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What Meyerson brought to the Tribune was the idea that e-newsletters need to be more than a mere list of headlines. “I argued this [newsletter] needs to have some personality, some sense of a human here.” Meyerson tells me, “I'm not sure a lot of people bought into this at the time.” While at the Tribune, Meyerson felt he was successful at giving Tribune Alerts some personality. “Interestingly,” Meyerson notes, “When I left the Tribune in 2009 to go to WGN, they reverted to nonhuman automatic headline lists—because it's easier, it's cheaper. You have to pay somebody to make it human. More recently they have eased their way back now to having some measure of personality, though not quite as snarky as it was on my watch.” Snark is definitely one of the ingredients Meyerson puts into the Public Square. Recent headlines: “March maskless,” “Pepsi denigration,” “Colonel of untruth,” “What’s nu? Omicron.” But snark is only one of the ingredients
that makes up the newsletter. Meyerson’s calm demeanor belies his depth—he is a major high-tech, podcast, and comic book nerd. The Public Square reflects all facets of Meyerson’s rich personality, his ear for news, his eye for finding interesting takes on that news, and his taste for quirky bits of human interest. “[When I put together the Square] I ask myself what are the five or ten things that I think the audience needs to know right now,” Meyerson explains. “Then you work your way down to stories you might not need to know, but are interesting. When I was working for ’XRT we always needed a kicker, one last story before you go to just kick it over back to the jock. And the jock would then play a song that riffs on that. So I always put some kickers in every issue.” Older readers may recall that back in the 80s, when Meyerson read the news on WXRT, the DJs used to tease him on air; Meyerson’s hyper earnest L7 persona was a contrast
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FOR NAMING THE POETRY FOUNDATION THE BEST POETRY ORGANIZATION 2021 We owe this to all readers and writers of Chicago poetry
MARCH 3, 2022 - CHICAGO READER 33