A $5 Million Offer for Chicago Sun-Times

What's a 165-year-old newspaper worth? If it's the Chicago Sun-Times (which grew from the ashes of the Chicago Evening Journal and launched as a standalone in 1949), about $5 million based on the bid for the paper made by STMG Holdings, LLC. The group would also assume $20 million in debt from the paper's parent company, Sun-Times Media Group, which owns 58 local newspapers in the Chicago area.

The investor group is led by James Tyree, chairman and CEO of Mesirow Financial, a 72-year-old firm based in Chicago.

The Sun-Times actually reported a 2.8 percent increase in its Sunday circulation this year (to 254,379), but in March the Sun-Times Media Group filed for bankruptcy. According to the Wall Street Journal's Shira Ovide, the company had operating losses of $381 million in 2008.

Financial losses notwithstanding, the paper is rich in history. It became the home of Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Royko's column after the Chicago Daily News went out of business in 1978. (Royko later jumped to the Chicago Tribune.) The recently departed Robert Novak was also based at the paper, and film critic Roger Ebert's reviews and columns have appeared in its pages since 1967.

In the new issue of Granta, the British literary magazine, Ebert offers a reminiscence of the old days at the Sun-Times—or, more precisely, at O'Rourke's, a bar on North Avenue favored by the paper's staff. As Ebert wrote, "When Chicago still had four dailies (the Sun-Times, the Tribune, the Daily News, and Chicago’s American, later renamed Chicago Today), it was as competitive as any newspaper town in America, and many of the reporters and photographers knew one another. Trucks would deliver bundles of the early editions for us to pore over. The day’s Royko column might be read aloud. Editors were libeled and publishers despised…. Above all we drank. It is not advisable, perhaps not possible, to spend very many evenings in a place like O’Rourke’s while drinking Cokes and club soda."

In a column from late August, Ebert said that he quit drinking in 1979. As his paper's owners mull the offer from Tyree and company, they're probably wishing they could have a few stiff ones right about now.