Who says nobody needs yesterday’s news and a bunch of old wire stories and couch ads thrown in your neighbor’s bird bath at 4:15 a.m. every day? The Chicago Tribune, one of our nation’s leading bankrupt newspapers, today offers this Roland “Pinocchio” Burris paper doll, so your poor kids can have something to play with — it’s kind of like a Star Wars action figure, but it’s free! And it teaches kids an important lesson about black senators from Illinois. [Chicago Tribune PDF]

Rod Blagojevich, you are a hero — you are still giving to us, in the form of comic material, months after you’ve been removed from the Illinois governor’s office. (Not that you ever actually went to the Illinois governor’s office, but you know what we mean, you fuckin’ guy.) And today, a new scheme, or at least new details on an old scheme: the bankrupt media operation Tribune Co. was riding Blago hard to get Illinois to buy Wrigley Field from Tribune. And when current Tribune owner-weirdo Sam Zell and Blago discussed the scam, they referred to it as “Project Elwood.” MORE »

ALL NEWSPAPERS FAILING: Tribune Co. went ahead and declared bankruptcy, which is surely good news for the battered half-dead Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. The New York Times is scheduled to go bust later this week, probably. The prognosis for print newspapers has been pretty grim since the 1980s, but the specific financial collapse of Tribune Co. and the NYT is, like everything, the fault of the real-estate bubble and credit swaps and whatever. [AP/WSJ/Gawker]