The entire organization was seized by their collective panic at lowering revenues, plummeting readership (I quite literally never met a Tribune subscriber socially during my five years in Chicago), and frequently aborted frantic attempts to do something—hastily convened committees to launch new sections produced prototypes that languished for months and months in sad little piles around the newsroom as reminders of the paper’s institutional paralysis. Meanwhile, there were days when the front page consisted almost entirely of wire copy, when editors picked up two-week-old Los Angeles Times stories to fill out sections, and when Lipinski reacted to the appearance of a bad word—actually, a cheeky, punny reference to a bad word in a headline—by dragging editors to the printing plant after hours and forcing them to physically remove the offending section from the next day’s bundled editions.

via New York Times Hires Gang Who Killed Chicago Tribune to Kill Tribune – New York Times – Gawker.