December 28, 2009

Wrigley Field to stay Wrigley Field

Fresh off promising a Fenway-style renovation of Wrigley Field, the new owners of the Chicago Cubs continued to go against the sports-owner playbook by saying they don't plan on selling naming rights to the 95-year-old ballpark. "We are not going to take the ivy off the walls and replace it with advertising signage," team marketing officer Wally Hayward told the New York Times.

Or rather, told the Chicago News Cooperative, the non-profit journalism outfit that actually wrote the story, though the Times is where it appeared. As a sign of Journalism of the Future, this article isn't entirely auspicious: It counterposes new owner Tom Ricketts' desire to preserve the ballpark with "an unrelenting need for major repairs at Wrigley that could run to $400 million or more" — without noting that that was the price tag to, according to Ricketts, "basically keep the marquee and store the scoreboard for a year, and tear everything else down." (Ricketts now plans a more modest reno for "significantly less than" $200 million.)

The news cooperative, meanwhile, cites as its source for the $400 million figure "documents reviewed by the Chicago News Cooperative and interviews with people who saw cost estimates during the Cubs' two-and-a-half-year auction process," though they could have gotten the same number by reading nine-month-old copies of the Chicago Tribune. You can take the profit out of journalism, but that doesn't guarantee good reporting. Even if sometimes it works out.