Could a nonprofit
ride to the rescue
of its own creator?
I've been watching my blog Statcounter reports of late, fascinated with the flow of visitors to The Real Muck since its public flogging of The Baltimore Sun began two weeks ago over the insulting treatment of dedicated employees in the firing of nearly a third of the newsroom staff.
The links to my accounts of the newspaper’s death spiral from more than a dozen blogs and Web sites brought readers by the thousands – so many that I could hardly keep up with watching where the visitors came from, the links that brought them, and which of my links they followed to other information and opinion sources.
But now that the shock value has worn off and the numbers are dropping into the very low hundreds, my eye caught an interesting digital footprint this week – of a visitor from the Abell Foundation. And Statcounter reported three previous visits from the same computer there.
I hope for another – for today’s entry – because of the Abell Foundation’s history, and a longshot hope in some quarters that it could factor in an eventual purchase of The Baltimore Sun that would return the nearly 172-year-old newspaper to local ownership, perhaps even a nonprofit.
You’d have to think that the price for buying The Sun is dropping, seeing as how its owner – Chicago-based Tribune Co. – is in bankruptcy and, while supposedly reorganizing under protection from creditors, is running its print media properties across the country into the ground.
What would it take to save this newspaper, here in Baltimore? Once upon a time (1986), Times Mirror Corp. valued it at about $400 million – paying some $600 million to the A.S. Abell Co. for The Sun and related properties, then selling off WMAR-TV for $200 million to comply with federal regulations on media cross-ownership.
The privately-held Abell company, largely owned by a small core of families, had created the A.S. Abell Co. Foundation in 1953 – launching it with an initial company contribution of $100,000. It grew, of course, but the sale of the company in 1986 had an enormous impact on the scope of what was renamed the Abell Foundation --- its assets multiplying tenfold to about $112 million, according to its own history (http://www.abell.org/aboutthefoundation/history.html).
What could be more appropriate than the Abell Foundation reclaiming the company that gave it birth, or at least playing a supporting role in its rescue from midwestern marauders.
And as I said in a radio panel discussion last week, if the Abell Foundation is looking around for donors to such a cause, I pledge $1,000 (from my personal ‘fortune’ as a Tribune retiree) – and would work for the newspaper six months for free to help out in the transition. (Then it's back to my seven-day weekends.)
The Sun was acquired by Tribune in its multibillion-dollar Times Mirror merger/takeover nine years ago, and then investor Sam Zell took the company private in an $8.2 billion deal a year and a half ago with a resulting debt burden that figured in the bankruptcy.
So, Sam – what would it take for a buyer to acquire The Baltimore Sun from Tribune? Clearly it’s worth a lot less than $400 million, now that Tribune has overseen substantial reductions in revenue and circulation through a combination of bad management, rapid growth of the Internet as an information source, industry-wide failures to adapt to that digital revolution, and now a global recession.
And you can hardly add ‘goodwill’ to the price – that’s pretty much been squandered. You and your yes-men flunkies treat its employees like chattel, and disserve readers by eliminating from the daily newspaper reason after reason why anyone would want to buy it.
Stock tables? Who needs them? And kill the business section while you’re at it.
National and world news? Who cares. Bury it inside. Makes it easier to import it all from Chicago in news modules, and run whatever fits.
Maryland section? Kill it. Put local news on the front page – only local news, unless you can find a Chicago module if anything really important happens like another war, or Mount Hood erupting.
Sports? Shrink it to a tabloid with half the space. Oops. That didn’t work. Must have had too many complaints. So make the section look larger, but still have half the space.
TV schedules? Kill the magazine, and create an unreadable Sunday section for the listings. Comics? Kill most of them. Sunday comics? Shrink what’s left, and make them unreadable in the back of the TV section.
Features section? Shrink it, eliminate it whenever possible.
Typefaces? Design style? Throw them out, and make The Sun look like all the other Tribune newspapers. And say the reason you did it was to improve readability. Not true? Who cares. Tell them anyway.
Oh, and don’t forget -- fire the writers, fire the columnists, fire the editors, fire the photographers, fire the page designers, fire the artists, fire the editorial writers, fire the infrastructure… fire the… fire… fire… fire… who?
