite a cough, congestion and a mild fever that a test assures me do not signify COVID-19, I am a well-medicated Charlie Meyerson with Rivet360 and Chicago Public Square, which, yes, is also an email newsletter. And this is Chicago Media Talks. Justin, what did you want to be when you grew up? And how did that lead you into Chicago radio?
Kaufmann 1:14 You know, it’s funny. My dad always reminds me that I was really into DePaul Blue Demon basketball when I was a kid and I would write up stories like sports stories of the games that they would show on Channel 9 at the time, like when DePaul would pay like Creighton, or Georgetown. And I would write—he showed me when I was older—like, these write-ups. So I think I wanted to be a sports writer in some form. But to be honest, I really wanted to be in radio. I love the idea I had my own— I did the announcements in high school and a lot of things to end up where I ended up to be a talk show host. So I think that that’s what I wanted to be.
Meyerson 1:53 High school announcements: You and I have that in common. Monica, what did you want to be when you grew up? And how has that shaped your career?
Eng 2:01 I had no idea. But by the time I was 15, and my mom was dating Roger Ebert, he said, “Hey, so do one of your kids need a job this summer?” I said, “Well, I’m not going to be doing anything but watching TV. So maybe I’ll go try this thing called being a copy clerk at the Chicago Sun-Times.” And from the first day I started working in the features department at the Chicago Sun-Times in 1985, I fell in love with it, and that’s all I ever wanted to do—be a newspaper woman or a newswoman. I did not envision I would be an emailer, thanks for calling me that.
Meyerson 2:35 It’s an honorable profession. It’s honorable.
Eng 2:37 There was no email at the time, which was why I had a job. You know, putting the mail in the slots at the Chicago Sun-Times.
Meyerson 2:45 How and when did you two first meet?
Kaufmann 2:48 Ooh.
Eng 2:49 Ooh.
Kaufmann 2:49 That’s a good question. Monica was world-renowned, you know, in Chicago media. And I think I booked her a couple times on talk shows on WBEZ. And then, you know, when Monica was looking to make a career change, she came over to WBEZ. So we worked together at WBEZ for a couple of years, working on talk shows and reporting.
Eng 3:12 Yeah, well, yeah, I remember I remember. I used to hear you on the radio. And I was always a huge fan of WBEZ, and then you know, you, you’d say, “Hey, can you come on and talk about your Tribune stories?” And I thought, “Oh, this is fun.” So when you said, “Hey, there might be a spot here,” like, “You know what? I’m gettin’ a little sick of the Tribune, maybe I’ll think about that.” But as you recall, hiring at public radio sometimes takes a little time. So I think we were doing that dance for a couple of years.
Kaufmann 3:39 Yeah, we had a lot of lunches at Fox & Obel, which is that high-end grocery store over on …
Eng 3:44 … between Tribune Tower and WBEZ.
Meyerson 3:47 How did you come to be a team on the Axios Chicago newsletter?
Eng 3:51 Justin had already been working with the Axios daily podcast. So he kind of knew about that world. And we both had worked with Niala Boodhoo at WBEZ. And she was already there. She was quite an evangelist for the place. And I thought, “Whatever, I’ve never really even heard of this thing.” And so when she told us both about it, I think we’re like, “Well, let’s take a look at this.” I don’t think either of us were like super-sure we wanted to do a newsletter because obviously we had different skills. We didn’t like who has newsletter skills? Do people like graduate college knowing how to do this?
Kaufmann 4:25 Yeah, I will say, Charlie, that the one thing that grabbed our attention, I think, was looking at what Axios was doing with newsletters—not just in the local markets, but what they were doing with Mike Allen and others who do the national newsletters—is they really did feel like a written talk show. And if you look at Mike’s Axios AM, that’s what it is. Mike is hosting a talk show—he’s doing articles instead of segments—but it really had this vibe, this energy to it. He’s connecting to his readers. He’s engaging, he’s going back and forth. It reminded me a lot of what I was doing at WGN Radio when I was doing a WBEZ with Reset. So it was an easy opportunity when they said they wanted to do it for Chicago, you know, it was a, it was a no-brainer to say, “OK, well, you know, could you do a talk show in an email format?” And that’s what we’ve been, that’s really our ethos, our mission statement, our philosophy, Monica and I, that this is a talk show in an email format, and it seems to be working.
Eng 5:19 In fact, when we are when we’re over length on these newsletters, Justin’s like, “Oh, we gotta cut it for time.” I’m like, “Justin, we’re not doing radio.”
Kaufmann 5:28 It’s hard to lose the little radio things like “cut for time.” “Listeners,” I always— Our readers are listeners, I always say that.
Meyerson 5:37 It’s easy to get those mixed up. You know, sharing some of that same professional DNA with you guys, I know that one of the hardest things I find in creating an email newsletter is deciding what not to put in. Because, as Monica has said, there’s no time restriction, there’s no length restriction, and deciding what doesn’t go in is harder than deciding what does go in. How do you wrestle with that?
Eng 6:00 Well, we do have a length: Nothing over 950 words. But that does make it harder. I mean, Chicago is full of, you know, a million stories in the naked city. And so how do you choose, you know, four or five a day? It’s a terrible Sophie’s choice to make.
Kaufmann 6:16 That has been an issue where I think a lot of the editors and everyone were like, “You know, you’re gonna have to do this every day, you’re gonna watch out— Finding content will be an issue.” For Monica and I—because we’ve covered the city for years, and you know, this, Charlie; I read your newsletters and same idea—you could do 50 stories, you could do 100 stories. I mean, there’s— time is nothing, so you’re just like, yeah, every night at 10 o’clock, after we put the thing to bed, I’m like, “Darn it, we didn’t talk about this, or we didn’t do this.” And that reminds me of when I worked at ’BEZ and ’GN as well, where you would be down on yourself because you missed the topic that you think Chicago wanted to talk about.
Meyerson 6:52 As we record this August 22, 2022, you’ve been with Axios just a bit more than a year. What’s been a high point of that year or so with Axios?
Kaufmann 7:00 I think, to me, the highlight has been just connecting with Chicago readers. I would have never thought this would be this successful. I mean, at the time we tape this, we’re over 80,000 people who are signed up for it. The open rate is way above the average. And people are engaging and sending us emails on a daily basis on every story we do. It’s way more than I ever had at WGN or WBEZ. I think that that has much to do with the format—I mean, people at their computers are like I can easily respond to this. But that has been the high point to me is watching that sort of evolved engagement from some of the other things that were— I mean, you know, Charlie, talk radio is all about engaged. So by getting people on the phone, like, that’s where it’s supposed— you think that’s ingrained in the secret sauce of an AM talk radio station like WGN, but this supersized it. We’re talking hundreds and hundreds of emails and people who want to engage.
Eng 7:56 They can be overwhelming at times—because, yeah, it’s like, “Oh, I want to respond to all 150 people who wrote to us today sharing you know, where they like to go, you know, for a picnic in Chicago, or, you know, what they remember about Tower Records.” So, yeah, similarly, I think, you know, the engagement. Yeah, of course, I got COVID during our first or before our first retreat, so I couldn’t go, and Justin just loves to rub it in about how fun it was.
