America’s birth registry from 1847 includes Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Jesse James — and a fledgling newspaper born in a third-floor loft at Chicago’s Lake and LaSalle streets. The 400 copies, four pages apiece, greeted a mud-flats shantyville of 16,000 souls. The town, incorporated a mere 10 years earlier, as yet had no railroad, no telegraph service, and the opening of its vital canal linking the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico was still a year off. Among the Tribune’s early traits: an abolitionist determination to vanquish slavery, and a conviction that electing Abraham Lincoln as president was the way to make that happen.
So in the year when that now-grown-up town marks its 180th birthday, the Chicago Tribune on June 10 will celebrate its 170th. That’s more than 62,000 days of delivering the news, first to a small cluster of Chicagoans, later to subscribers across the Midwest, and now to a global audience of millions — more readers today, that is, than the Tribune ever has served.
We’re proud of our past, eager to plow forward. We often explain that despite that worldwide reach, the Tribune is a loyal citizen of its community — Chicago, Illinois, the Midwest — and glad for the privilege. Those of us who bring you each day’s Tribune, via digital platforms and print, are but temporary stewards of journalistic traditions and values that we trust will endure for another 62,000 days. And for 62,000 after that.
Businesses come and go; this one, first swaddled in newsprint and baptized in ink, chose in its 149th year to launch its internet edition. A year later, as a mere stripling of 150, the Tribune synthesized its legacy and its aspirations into two sentences:
“This has always been the best place to find out where dreams came true and where hearts were broken, where valiant soldiers fell, and where fools and thieves stumbled under the crushing weight of truth. The Tribune remains an enterprise that reports about everything from making money to making love to making a proud, perfect meatloaf, along with telling everyone who will take the time about everything of interest that happened over the past day or so.”
Working in any capacity at the Chicago Tribune means nurturing that connection with each new generation of smart, caring readers — speaking, and listening, to those who’ve allowed this news organization to survive for 170 years. This is their Tribune — your Tribune — too.
The relationship between the Tribune and its readers evolves, endures and surely will outlast all of us alive today. But whatever triumphs and agonies that future delivers, those of us at the Tribune are in something of a hurry to get there. In something of a hurry to tell you, our readers, all about it.
We thank you always, but this week especially, for your time, your trust and your willingness to march forward with us … since 1847.
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