By Terry McDermott

On Tuesday, August 21st, a CNBC commentator, taking a break from the TV station’s sub-prime credit crisis hysteria, switched to the announcement that The Chicago Tribune Co. shareholders had approved the sale of the company to Sam Zell and a ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan.) Said ESOP members are now left with 12 billion dollars in debt, certainly qualifying them to feel a credit crisis as well.

The potential impact on Chicago culture may seem minor until you think of the local assets: the Cubs, Wrigley Field, WGN Broadcasting (which made the Cubs a national team on radio and TV for decades), and The Tribune Tower.

The Tower, which as much says Chicago as its neighbor across Michigan Avenue, The Wrigley Building, or the much lamented late Marshall Field’s flagship store on State Street was the result of one of the first major architectural design completions in the U.S. and was competed hotly for by every major architect of the day.

Now unless you believe the Management announcement that they would manage this enormous debt burden by improving the revenue growth of their Internet ventures, increasing WGN and other broadcast media revenues and turn around the multi-year trend of shrinking newspaper ad revenues then you have to share my concern that some of the very icons that have created Chicago’s ongoing cultural memory will soon be for sale.

It would be comforting to think that The Los Angeles Times might be the first to go or Newsday on Long Island, but Sam Zell did not become a multi-billionaire by making emotional decisions about business assets. Mr Zell has a long record of being smarter than all of the other guys in the deal so maybe we will be lucky and he will see that the Chandler Family and their great Left Coast newspaper is not a great match with the McCormick legacy and the conservative bent of The Tribune.

So why should we care who owns The Cubs or all the great media assets and whether the owners are local or not? The Wrigley Company and The Tribune Company have been international, publicly owned companies for many years. Well, chewing gum is one thing but newspapers and broadcast media are highly focused neighborhood entities who should and do have great impact on the culture, politics, economy and sense of place in the geographical area they serve. The newspaper reflects who we are, what we think and what kind of place this is - and in many ways how we arrive at those identities. We may read the New York Times for the Book and Arts section, the Wall Street Journal for financial news but they will never catalyze us into being New Yorkers.

Let us all hope the ESOP is successful for the sake of all the employees, whether they are here or in L.A. or NYC. It will mean our daily media diet is protein-rich and not just carbs that are cheaper and easier to produce. There is no Field’s anymore. The Daily News is a grey-haired memory. We have lost all our Chicago-based money center banks and Sears is now more of a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) than retailer. If culture were just art, music, and literature we would be out of danger, in fact prospering, but the cultural fabric of a great city is woven with many more threads than the arts. Local media defines, reports, and prioritizes those threads of our identity: be it the culture of work, the contribution of music, or the political culture of a city rightly famed for its colorful public life. Let’s pray our local media is not too influenced by New York, L.A., London, or worse, the LIBOR loan rate.

As a child reader on the West Side I would eagerly await the arrival of the Saturday Daily News and their best in class comics and The Chicago American. Then on Sunday came the formidable bulk of The Chicago Tribune and the neighborhood focus of the Chicago Sun Times. All were eagerly read and it usually took my Father until Tuesday to calm down from the Tribune's political bent. Each one had its own personality, comics, sports section (The Sun Times only recognized baseball played in Comiskey) and political view, as well as a very definite view of what kind of city Chicago was, what kind of city it should aspire to be, and how the city should go about achieving those goals. Now we have the Internet, the most personal and intimate media to date, hundreds of TV channels, but just the Chicago Tribune and The Sun Times. The Reader and Time Out can’t do it all. Sam Zell showed us all how real estate is done; let’s pray he has equal success showing Chicago how to run media profitably in a world of print and electronic info.