• RICHARD A. CHAPMAN/SUN-TIMES
  • Dave McKinney has left the building.

Talking to various people earlier this week about the Sun-Times, I heard the situation described exquisitely by one person with knowledge of the company:

Scorning last Sunday’s Sun-Times endorsement of former Wrapports investor Bruce Rauner for governor, McKinney told Ferro in his resignation letter that the paper had “reversed its three-year, no-endorsement policy and unequivocally embraced the very campaign that had unleashed what Sun-Times management had declared a defamatory attack on me.” McKinney not only was taken off his beat on October 8—two days after cowriting a story that cast Rauner in a negative light, and after the Rauner camp challenged his honor (alleging that his wife’s work for a Democratic consulting firm amounted to a conflict of interest)—he was taken off the beat in midstream, so to speak. As he was covering a legislative hearing into Governor Quinn’s misbegotten Neighborhood Recovery Initiative, McKinney got word to pack it in. He disappeared from the hearing room in the Bilandic Building, and the Sun-Times took down his story covering the hearing and replaced it online with a wire service report. Newspapers act that way when reporters are in sudden disgrace.

The endorsement, followed by Feder’s story about the sale of the suburban publications, had made Sun-Times Media look shaky enough. And then McKinney quit.

These results have special significance for all of us at the Chicago Sun-Times, because they validate our core customer strategies. The results illustrate the power of the audience we engage daily across our Chicago Region Wide Network (CRWN). We are proud to be the sole provider of news and content that reaches the entire Chicago region in a localized manner. We do this by focusing on the people and places in our region’s vibrant communities in Chicago Sun-Times and our 39 unique publications.

Kirk is “an honorable man with solid news judgment,” wrote McKinney to Ferro. “But, ultimately, I don’t believe he called the shots here.”