Kaufmann 8:25 It was such a fun time without Monica. That really I think that’s the secret sauce is that Monica wasn’t there.
Eng 8:30 Leave that old wet blanket home.
Meyerson 8:32 All right, how about the low point of your first year with Axios? Monica?
Eng 8:36 Oh, jeepers, I wouldn’t say low point. But, I think, you know: Breaking news. During the strike, when omicron was raging and the CPS and CTU were fighting. We were doing really long days. And it was like, “Oh, shoot, something else just happened. Let’s, you know, break the thing open again.” It can kind of it’s actually very exciting to cover breaking news. But it was wearing and I think, you know, and well and then the Highland Park thing, day after day, turns into a manhunt it turns into to these things. And our bosses are actually great. They’re like, “Look, are you guys feeling worn down? What can we do to kind of rejuvenate you.”
Kaufmann 9:20 I think because we are news media creatures at best and at heart, it becomes really difficult to shut it off. And so, if there are breaking news stories on top of breaking news stories, we’re not the type to bury our head in the sand. We’re the type to say it doesn’t matter if it’s 8 o’clock, 10 o’clock at night, 11 o’clock, we get up and we start working again. And that is just part of the pitfalls of the job. I mean that you get burnout. You don’t get a chance to have any sort of renewal moment or time to rest. You just gotta keep going.
Meyerson 9:53 Just six years after its founding Axios is being bought by Cox Enterprises, the cable communications and historically a newspaper company, for a little more than half a billion dollars. What’s that mean for you and Axios Chicago? Are you both millionaires now?
Eng 10:09 Well, I guess quasi-millionaires maybe like, multi. It’s actually, you know, I’ve been and Justin’s been at companies that have been bought before, and it’s usually bad, bad news. It actually appears to be good news, in this case. And, and our bosses made sure that they got a really good deal for employees as well. As far as we can tell, they’re not going to touch the journalism, they just actually want more local journalism. Cox seems to really love the local end of it. And so I think it means we get more love and, and, and our bosses are talking about this as a multi-generational thing. They want Axios to be around generations after they’re gone. And I think, as far as I can tell, that’s, that’s really gonna help with this.
Kaufmann 10:59 Yeah, they’re saying all the right things.
Meyerson 11:00 When you say “good deal for employees,” what does that really mean?
Eng 11:03 We get to sell a third of our stock. So everyone is vested, even people who have been there a short time, and you can sell a third of your stock to Cox and then later, we can sell it for actually an even better deal—you know, depending on the valuation of the company at the time.
Kaufmann 11:17 You know, Axios is a young company. And it is interesting to see the difference in philosophy and styles when a young company is bought, as opposed to an older company. And I’ve been on both sides of the spectrum. I was there when WGN Radio was sold to Nexstar, before that tried to be sold to Sinclair. That is a different feeling. That’s a feeling of dread. And, you know, they’re coming in to change formats or cut or like even work in the newspapers. That’s not what this is, this is a win for Axios, they got a media company to buy the product for a pretty sizable amount of money. And they look at it as this is an indicator and also, I would think, an encouraging sign that people are interested in the future of local news.
Meyerson 12:03 Between the two of you, you have by my count, more than half a century of experience in newspapers and radio. What’s your take on this, this email news business? Is it a fad? Is it here for the long run? Is it the successor in any way to traditional radio and television? Or is it something that you expect is going to fade away as something else comes along?
Kaufmann 12:23 Well, I will say this: I think that obviously you’ve been a pioneer and doing email, and you’ve you found your voice, and that’s really what it’s about. It’s not that everybody can go to email and, and be like, “All right, I’m just going to transfer my product to this new format and it’s gonna work.” I mean, it’s the same tenets. You have to be engaging, you have to have personality, it’s about the tone. Everything is the same. It’s just you’re using words, and I think it’s very akin to maybe what we saw in the early 2000s, with the blog movement. I think that that was something that at first people were like, “What, you’re gonna put your—this is in the newspaper? It’s digital? What are we doing?” And you saw some that became very successful and very profitable, and some that were middle of the road and some that died off. And I think that newsletters, especially independent newsletters, are in the same ballpark. I think it’s the same game. It’s just evolved. And I think that advertisers are more interested in putting their money into email newsletters because it’s been tried and true by now.
Eng 13:26 Yeah, if you’d asked me a year ago, I would have said, “What the heck email newsletters?” I mean, actually, I’ll be honest: At WBEZ they kept saying, “Would you like to write our newsletter?” And I’m like, “Are you kidding me? I’m a reporter! Stop with the insulting questions.” And now, like, I love it. And it really is meeting people where they are. People our age still open email. My daughter, she’s like, “Can’t you just text it to me, mom?” So maybe these will be texted in the future. But it’s respecting their time. It’s curating for them. And it’s yeah, it’s going into the box that they open every morning.
Kaufmann 14:05 I think it’s all about advertising. And I think that the audience has been there. Charlie, you—we did it together at ’BEZ.
Meyerson 14:13 Let’s be transparent. You hired me to do WBEZ’s—
Kaufmann 14:17 Yeah!
Meyerson 14:17 Well, it wasn’t even— WBEZ in 2013 was not set up to send email to readers. So I did what should have been email but was just a blog at the time.
Kaufmann 14:27 Yeah, but it was a news blog. It was similar. It’s similar in the way to what you do right now with Square. I mean, it was a very similar idea. But that is where this— I mean, you could see the evolution from those kinds of posts that were important—that people would go to the URL to check it out every morning to see what Charlie had to say about Chicago news. Now, they’ve just like podcasts, they figured out a way to take these blog posts and give them right to you in an email format. And that is that I mean, if you really think about podcasts, that’s where the world changed when you were doing radio and it was appointment and I had to go to a dial. I had to actually punch the numbers in. Now they found technology that just puts it on my phone when I wake up. And that’s a big difference. That’s why you have … so much audience there because they’re not having to do anything. It’s almost like the media industry is finally figuring out, you have to go where the audience is at as opposed to trying to get them to come to you.
Meyerson 15:20 A colleague in the broadcast business once talked about his organization’s ability to train listeners to do certain things at certain times. That seems to be a notion that I think is going away. I don’t even know when my favorite TV shows are on, they just show up on my TV when I want to watch—
Kaufmann 15:34 When you’re ready to watch them! Exactly! Right? I mean, I watched two or three TV shows over the weekend that were season finales from two weeks ago. And I didn’t have any problem with it. I knew how to avoid the spoilers. We’re not living in this collective zeitgeist anymore, where everybody’s watching one episode of Lost. There’s a lot going on. And I feel like that is the same with we talked about podcasts, you talking about newsletters, talking about news. And I think that what I find interesting is just the idea that Monica and I are, we get this all the time from listeners—or readers. Sorry, there you go—that say, “I get all my stuff from you.” You know that—
