Clayton Kirkpatrick is generally credited with ushering the Chicago Tribune into the modern newspaper era. A career-long reporter and editor with the Tribune, Kirkpatrick was named overall editor in 1969, eventually remaking the appearance and redirecting the goals of the newspaper. Under his guidance the Tribune shed its image as a parochial midwestern publication, the right-wing tool of longtime editor and publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick, who died in 1955.

Kirkpatrick emphasized hard-hitting, objective journalism. The son of a small-town auto mechanic, Kirkpatrick envisioned a wide-ranging appeal to sophisticated, urbane, modern readers and reoriented the Tribune to fit that vision. Between 1971 and 1976 the newspaper won three Pulitzer Prizes and changed its tone, both on the editorial and news pages.

McCormick and his cousin Joseph Medill Patterson became president and chairman of the board respectively of the Tribune Company in 1911. When Patterson assumed the leadership of the fledgling New York News...