Chicago Sun-Times - The 1990s

The 1990s

In mid-1991, veteran crime reporter Art Petacque, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974, left the paper. Almost 10 years later, Dennis Britton, who had been the paper's editor at the time of Petacque's retirement, told the Chicago Reader that Petacque's departure, which was described at the time as a retirement, was involuntary. "I had problems with some of the ways Art pursued his job," Britton told the Reader.

In September 1992, Bill Zwecker joined the Sun-Times as a gossip columnist from the troubled Lerner Newspapers suburban weekly newspaper chain, where had written the VIPeople column.

In September 1992, Sun-Times sports clerk Peter Anding was arrested in the Sun-Times' newsroom and held without bond after confessing to using his position to set up sexual encounters for male high school athletes. Anding was charged with aggravated criminal sexual assault and possession of child pornography. In September 1993, Anding pleaded guilty to arranging and videotaping sexual encounters with several teenage boys and fondling others. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

In 1993, the Sun-Times fired photographer Bob Black without severance for dozens of unauthorized uses of the company's Federal Express account and outside photo lab, going back more than three years and costing the company more than $1,400. In February 1994, however, Black rejoined the paper's payroll after an arbitrator agreed with the paper's union that dismissal was too severe of a penalty. At the same time, the arbitrator declined to award Black back pay.

In 1993, longtime Sun-Times reporter Larry Weintraub retired after 35 years at the paper. Weintraub had been best known for his "Weintraub's World" column, in which he worked a job and wrote about the experience. Weintraub died in 2001 at age 69.

In February 1994, the Adler & Shaykin investor group sold the Sun-Times to Hollinger International for about $180 million. Hollinger was controlled, indirectly, by Canadian-born businessman Conrad Black. After Black and his associate David Radler were indicted for skimming money from Hollinger International, through retaining noncompete payments from the sale of Hollinger newspapers, they were removed from the board, and Hollinger International was renamed the Sun-Times Media Group.

In 1994, noted reporter M.W. Newman retired from the Sun-Times around the age of 77. Newman, who died of lung cancer in 2001, had been with the Sun-Times since the Chicago Daily News closed in 1978 and had focused his efforts on urban reporting. Among other things, Newman had been known for coining the term "Big John" to describe the John Hancock Center and the expression "Fortress Illini" for the concrete structures and plazas at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

On March 23, 1995, the Sun-Times announced that beginning April 2, 1995, veteran Sports Illustrated writer Rick Telander would be joining the paper and writing four columns a week.

On March 24, 1995, the Sun-Times published an editorial by Mark Hornung, then the Sun-Times' editorial page editor, that plagiarized a Washington Post editorial that had appeared in that paper the day before. Hornung attributed the plagiarism to writer's block, deadline pressures and the demands of other duties. He resigned as editorial page editor, but remained with the paper, shifting to its business side and working first as director of distribution and then as vice president of circulation. In 2002, Hornung became president and publisher of Midwest Suburban Publishing, which was a company owned by then-Sun Times parent company Hollinger International. In June 2004, Hollinger International placed Hornung on administrative leave just two weeks after Hollinger revealed that the paper's sales figures had been inflated for several years. Hornung resigned from the company four days later.

On May 17, 1995, the Sun-Times' food section published a bogus letter from a reader named "Olga Fokyercelf" that Chicago Tribune columnist (and former Sun-Times columnist) Mike Royko called "an imaginative prank" in a column. In that same column, Royko criticized the paper's food writer who edited the readers column at the time, Olivia Wu, for not following better quality control. The Wall Street Journal then tore into Royko with an article of its own, titled, "Has a Curmudgeon Turned Into a Bully? Some Now Think So...Picking on a Food Writer." Although the Sun-Times began hiring a free-lancer to edit the space and look for double entendres, another one made it into the same column on July 26, 1995, when the section published a letter from a "Phil McCraken." "This one was a little more subtle," a reporter outside the food department told the Chicago Reader.

From September 1996 until May 2000, fictional editions of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper were prominently featured in the CBS television series Early Edition. The series followed the adventures of a man who mysteriously receives each Sun-Times the day before it is actually published, and who uses this knowledge to prevent terrible events each day.

In 1998, the Sun-Times demoted longtime TV critic Lon Grahnke, shifting him to covering education. Grahnke, who died in 2006 at age 56 of Alzheimer's disease, remained with the paper until 2001, when he retired following an extended medical leave.

In 1999, longtime Sun-Times columnist Ray Coffey retired around the age of 70. He died in 2008.