Eng 16:11 Which is scary. Come on, guys, you shouldn’t be—
Kaufmann 16:13 Yeah, it is scary. You should read other stuff for sure. I mean, but I think it’d be the same with your readers, Charlie. I mean, they’re coming to you, they can go get the stories from different places. But they’re coming to you for that five, three to five minutes in the morning. For them to say, this is what I this is what’s going on. And this is what I need to know what’s going on.
Meyerson 16:28 You know, “We read the news so you don’t have to” is one approach to email newsletters, I think. How has the pandemic played out for you, as you create the Axios Chicago newsletter? Monica?
Eng 16:40 Well, we started it like 1/3 or halfway into the pandemic. And so, I’m thrilled to be at an organization that says “We will be remote all the time.” If you’re in New York, and you want to go to the New York office, or in Virginia and want to go there, that’s great. But they say “Home is where your office is,” and we get a nice fat stipend every month to make our home a nicer place. And you can spend it on flowers or a dog or whatever —
Meyerson 17:12 A dog? I’m impressed.
Eng 17:14 I mean, anything that will make your home a nicer place to do your job. But for younger people for whom work is like the place where you’re gonna meet your mate, and you can learn from older journalists, I could see how it’s a problem. The world, you know, we know it all.
Meyerson 17:29 You’re both youngsters compared to me! Justin, how did the pandemic play out for you?
Kaufmann 17:33 Well, I mean, I left—I got, you know, tossed outta WGN Radio right when the pandemic started.
Meyerson 17:39 Yeah, I was on your last show. It was an honor.
Kaufmann 17:40 Yeah, that was right. I mean, that was right when the lockdown was happening, which is the timing is crazy. But the so I was one of the people who lost their job right when the pandemic started. And I have yet to— Any project that I picked up freelance, I mean, I went on to host Reset, and I went into the Navy Pier studio to do that. But since then, I’ve done a number of projects—the Madigan podcast, and the Axios newsletter, and working for Axios Today, which is the national podcast—from this desk. And that has changed the world, the technology for us to be able to do this, the technology for us to be able to connect through Slack and other platforms that give us an immediate connection is great. Now, I will say that What I miss is the creativity through collaboration, which was brought up in D.C. I mean, when we went to the Axios retreat—they had an all-staff retreat in DC—that was a big thing that the CEOs and the founders talked about, is they said, we have to do more of these. Because you do find yourself coming out of those, talking to the crew from Dallas or the crew from Tampa or the crew from Salt Lake City, or Seattle, and becoming friends and saying, “We should do something, Detroit.” All that kind of like conversation is amazing. It really gets your creative juices flowing. And so that we miss for sure. And even Monica and I, who have a great shorthand, we don’t see each other in person enough. Now luckily, we’re on the same softball team and that softball team is winning. It’s a winning team. So it’s …
Eng 19:08 If it were losing, you know, it’d be a sort of an angry confrontation.
Meyerson 19:11 All right, well, that brings me to my next question, coincidentally, which is that your passions shine through in almost every issue—Monica, food, and Justin, sports. Justin, we’re in the thick of the season for your passion—and passion’s putting it mildly because I’ve played against you—Chicago’s Kup Media Softball League, named for Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet. How’s it going? Justin?
Kaufmann 19:34 It is good. You know, there’s some really good teams this year in that league and the league is great, because—come on. It’s a passion of mine because I love the sport. And I really start to learn the nuances and the history of 16-inch softball. The 16-Inch Softball Hall of Fame in Forest Park is a tremendous place to learn more about our forefathers, and how they played softball and how softball is Chicago’s sport. So it is really great to be out here and like a night like tonight we’re gonna play tonight as we’re taping this, we’re gonna play on a beautiful night at 75 degrees in a Chicago park on the West Side. It doesn’t get more Chicago than that. So like the connection to the city. And I think I think it’s a very inclusive sport. I think that you see really strong African American leagues on the South Side, you see really strong Latino leagues, you see suburban, a lot of car dealerships. You can’t have a Chicago softball league, leagues without car dealerships, but I mean, everybody knows the game. Everybody’s played it. Everybody’s got a crooked finger. So I feel like it’s the ultimate connector. That’s why I love the sport.
Meyerson 20:42 Yeah, the fingers. I can identify with the fingers. That’s why I’m not doing softball anymore. Monica, you’re just back from your visit to the Illinois State Fair. How was it?
Eng 20:49 It’s pretty disgusting. The highlight was the walking a horseshoe which is, as you know, is Texas toasts covered in ground beef or other meat and then fries and then a beer cheese sauce. This one those are you throw all that in a tortilla, roll it up, deep fry it and then put more cheese sauce on it. I feel like it’s gonna be a few years before I recover. But I have to say I loved those tiny little fried doughnuts, those like tiny cinnamon doughnuts that are warm. You pop them in your mouth, and those are no good for you. But, no, it was fun. But I think state fair food is really an exercise and excess and, and fun for the time you go out there. But I’m paying my penance. I just went to Wrigley Field over the weekend to try their plant-based meats. So I got a really healthful giant helmet of nachos, covered in cheese and sour cream, but then some plant-based chicken on top and a kind of shriveled-up hot dog that you will …
Kaufmann 21:53 No, that that definitely, definitely evens it out.
Eng 21:55 No, no, like virtuous. It’s like a kale salad. So yeah, but it’s fun. And I know that readers can vicariously enjoy these strange treats through me. So I’m happy to do it.
Kaufmann 22:07 I will say this, Charlie, like, I just think that even beyond food and sports, we both share a lot of passions, but we also have individual uniques. I mean, I’m big—you know this—I’m big into politics. Monica is big into public policy and health and environment. You mentioned sports as a passion. But I also feel like sports is a huge part of the stew that is Chicago news. And a lot of places I’ve worked—’BEZ is a great example of it—they ignore it. Or they think that that’s not important. And I think that that’s wrong. And most of the readers that that will write in are going to be sports fans in some form.
Eng 22:48 Every time I think, “Oh, God, Justin’s writing the sports story again,” we get tons of response. And so I’m so glad we balanced each other out on that because he knows the world. And I just trust him from now on.
Kaufmann 22:58 Yeah, and that was it. But that’s the news. I mean, if you grew up in Chicago, and you know Chicago, you know how important a Monday recap of the Bears game is.
Eng 23:07 I did grow up in Chicago, but I’m just like, I’m not interested. But you know that people will be.
Kaufmann 23:11 They will be. But I think the combination of Monica’s interests and mine together make something that is very specific and unique to Chicago, that brings people around and wants to engage because it’s everything from arts, music, to— and it’s different than a lot of the markets, Charlie. Like if you go to some of the other Axios locals, they’re just straight-up reporters.
