The Chicago Sun-Times filed bankruptcy today — it’s the second Chicago publishing company to seek bankruptcy protection in the last several months. The Chicago Tribune Company, which publishes The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, filed for court protection in December.
Meanwhile, we got word yesterday that our friend –and friend of book publishing — Heidi Benson has taken a buyout at the San Francisco Chronicle, which means she now will freelance for the Chron, without the benefits of regular and secure employment. Both Heidi and her partner work for the Chron so their household is, no doubt, in crisis mode. Each of them has an idea for a book project. We wish them well.
These are terrible times for our papers, in that their individual and individualistic personalities will be at least changed by their going to a ghosly and on-line only edition, which is the way it seems all this is trending. And the Alison Bechdel review, which was printed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, has been picked up and is carried along by bloggers, who do evidently reach bookbuyers, if the Amazon numbers serve to illustrate anything. The response to that review — which was almost entirely positive and which was done by a woman with natural sympathies to my tale — is by far and away the most dramatic. Sales figures are delayed by a week, but we’ll see numbers in the next ten days or so, which will begin to tell us something about how all this is actually going.