Hmmm. Surely they can find someone who’s really to blame.
A reporter with real heart
My friend and former colleague, Sara Neufeld, who covered the Baltimore schools beat with distinction and reached out to the community through blogging about city education at baltimoresun.com, announced on her blog today she is volunteering to leave -- in order to save the job of a less senior colleague.
Her blog entry begins:
This is a hard post to write, but as a reporter (for the next five days, at least), I mustn't bury the lead: I volunteered today to be laid off by The Sun.
After the 61 layoffs in our newsroom two weeks ago, former reporters laid off from other job classifications (i.e., columnists, copy editors) have the option of going back into the reporting lineup. As a result of that "bumping," some of the reporters with low seniority are being laid off this week, including a friend with many more personal responsibilities than I have. That friend's situation inspired me to offer my job, but I think it will also be the right move for me personally, sorry as I am to leave the Baltimore schools beat that I've come to care so much about.
And this blog...
Read the full account at: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/education/blog/2009/05/sara_neufeld_baltimore_sun.html#more
Noted in passing
Tribune Co. received permission Tuesday from a federal bankruptcy judge to pay more than $13 million in bonuses to almost 700 employees for their work last year – but because of constraints in the law, not to pay more than $2 million in severance payments to more than 60 employees laid off shortly before the company filed for bankruptcy protection, Associated Press reported.
“Judge Kevin Carey authorized the bonus payments after Tribune chief financial officer Chandler Bigelow III testified that the bonuses are critical to keeping key managers motivated as Tribune tries to adjust to a tough economic climate for media companies,” AP reported.
“We need to motivate and incentivize the key people who will implement change," Bigelow said. "These are really good people we're talking about. They're the best and the brightest of the company."
If anyone finds a list of Tribune’s “best” and “ brightest" needing that additional monetary motivation and incentives to do their jobs, please send me the link. I have a list of many of the real best and brightest at The Baltimore Sun, and their reward: Fired without notice, with extra security guards called in to make sure they didn’t steal anything on their way out the door.
Open Letter to Tim Ryan
A friend and former colleague, Arnold R. “Skip” Isaacs, emailed a letter Wednesday to triple-threat Sun publisher/president/CEO Timothy E. Ryan and top editor J. Montgomery Cook, and gave permission to The Real Muck to share it:
Dear Mr. Ryan and Mr. Cook --
I am writing this letter with more sadness and regret than you can probably imagine.
I was a reporter and editor for the Baltimore Sun for nearly 19 years, during which I had various adventures, many enjoyable, some not, some fairly dangerous. I did not agree with every decision the Sun's management made in those years. But there was not a day or a moment that I was not grateful to be working for an honorable newspaper, whose owners recognized their responsibility to readers and their community as well as to their own profit and who expected me and my colleagues and our editors to do our jobs honestly and thoroughly with no agenda except to find and tell the truth in whatever story we were covering.
In our worst nightmares none of us could have imagined how badly the present owners and managers have damaged that tradition. Nor could we have conceived that any Sun executives would treat any employees the way you and those under your direction treated the men and women whose jobs you eliminated last month.
No doubt you will blame business conditions for the drastic shrinkage of the paper and loss of journalistic quality. That can be debated elsewhere. But business conditions didn't require canning people without notice in the middle of covering or editing a story, or letting them find out when they couldn't log onto their computers, then shoving them out the door under the eyes of security guards without time to absorb the event or for an appropriate goodby to colleagues. There is no possible business reason for those practices. The only reason is a thuggish indifference to common decency and human dignity.
The wrecking crew in Chicago and your leadership have bankrupted the Sun in more than the legal and financial sense. You are also intellectually bankrupt and morally bankrupt, bankrupt of principles, bankrupt of social conscience, bankrupt of basic decency. Not to mention bankrupt of any idea of what good journalism is and why it matters. I am sure that nearly all present and former employees share my feeling that only new ownership, as soon as possible, has any hope of restoring the serious purpose and public responsibility the Sun once had. If and when there is a change, no doubt many would be happy to see you booted out of the building with the same contempt you showed those you terminated earlier this month. But that will not really even the score, for this reason: You will deserve that contempt. The good journalists you kicked out the door did not.