Eng 23:35 Some of them are former real estate reporters. So they love doing real estate stories. One of them is like a beer fanatic, and he does tons of beer stories. And Axios says, “Let your freak flag fly, man. You’re into it, our readers will, like, understand your passion and get into it, too.”
Kaufmann 23:50 Yeah, but you also know that like Chicago is a different place. I mean, we can compare ourselves to New York or L.A. or compare ourselves to Wisconsin and Indiana. I mean, there’s, there’s something about Chicago, it’s cliche to say it’s, you know, big city, small town kind of thing. But it is going to be a different newsletter than Denver, it should be a different newsletter than San Francisco. And that’s what’s great about it is ours is very unique, very different than the others in the market. And, and theirs are great. I mean, I read them all. I love them. I love the local stuff.
Eng 24:22 Well, at some point we’re not gonna be able to it’s going to be 35 by the end of the year, and then maybe 100 by 2025.
Meyerson 24:28 We have a question from one of our viewers on YouTube, Mike Dessimoz: “From communications and other interactions you have with your readers, what seem to you to be their most serious areas of concern?”
Kaufmann 24:41 I think it’s violence. I think whenever we get into political stuff like Monica wrote a great piece about Bailey calling Chicago a hellhole again, and really the follow when she asked at the fair, “Hey, what do you say to Chicagoans who live in that hellhole?” he’s like, “I hear from them all the time.”
Eng 25:00 He says he believes most of us think we’re living in a hellhole.
Kaufmann 25:03 And so that’s the story. And so today, it’s been really thoughtful. A lot of people are mad at Darren Bailey, but then others who say, “I don’t agree with the word, and he’s not right. But there are some serious concerns in Chicago right now, when it comes to violence, and crime, things like that, that need to be taken, taken care of.” So he’s not wrong in saying that things are happening in Chicago, that shouldn’t be, but the way that he’s using—the words that he’s choosing are too political, divisive, or just straight-up wrong. So I think that that’s what we get, mostly when we do police stories, or we do violent stories, anything like that, you’ll get responses that are much more divisive than you would think. We’re not an echo chamber. But I think what you notice the most is people get upset about the mayor, and where we are when it comes to crime.
Meyerson 25:56 Monica?
Eng 25:57 Yes, well, the same. They say oh, to talk more about crime, and I say, “We cover crime, but I don’t think Chicago is defined by crime.” We want to also remember why we love this city. And that’s also what this newsletter is about. So we try to be balanced. One person said, “You guys are a sort of glass half-full?” I don’t know. But I know that I would want to open up something that is “glass half-full,” and not just be bludgeoned by how horrible this place is every morning. I’m not sure I wouldn’t open up that email every morning.
Kaufmann 26:27 Well, you know, Charlie, you do your newsletter. Every morning, you could spend the first 15 links on crime stories. The 10 o’clock news loves it. Oh, my God, from 10 to 10:15. is every carjacking that happened in the city. They love it, they put reporters on it—
Eng 26:40 —which is why our parents are all like, “This city. How do you live in it?” Like, “Stop watching the news, Mom.”
Kaufmann 26:46 There has to be a study at some point—I’m sure we used to have think tanks that would do this, and maybe they still do—about the role the 10 o’clock news has played in how people see their city. Because it used to be, what, 10 to 10:04—I’m an idiot savant when it comes to this stuff, because I watch it and I mark where the stories are at—but it used to be maybe you get the first two stories that were violence. I’m seeing now like almost through the first commercial break. And you can I feel like you could cherry pick a lot of that stuff, because it’ll be carjacking here, somebody got mugged over here, you know, things like that. And that is a big story in Chicago. But it’s not the only story. And when you’re talking about millions of people, I mean, what, 2.7 million in Chicago, and then you go outside of that to people like 9 million in the whole like area, of course, there’s going to be crime. So and I’m not saying that Chicago doesn’t have a crime problem; we talk about it all the time. But I think that it’s a strange world we live in where the people who are charged with documenting what’s happening in our city are spending a third of their time talking about crime.
Meyerson 27:51 Closing thoughts. Justin.
Kaufmann 27:55 You can’t have a conversation about the future of this kind of work without pointing out what you’ve done for Chicago. And obviously, Chicago Public Square has been there and done a lot so far and, and continues to lead. You know, there wouldn’t be an Axios newsletter, or a Politico newsletter or any of the newsletters that came in if there weren’t independents that tried and showed that it was successful before.
Meyerson 28:18 Closing thoughts. Monica?
Eng 28:20 Well, I’m just glad that you saw fit to have us on. We type all day and we don’t get to use our talking muscles that much. Thank you so much for doing it. And thanks for amplifying our stories sometimes. That really helps. And I think it shows that a lot of people say “Oh, Axios is trying to kill local journalism, it’s going into these markets,” and a certain leader of a certain large news organization in Chicago said, “You’ll never be us.” And it’s like, “Dude,” or maybe it was a woman, “Yeah, we’re not trying to be. We’re trying to be additive to the local news environment. I think we can all support each other. Because more information for Chicago is only good for Chicago.”
Meyerson 29:04 Yeah. I don’t know if you get anyone asking you about other email newsletters as if they’re competition—sounds like you do—but every once in a while, someone will ask me and I want to say publicly: The more email newsletters for and about Chicago, the better. Especially if—as Axios Chicago does—it comes out before mine, so that I can link to your work.
Eng 29:22 There you go.
Meyerson 29:23 Makes my newsletter all the better.
Kaufmann 29:24 Yeah. And we’re the same. I mean, we when we talk to any— I mean the people writing Chicago newsletters are great. I think Shia [Kapos] is awesome working at Politico, Hunter [Clauss] at WBEZ, the folks at the Sun-Times and the Tribune do great work. So, you know, I don’t know if they just because we’re—it’s so funny, because, for years, we’ve all worked at different media outlets and then we’ve changed …
Eng 29:47 And we’re all friends …
Kaufmann 29:49 … we’re all friends and personal, yeah.
Eng 29:51 When I was at the State Fair covering Pritzker, some of us couldn’t get close to him. And so Amanda Vinicky was taking my phone and making it closer and then I took the NPR person’s mic and moved it closer. We’re all just helping each other and I think that that’s the spirit we should see it in.
Meyerson 30:08Amen.
Kaufmann 30:09Except on the softball diamond.
Meyerson 30:11Our guests on this edition of Chicago Media Talks—recorded August 22, 2022—have been Monica Eng and Justin Kaufmann, co-authors of the essential (and free!) Axios Chicago email newsletter. You can reach them at [email protected] and [email protected]. And join me for a roundup of the news weekday mornings at ChicagoPublicSquare.com. I’m Charlie Meyerson. For producers Jesse Betend and Cindy Paulauskas and everyone at Rivet360, thanks for listening to Chicago Media Talks.
[Transcribed by Otter—and then edited. A lot. Thanks for the inspiration, Eric Zorn.]

