Carol Marin: Thank you, readers, as I say goodbye

Follow @CarolMarinI am a lucky news dame. Lucky because I will forever be able to say that I worked at the Chicago Sun-Times as a columnist and a reporter.

In 2004, when John Cruickshank and Michael Cooke, the bosses at the time, offered me this job, I jumped at the chance even though I had real doubts I could do it well enough to satisfy them or me. Having spent my whole career, to that point, in television news, I understood the world of print was a different animal.

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My first months were spent at the old building on Wabash, the one where Irv Kupcinet reigned. And Royko wrote. Where presses once roared, shaking the building. And where every inch of ancient carpet was stained by something. I shudder to think what.

Soon we moved to the North Orleans location so Donald Trump could build another monument to himself on the river.

Many things have changed at the Sun-Times — and at other newspapers across the country. In our case, we’ve had a succession of owners, one of whom had a British title of “Lord” but landed in prison anyway. And there has been a constant financial struggle to stay alive amid shrinking revenues and multiplying digital competitors.

And yet, what’s so impressive about my colleagues at the Sun-Times is that they spend precious little time hand wringing. They just work. Break stories. Speak truth to power. And work some more.

For those of us with a bit of a blue-collar chip on our shoulders, there is a lot of pride knowing we have always been the working person’s paper.

So why leave?

Mainly because there are only so many hours in the day. And I’ve been burning up too many of them.

And because a great opportunity arrived to help create a Center for Journalism Integrity & Excellence at DePaul University. A center that DePaul’s president, Fr. Dennis Holtschneider, and its dean, Salma Ghanem, hope will widen students’ exposure to the real world of journalism and the ethical challenges that inevitably arise.

It’s exciting to start something new in conjunction with the work that I will continue at NBC5 and WTTW’s Chicago Tonight.The hard thing, always, is leaving something you love to make room for something else.Harder still to say good-bye to colleagues who have been as collaborative as any I have ever known. And to editors who constantly made me better than I otherwise would have been.Most difficult of all is leaving readers — you guys — who have been loyal and thoughtful, encouraging and critical, funny and heartbreaking. I love every week reading the emails from some of my “regulars.”And am endlessly grateful to anyone who ever took the time to weigh in, even the flamethrowers in the crowd.Publisher Jim Kirk has been kind enough to leave the door open in case I feel a column urge again.

But for the moment, there is only one thing I want to say as warmly and as deeply as it’s possible to say it.

Thank you.

Email: cmarin@suntimes.com

Follow Carol Marin on Twitter: @CarolMarin