Heidi Stevens: A humble plea to Mayor Lori Lightfoot: Please resubscribe to the Chicago Tribune

Dear Mayor Lori Lightfoot,

I’m writing to ask you to reconsider your decision to cancel your Chicago Tribune subscription.

Maybe you already resubscribed, in which case this column was simple for you to access. If not, I’m hoping a member of your staff might print it out for you and leave it on your desk.

You are this city’s leader. We elected you, by a landslide, to represent us and fight for us and listen to us and talk to us and help us grow, heal, mourn, celebrate, build, unify, evolve into a better, more perfect version of ourselves.

You need to know our stories. The Chicago Tribune tells them.

You need to know Shamaya Coleman lost four of her children within minutes, when a fire tore through her apartment building. There were no working smoke detectors. Coleman talked to Tribune reporters about the worst night of her life, as part of a joint Chicago Tribune/Better Government Association investigation into six years of fatal fires in this city and the role city officials and negligent landlords played in those fires.

You need to know what it means to residents of Oakland and Lincoln Park and West Englewood and North Center when the city’s historic two- and three-flats are demolished and replaced, in some neighborhoods, by pricey single family homes and, in other neighborhoods, by nothing.

You need to know how Martha Askew, a six-year resident of Woodlawn’s Parkway Gardens, is feeling about the long-troubled housing complex going up for sale.

You need to read the firsthand accounts of Chicagoans surviving COVID-19, or not surviving COVID-19, or fighting to treat patients with COVID-19, or getting vaccinated against COVID-19, or watching their livelihoods be decimated by COVID-19, or rebuilding their community gems in the wake of COVID-19. We’ve told them all.

You need to read some of the truly beautiful ways Chicagoans have come together to heal and help each other during COVID-19. We’ve told those too.

Our newsroom, as you know, used to be housed in the ornate, almost century-old Tribune Tower. For 20 years, I got to walk through those front doors, into the majestic lobby and read the quotes etched into the marble walls on the way to my desk. (Soon the building will be occupied by luxury condo owners. Hopefully the roach problem’s been handled.)

My favorite etched quote was from the playwright Arthur Miller: “A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”

The Tribune, at our core, strives to be in constant conversation with Chicago. Chicago needs you in on that conversation.

You’re not going to like everything we write, including, obviously, the pandemic parking ticket coverage that inspired you to cancel, according to leaked emails. A newspaper’s role is, in large part, to hold leaders to account. To ask difficult questions and push for reluctant answers. To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

That doesn’t mean we stop talking to each other.

A bunch of us — Tribune employees, former Tribune employees, Tribune readers gathered Saturday evening outside Freedom Center, 560 W. Grand Ave., where we print the newspaper every day. It was a rally to raise awareness about the newspaper’s likely grim fate if the hedge fund Alden Global Capital takes ownership of us this week. We’re hoping maybe a billionaire drove by and noticed our signs and decides to give us a go.

I was hoping you’d swing by. Hang out for a while. Get to know some of the writers and photographers and editors and page designers and press workers and delivery drivers who bring this city’s stories to life day in and day out. We’re a lively, complicated, curious, multifaceted bunch. Not unlike Chicago.

I didn’t see you. That’s OK.

But truly, if you haven’t already, please resubscribe. We have some fantastic deals right now — 99 cents gets you four weeks of unlimited digital access and the Sunday paper.

You can’t root for Chicago without rooting for — and reading — a healthy, robust newspaper that tells its stories.