The most enduring memory of a restaurant reviewer through the pandemic: “Crying so much … over so many meals with gratitude and relief.”

Joining this edition of the Chicago Public Square / Rivet360 podcast, Chicago Media Talks: Chef, journalist, adventurer and Chicago Tribune critic Louisa Chu—who takes us from her time as a 4-year-old worker at her family’s Chicago restaurant through her stint as a judge on Food Network’s Iron Chef America to what she’s working on next.
Listen on Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers or Apple Podcasts.

■ Enjoying these podcasts? Help keep them coming by joining The Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.■ And consider subscribing—free—to the daily Chicago Public Square email newsletter.

Joining this edition of the Chicago Public Square / Rivet360 podcast, Chicago Media Talks: A couple of media figures whose work is increasingly shaping Chicago’s news and political landscape.
Meet A.D. Quig, a rising Chicago Tribune reporter who sees local government facing “a time of big change”; and Girl, I Guess Progressive Voter Guide author Stephanie Skora—someone unafraid to call a candidate, in her words, “a slimy fuckface—because there’s no reason not to.”
Listen in your favorite podcast player, via Spotify, YouTube and Pandora, on Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers or on Apple Podcasts.

■ Enjoying these podcasts? Help keep them coming by joining The Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.■ And consider subscribing—free—to the daily Chicago Public Square email newsletter.
(Photos, counter-clockwise from right: Quig, Skora, hosts Charlie Meyerson and Sheila Solomon.)

Their groundbreaking alliance netted them and their news organizations a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. But that doesn’t mean they always worked together seamlessly.

In this edition of the Chicago Public Square / Rivet360 podcast, Chicago Media Talks, meet Madison Hopkins and Cecilia Reyes, praised by Pulitzer judges

for “a piercing examination of the city’s long history of failed building- and fire-safety code enforcement, which let scofflaw landlords

commit serious violations that resulted in dozens of unnecessary

deaths.” (Recorded June 13, 2022.)
Listen in your favorite podcast player, via Spotify, YouTube and Pandora, on Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers or on Apple Podcasts.

■ Enjoying these podcasts? Keep them coming by joining The Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.■ And consider subscribing—free—to the daily Chicago Public Square email newsletter.
(Photos, counter-clockwise from right: Reyes, Hopkins, hosts Charlie Meyerson and Sheila Solomon.)

She’s the first woman—and the first woman of color—ever to serve as Chicago Sun-Times executive editor. She’s facing challenges like none before her, as the paper comes under the control of an organization primarily in the radio business.
In another edition of the Chicago Public Square / Rivet360 podcast, Chicago Media Talks, meet Jennifer Kho, who joins the Sun-Times at a critical point in the evolution of the news business. (Recorded July 11, 2022.)
Listen in your favorite podcast player, via Spotify, YouTube and Pandora, on Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers or on Apple Podcasts.

■ Enjoying these podcasts? Keep them coming by joining The Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.■ And consider subscribing—free—to the daily Chicago Public Square email newsletter.
(Photos, counterclockwise from right: Kho, with hosts Sheila Solomon and Charlie Meyerson.)

Odds are good you didn’t know their names a decade ago, when one of them was just breaking into Chicago radio news and another was barely removed from an internship at Chicago’s public TV station. And now they’re two of the city’s most influential journalists.
In another edition of the Chicago Public Square / Rivet360 podcast, Chicago Media Talks, WTTW News’ multiple award-winning reporters and Chicago Tonight co-anchors, Brandis Friedman and Paris Schutz, talk about their careers, the challenges facing local news and recent turbulent times at Channel 11.

Listen in your favorite podcast player, via Spotify, YouTube and Pandora, on Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers or on Apple Podcasts (say “Hey, Siri! Play Chicago Public Square Podcasts”).

■ Enjoying these podcasts? Keep them coming by joining The Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.■ And consider subscribing—free—to the daily Chicago Public Square email newsletter.And now, courtesy of Eric Zorn and Otter.ai, here’s an extremely rough transcript of the show:

Charlie Meyerson 00:00

Odds are good you didn’t know their names a decade ago when one of them was just breaking into Chicago radio news and another was barely removed from an internship at Chicago’s public TV station. And now they’re two of the city’s most influential journalists.

Brandis Friedman 00:14

The truth is I never would have chosen Chicago for myself until I did.

Paris Schutz 00:18

I thought, “At some point, my internship is going to end, and they’re going to hire me and pay me.”

Charlie Meyerson 00:23

Brandis Friedman and Paris Shutz are multiple award-winning reporters and co-anchors for WTTW television’s signature broadcast Chicago Tonight. I’m Charlie Meyerson with Rivet 360 and ChicagoPublicSquare.com. And this is Chicago Media Talks, a show in which people in Chicago media talk about Chicago media. Here’s my co-host, my friend and my Rivet 360 colleague, journalism strategist Sheila Solomon.

Sheila Solomon 00:51

How is Chicago Tonight different from other local news shows in Chicago?

Brandis Friedman 00:57

We e get this question a lot, and Paris can address this as well, I think we try to spend more time on our subject matter. And, no disrespect to our colleagues at the commercial TV stations, you know, there’s a place for each of us in this market. But what’s different is, we spend more time on our subjects. So a report or package, maybe 3, 4, 5 minutes versus the minute, minute-and-a-half that you’d probably get at other stations. So that we can let it breathe, and provide a bit more context, sometimes analysis. You’ll notice that we do a lot of talk segments, so that we can balance out a segment or just explore whatever the topic might be from different viewpoints. And allow folks to really share more of whatever it is we might be talking about that night. And, in addition to the politics, and the education and the business, and all that stuff that we cover, we also give a good bit of time to the arts. We have an arts producer here as well as an arts reporter. And so we get to showcase not just the big arts organizations in town that we all know about, like Joffrey or Lyric or Chicago Symphony, but these two producers are really good at finding the arts stories that you have not heard about and bringing those to our audiences as well.

Paris Schutz 02:09

Our goal is to have our audience understand what’s happening in Chicago and Illinois and the world at large. And following the mission of WTTW, to leave you enriched, to leave you feeling like you’re more connected to your community. So we’re not out there to chase ambulances or cover every single crime or police chase that happens. But if we do cover crime, we want to talk about it in a way that will help people understand this as an issue, help people maybe empathize with what’s happening. And then talk about what stakeholders are talking about as solutions.

Charlie Meyerson 02:53

WTTW has gone through some big changes in the months leading up to your ascendance as co-anchors of Chicago Tonight. You lost a news director—forced out after just about a year on the job— and Phil Ponce and Carol Marin stepped down from their roles as two of the key faces of the station’s news coverage. How’s that affected the show? And WTTW News overall?

Paris Schutz 03:11

Well, we’re just the last ones standing, Charlie. No, I mean, it’s certainly affected, I would say workplace morale a little bit. But at the end of the day, we do the same show that we always have. And we have the same goals that we always have. And we’re out there distracted by the reporting, and by the journalism, and by all the news that we have to report on and put into context. So the mission never changed through all of that. And you mentioned Phil and Carol being gone. They’re part of the DNA of Chicago Tonight, just like John Callaway, who started the show. So they’re very influential on what we do now. And I always just try to think about what Phil would do in a certain situation, or what Carol would do, or even what John Callaway would do. So, it’s kind of like a family, you know, all these things are sort of passed down through the generations and the show really hasn’t changed much. I mean, it might look a little different, that tone might be a little different. But those North stars are still exactly the same as what John Callaway wanted, and what Phil did, and what Carol did, and even to an extent, Bob Sirrott. And some of the other folks that have been associated with the show, are Eddie Arruzza, Elizabeth Brackett. And, as Brandis said, the quality in-depth journalism, the context that we’re providing, and the goal to really inform the community and make them feel connected to the city.

Brandis Friedman 04:40

There have been some changes. But to the credit of our colleagues, everyone has really kept their heads down and focused on the work. And I don’t think any of us allowed ourselves to really be distracted by any of that other stuff that was going on. Obviously, everybody noticed it. We all recognize it, but that wasn’t really the focus. We kept our focus on the work. And with regard to Phil and Carol moving on to their next chapters, everything that Paris said is true. But Phil slowly started to step back little by little a couple of years ago, and Paris and I were given the opportunity to start stepping in and filling in at that point, I think probably with the intention that at some point if Phil was ready to move on from hosting every night with regularity that Paris and I would be prepared to try and fill his shoes. I don’t think that we can necessarily it takes two of us to do it. But I think we’ve been given ample time to prepare for this moment,

Paris Schutz 05:37

It feels like we’ve been in these roles for a long time. And it doesn’t, it doesn’t feel like it happened overnight or anything. It feels like we’ve been doing this for a while and getting our sea legs under us to take the baton, if you will.

Sheila Solomon 05:53

So how do you see Chicago Tonight changing on your watch?

Brandis Friedman 05:56

I feel like the show is not necessarily mine to change. Only that, you know, we are very collaborative here. I think all of us take a lot of ownership on this show. And so at the moment, I don’t predict any major changes. Obviously, I think all of us think there are ways we can work to be better or different or to improve or provide our audiences with something more, something different. Over the last year. It is obvious with the expansion to the other shows, “Chicago Tonight Latino Voices” on Saturday and “Chicago Tonight Black Voices” on Sundays, it is clear that we have included and diversified our coverage a little bit more— right? — covering those communities that as evidenced by what we saw last summer did not feel they had been covered and heard enough. And so I think we’ll definitely keep that going. Obviously.

Paris Schutz 06:45

I agree with Brandis there. And I’ll just add that, as a staff, I think we’ve started to talk a little bit about the big picture, long term. How can we meet our mission best in this day and age as things change as platforms change? I think it’s really good to every now and then to inventory here at Chicago Tonight and ask what is it we’re doing well, what it is we can improve on? Do we need to change some things? So I can tell you that we are having some of those discussions. There might be things that we want to change, we just don’t know what those are yet. The North stars don’t change, we want to remain balanced. We want to remain a place where everybody can trust the information. And in this day and age trust is so important when you have such a bifurcated media, landscape and social media where everybody’s just kind of turning to, whatever satisfies their preconceived bias. I’ll say personally, I feel an added responsibility that we need to be the vanguard of that traditional sense of y journalism and trustworthy journalism and balanced journalism that everybody no matter what your opinions are, or what your ideologies are can trust to get reliable information.

Charlie Meyerson 08:12

Paris, you started at WTTW as an intern in 2005. Back then, what was your dream job?

Paris Schutz 08:50

Well, I at some point, my internship is going to end and they’re going to hire me and pay me. No, I’m kidding, Charlie. At that point, I did not know what my dream job was. I actually intended to do documentaries, be a filmmaker. I’m also a musician and thought maybe I’d do that as a career. I really was kind of all over the place. But the internship with Chicago Tonight—and by the way, I applied to intern with Chicago Stories, which was a documentary unit that we had at the time. But they didn’t need an intern, so they sent me to Chicago Tonight which did need an intern, I was like, “OK, I guess I’ll do that.” And that’s where I caught the bug of local news on live television. And just as an intern being part of these stories that I remember as a kid that shaped the city of Chicago and the region and meeting some of these players, the political players, and the local newsmakers that again that I had read about and watched it that was pretty exciting. And, again, I did sign on as a production assistant. I still didn’t know what my long-term goal was. I started to inch my way on the air only because I’d had a forming background, you know, as a kid and as a teenager, you know, naively thinking I could do it. And I was terrible for a long time. And the more I did it, the more I realized this was exactly what I wanted to be doing the kind of journalism that we were doing, it’s pretty much the only kind of journalism I feel like I can do. Reporting was a thrill chasing down the story. And the performance aspect of it is really exciting, it’s performing nonfiction, basically. So when I was an actor and a performer as a kid, something wasn’t quite right. And that was that it was that, I didn’t want to be doing fiction. I wanted to be doing nonfiction. Because I just felt more connected to that. So this has been a dream job. But when I started off, I had no idea. I was just trying to figure out a way to get paid.

Sheila Solomon 10:50

Brandis, unlike Paris, you didn’t grow up in the Chicago area. So what brought you here about a decade ago? And what was your career goal at that time?

Brandis Friedman 11:01

It’s funny, you should mention that. But just because, you know, in college, I came to visit Chicago once and I don’t know why I hadn’t come before college, you know, I’ve got family here. I just hadn’t done it. So on a visit, it did not have a very good trip. I just didn’t I didn’t see the parts of Chicago that I know I love today. I got sick on that trip. It got 70-something degrees in July, and I’m from Mississippi, and I thought that was ridiculous and abnormal. And so the truth is, I never would have chosen Chicago for myself until I did. My husband is from the area. He grew up in Morton Grove. He’s a former TV news reporter. And both of us had done the market hop. I started in Wichita Falls, Texas, and then in Little Rock. And then I got out of the business briefly when I was in Kansas City and worked on Capitol Hill a little bit in Washington, DC. And then that’s where I got back into TV, after being out for about a year-and-a-half and started producing at the ABC affiliate there, because it was where I wanted to be— being out of it was not right for me. And so I came to Chicago because we knew we wanted to be closer to family and his family was here and I wasn’t moving back to Mississippi. That’s when I got hired at WBBM News Radio as a freelance reporter and anchor because I thought it was a really great opportunity to get into the market and learn my way around. And then I got lucky when the correspondent position opened at Chicago Tonight and just kind of applied. I was like, who knows, we’ll see what happens. The executive producer at the time, Mary Field, called for an interview while I was walking my dog. And that very day, I was very disappointed because I learned I hadn’t gotten some other job that I thought I wanted, and looking back would have been all wrong for. So it worked out the way it was supposed to. I feel like I’m lucky to have this job because I really love and respect and appreciate the kinds of news that we tell and the way we tell those stories. And no disrespect to our colleagues at commercial stations. It’s just that some of that is not for me. I’ve done it before and I don’t want to do that now. I wouldn’t be where I am. So I recognize my job is a bit of a unicorn. But I’m thankful to have it.

Charlie Meyerson 13:04

Brandis broke journalism’s fourth wall this month, interviewing someone with whom she and Sheila—as I’ve just learned—have a personal connection: A friend whose son was shot and killed last month, the day before his 19th birthday. So Brandis, how did the decision come down for you to conduct that interview instead of you know, as might be the case in many a more traditional newsroom, assigning it to someone else?

Brandis Friedman 13:31

Right. It’s funny, you should mention that. Sheila does know the same friend. I remember, I saw Sheila at the funeral. And I wasn’t able to make it over to say hi to you in time, because it was very it was a full room. So when this happened, part of me looked at it as a journalist, right. And I saw, there are going to be other stations that are going to cover this, and newspapers. And we all know this has been picked up by most of the outlets here in town. And actually, my husband put the bug in my ear. He’s like, What if you were to interview her? And I’m like, I don’t know. At the time. It was too early. I didn’t mention it to Sonia, I didn’t mention it to anyone at work. But then I did. And Sonia, I think as a professional and as a grieving mother and an angry citizen, was kind of looking for a way to express all of her thoughts and feelings because of all those hats that she wears. And I was advising her as a friend. And then I thought, the one station I didn’t mention is my own. And what do you think? And then I talked to my boss to see what he thought. And I wanted to be sure that if was going to do it that I’ve got a trusted producer looking over my shoulder to make sure that I was still practicing the journalism that I’m supposed to be practicing. In this instance, we decided to have me do it instead of someone else just because, sadly, we don’t interview a lot of grieving mothers at Chicago Tonight. As Paris said, we cover the issue of violence but not each and every instance of violence, which happens far more than it should. And if I were to interview this particular grieving mother— it was her stepson, Miles Thompson, who was killed — we’d have a different conversation because she and I know each other, we have a lot in common. We’re both former Mississippians, Ivy League grads now living in Chicago, we both have sons. And so that conversation is much more intimate than one that I would have gotten had I interviewed a grieving mother with whom I’m not friends, or had we allowed someone else in the station to do it. And I think that was our intention, our intent was to make it different, to make it a little bit more intimate than it might have been otherwise.

Charlie Meyerson 15:37

That segment was produced for WTTW’s relatively new show Chicago Tonight Black Voices. What is different, if anything about your approach to that work in that show, compared to your role at Chicago Tonight?

Brandis Friedman 15:49

The standards are the same. We still want to make sure that we’re providing viewers with news that has impact. And of course, we have to be fair and balanced and accurate. And all of that is the same. But we get to experiment with that show just a little bit more. It’s a younger show, it hasn’t been on the air a year just yet. And so we play around a little bit more with like this kind of segment or that kind of segment. There are days we’ll run a segment on black voices that can re-air on Chicago Tonight the following week for a slightly different audience. And vice versa. But not every segment that runs on Chicago Tonight Black Voices would also run on Chicago Tonight. And so I guess it’s kind of hard to describe what the differences are, I can’t quite put my finger on it. But we certainly examine what it is like to be a Black Chicago when on that particular show, the issues that affect black Chicagoans. But that does not mean that all the guests are only Black people, right? Because we also want anyone who is watching the show, not just a Black audience, but anyone who’s watching the show, comes away with an idea of what it is like to live a Black Chicagoan experience.

Sheila Solomon 17:02

Chicago Tonight Latino Voices is another relatively new show on WTTW. And it’s focusing on a different ethnic group. So what are the pros and cons of having new shows devoted to specific demographics? I

Paris Schutz 17:20

The pros are obviously, as Brandis said, giving, these communities a chance to share their stories and to elevate their stories and their experience to a broader audience, which by the way, these shows are meant for everybody. It’s, not it’s not simply Latino Voices for Latino audiences or Black Voices for a Black audience. From my own experience last year reporting in the pandemic, going from neighborhood to neighborhood, —we were in a different neighborhood each night for about five months— but a lot of those were the Black and Hispanic neighborhoods of Chicago. And one of the things that was evidently clear in doing that was, I didn’t understand my own city as well as I should have. And I think most Chicagoans don’t. And there were just a lot of things I learned about neighborhoods on the South Side or the West Side that you would never hear in local news coverage. Because a newsworthy event in a lot of those communities tends to be a negative event— a crime, or a shooting. And w that skews the audience’s perception of what really characterizes life in those neighborhoods. So obviously, this weekend, you had the tragic shooting and killing of police officer Ella French in Englewood. And it is tragic. And it’s a huge newsworthy event. But what happens is, when we only cover the negative stuff viewers can think that that’s the only thing that defines life in Englewood — crime and murder, or in Austin, or in Pilsen, or in Belmont Cragin. And doing the kind of reporting that’s done on Black Voices and Latino Voices, or that we did last year with his neighborhood stuff is you get a different picture. Like it’s complicated, there are really bad things. The crime is really a part of daily life here. But there are also really amazing things. There’s so many people that work in organizations that try to help people, whether it be mental health, or whether it be crime prevention, There are people, you know, Black and Latino, middle-class Chicagoans that live in these neighborhoods that that swear by them, that won’t leave even though the problems are bad. So the true story is a much more mixed picture. There are some wonderful parts of Englewood, there’s some wonderful parts of Auburn Gresham. And maybe this is a way to help change this skewed perception in the audience, that that the only thing that characterizes life in parts of Chicago is crime. It’s not true. It’s a big part of life. But there are also other really wonderful things that characterize life in these neighborhoods. And I’ll just say, cons, because you asked: We’ve gotten some letters saying, well, it’s you know, it’s too narrowly focused. And, what about other groups? You know, what about Asian Americans? What about LGBTQ? I mean, I think all those things are fair. But Chicago Tonight tries to incorporate, all these points of view and all these communities. So that we all understand each other better. I have gotten some tweets—not a lot, I haven’t gotten a lot of emails necessarily— but some folks who have something to say about it being you know, Black Voices. I’ve got a tweet that says “racist propaganda hour.” The show’s a half-hour; it means that person doesn’t even watch. And I really ignore those tweets The only value to those tweets is a reminder that there are folks out there who think that way. And I’m not signing up to change their minds. If they do, great, but I’m signing up to do the job that I’m doing. And I don’t really pay a whole lot of attention to those tweets, unless someone has something that they actually want to discuss. But that’s not what’s happening in those tweets.

Sheila Solomon 21:13

Paris, how is WTTW expanding its team of reporters and producers and videographers?

Paris Schutz 21:19

I think most of the expansion lies on the online side of things. We’ve really beefed up that operation in recent years to where we have dedicated beat reporters that are exclusively online. We look at people like Heather Cherone, who covers City Hall, and she’s pumping out three stories a day. She’s going toe to toe with some of the newspaper reporters there. And we’ll have her on the Chicago Tonight program every now and then debriefing her reports, and we have folks like Patty Wetli, who does the environmental beat; we have Matt Masterson, who’s doing criminal courts and education.

Brandis Friedman 21:59

Kristin Tomasz

Paris Schutz 22:01

Yeah, so we’ve really tried to make this a 24/7 news operation, especially online, where we have people covering beats, and it’s not just at seven o’clock at night, which is when Chicago Tonight comes on where you’re gonna get Chicago Tonight journalism, you can get it 24/7 when you refresh, the website, and it’s designed for you to check it at all hours of the day. So that we have our reporters keeping up to speed on what’s happening in the city. We recognize that at some point — we’ve been talking about this for years — the singularity is going to happen, where the platform really doesn’t matter, whether it’s TV or streaming or online or social media, it’s just the content that matters. And we will have to master all of those platforms.

Brandis Friedman 22:50

I would add to that, you know, we’ve recently added an on-air reporter in Joanna Hernandez, who is coming home to Chicago. She’s been in New York for about five years. And now she’s here. And we’re hiring a “Chicago Tonight Black Voices” producer, one who is dedicated to black voices.

Sheila Solomon 23:07

Closing thoughts, Charlie?

Charlie Meyerson 23:10

As you know, I spend a good chunk of my day cruising Chicago’s many, many news websites. We’re lucky to have so many in this town. And I haven’t been shy about saying that most of the city’s commercial TV and radio websites suck. Can I say that on this podcast? I think so. They’re ugly. They’re riddled with typos, editing failures, factual errors. Channel 11’s.Is a cut above. And I wish other broadcasters would take note. Your closing thoughts Sheila?

Sheila Solomon 23:42

The other day, a friend texted that I should look for her in an interview on Sunday’s Black Voices and Monday’s Chicago Tonight. And her text reminded me how important it is to have a broadcast outlet that centers its storytelling on the diverse voices that make up Chicago. Closing thoughts Paris?

Paris Schutz 24:05

We’re in a moment with news media where there’s a significant reduction in traditional news; you see what’s happened with the Chicago Tribune. And the whole industry is trying to figure out what the winning model is going to be. And like I said earlier, the fact that so many people get their news and information from social media, I think is troubling. Because as we know, they’re not reliable. And those algorithms just prioritize stuff that’s going to, send people down a rabbit hole and confirm their biases. And so Chicago Tonight, we’re gonna stick to the script that we’ve been doing for 30 years, in that we’re going to offer you in-depth, thoughtful coverage. It’s going to be hard-hitting some of it will be softer or feature-oriented. But it’s our best effort to get at the objective truth. Knowing that we can never 100% get there but we’re gonna do our best. And, again, it’s a place that everybody — no matter what their background — can trust. That’s what we hope. We hope that they continue to trust us because we really need good traditional journalism and news sources. And we really need people to turn to those kinds of traditional media to get their information. You see what’s happening with vaccine misinformation. Misinformation and disinformation are just way too, prevalent and way too dangerous. And so we’re going to continue to try and fight the good fight in terms of being that traditional objective source for everybody. We’ll do our best, and we hope that more people understand the value of that.

Charlie Meyerson 25:47

Brandis your closing thoughts?

Brandis Friedman 25:50

As journalists we are lucky to be in the position that we’re in, What’s important to me is to be able to uplift the voices that you get to hear on Black Voices and the folks that we hear from, and I see that as an opportunity not just to provide for the viewers who are watching, but also for the people who are on the show,.We’re hoping to provide them an opportunity to share their perspective and their point of view with other people. So I’m thankful to be in this position where I can make those connections happen.

Sheila Solomon 26:26

Paris, you’re also an accomplished musician. Where can people see you perform these days?

Paris Schutz 26:32

I don’t know about “accomplished.” I don’t perform out much these days, I hope to change that. I’ve played at some piano bars in the past. I’ll play with some bands every now and then just for fun. I certainly have a lot of empathy for the working musicians who do rely on this for a living and hopefully, they get out and get all the gigs that they can. And when I am out there, I will be sure to try and let everybody know, through the proper channels.

Charlie Meyerson 27:03

I’m pretty sure a lot of viewers of Channel 11 don’t realize that Paris co-composed the Chicago Tonight theme music. How did that happen?

Paris Schutz 27:14

Well, our former executive producer Mary Field said we need a new theme song, but we don’t have any money to pay for it. So we’re going to just use some stock songs in the music library. You know all these TV stations and production companies pay for these stock music libraries where people create these stock melodies. I said, “Oh my God, we can’t do that we need to have something original that says ‘Chicago Tonight.’” So I went down to the piano that we used to have in our old studio and just started looking around at the set and try to have something sink into my brain through osmosis. And I came up with just a really simple little melody, that you could basically sing “Chicago Tonight, Chicago Tonight, Chicago Tonight,” just that easy, and fleshed it out a bit. Sought the services of the brilliant trumpet player at the CSO, John Hagstrom, and he really helped flesh it out. He plays all the brass instruments you hear on that theme. Took us to a recording studio and we put it down on tape and it’s been going, I don’t know, it’s gonna be going on 10 years now that that’s been the theme song. And none of us have seen a penny in royalties from it but that doesn’t matter because we did it out of love. But maybe for the next one. Oh, I won’t give away my services for free.

Charlie Meyerson 28:42

And as Paris Schutz’s Chicago Tonight theme music escorts us out of this edition of Chicago Media Talks, recorded Aug. 9, 2021. We remind you our guests have been Paris Schutz and Brandis Friedman. You can reach Brandis at [email protected], and Paris at [email protected]. You can find Sheila Solomon at [email protected]. I’m Charlie Meyerson. Join me for a roundup of the news at 10 weekday mornings at ChicagoPublicSquare.com. For Sheila Solomon, producer Jesse Betend and everyone at Rivet 360, thanks for listening.

When a billionaire yanked the plug on a pioneering Chicago digital news site, putting a large team of local reporters out of work, some of them banded together to start another digital news site—for themselves, and for the people of the city.
Block Club Chicago editor-in-chief Shamus Toomey joins hosts Sheila Solomon and Charlie Meyerson for another edition of the Chicago Public Square / Rivet360 podcast, Chicago Media Talks.

Listen in your favorite podcast player, via Spotify, YouTube and Pandora, on Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers or on iTunes (say “Hey, Siri! Play Chicago Public Square Podcasts”).

■ Enjoying these podcasts? Keep them coming by joining The Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.■ And consider subscribing—free—to the daily Chicago Public Square email newsletter.

You could trace the evolution of the news business through Jim DeRogatis’ career arc over the last 35 years—as he’s moved from print to broadcast to online and podcasting, and from employer-supported to audience-funded journalism. And along the way, he broke one of the biggest stories in music history.
He joins hosts Sheila Solomon and Charlie Meyerson for the Chicago Public Square / Rivet360 podcast, Chicago Media Talks—to discuss his life, how he broke the R. Kelly scandal, and the state of the media in the 21st century.
Also, he recounts the times he was dissed by a couple of famous Billys.

Listen here, or in your favorite podcast player, via Spotify, YouTube and Pandora, on Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers or on iTunes (say “Hey, Siri! Play Chicago Public Square Podcasts”).

■ Enjoying these podcasts? Keep them coming by joining The Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.■ And consider subscribing—free—to the daily Chicago Public Square email newsletter.

Columnist Eric Zorn started at the Tribune in 1980; cultural critic Steve Johnson started six years later. Now, they’re among the more than three dozen editorial staffers who’ve left—taking buyouts offered under the Trib’s new ownership.
They join hosts Sheila Solomon and Charlie Meyerson for another edition of the Chicago Public Square / Rivet360 podcast, Chicago Media Talks.

Listen here, or in your favorite podcast player, via Spotify, YouTube and Pandora, on Amazon’s Alexa-powered speakers or on iTunes (say “Hey, Siri! Play Chicago Public Square Podcasts”).

■ Enjoying these podcasts? Keep them coming by joining The Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.■ And consider subscribing—free—to the daily Chicago Public Square email newsletter.