Sincerely
Arnold R. Isaacs
Thanks for all the comments
Responses at this site and through emails to Muck postings continue to amaze and delight.
From Tim Windsor, on the newspaper’s explanation for its typeface changes:
Not to minimize the pain and suffering of the 61 newly-former Sun employees, but to me the low point of the past several weeks was the obvious dissembling of the reader's note you quote above. There were many ways to acknowledge the change; saying it was for readability was an unnecessary lie. All a news organization has is its reputation for truth. Beyond that clear line lies Pravda and the house organs of a dozen Banana Republics.
From ‘anonymous’:
Didn't The Sun pay a bazillion dollars to have someone create the "Mencken" font used "exclusively" by the paper? Seems to me at that time the Mencken font was praised for it's "readability."
From Len Lazarick, of the recently defunct Baltimore Examiner, who wrote just before the ‘Sun lies’ posting here:
This was much like the explanation when they trimmed the page size and told readers something like "this will make the paper easier to carry."
How can you have any credibility as a newspaper when you can't speak the truth to your own readers?
TV worth watching
Friends Laura Lippman and David Simon are heading to Los Angeles for television appearances later this week.
Laura, a former Sun reporter who has produced some 17 books of fiction (most of them in the mystery genre), is scheduled for an appearance Thursday night on CBS’ Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Not familiar with her? Visit http://www.lauralippman.com/. Not familiar with Ferguson? You go to bed too early.
David, a writer, TV producer and former Sun reporter best known as creator of the HBO series ‘The Wire,’ is among the guests Friday night on HBO’s ‘Real Time With Bill Maher.’ David testified last week at a Senate committee hearing on “The Future of Journalism.” If you haven’t seen the transcript already, here’s a link: http://commerce.senate.gov/public/_files/DavidSimonTestimonyFutureofJournalism.pdf
Showing posts with label Timothy E. Ryan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Timothy E. Ryan. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
Newspapers: Sun lies?
‘Font Day’ brings change
to Baltimore Sun design,
and curious note to readers
The Baltimore Sun took on a noticeably different look on Monday as the newspaper adopted the typographical style demanded by its Tribune Company overlords – throwing away the work of Sun staffers in recent years that produced the last of several redesigns.
A small notice at the bottom of the front page, with the heading “To our readers,” offered this explanation:
“Today you may notice that we have changed the newspaper’s type styles to improve readability.”
Then again, you may notice the change another way – to make less obvious the smuggling of content from Tribune’s central editing and production staff in Chicago into The Baltimore Sun.
There wasn’t much from the Windy City on this inaugural day of the style overhaul – the heavy local content seeming almost to have been planned as a cover-up. But increasingly, Baltimore Sun readers will find the balance shifting, their newspaper becoming less and less uniquely Baltimore – and more and more driven by content that’s cheaper to produce, using the Tribune chain’s nonunion central staff to feed all of its publications.
That’s part of the reason for the firing without notice nearly two weeks ago of nearly a third of the news and editorial staff – writers, copy editors, photographers, page designers, graphic artists, newsroom editorial assistants, even one of the few remaining librarians. (Another, clearly, was that little matter of breaking the Sun chapter of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild.)
The Tribune typeface, to my aging eyes, seems less readable. It’s also uglier – visually and morally.
And the notice “To our readers” was disingenuous at best.
At worst? Maybe it was a little notice bearing a big lie from Sun president/publisher/CEO Timothy E. Ryan.
'House ad' hilarity
Don’t know if anyone noticed the back-page house ad appearing in The Baltimore’s Sun’s unreadable ‘tv&comics’ section on Sunday.
A house ad is a self-promoting message often used to fill pages and holes where paid advertising is lacking, and can probably be deducted from the bottom line for tax purposes as a business expense. In flusher times, many house ads were planned and scheduled for specific parts of the newspaper to promote classified ad sales, special marketing sections, newspaper-sponsored events and the like -- and when important news needed additional space on a page, moving or eliminating a “scheduled” house ad required permission from higher-ups.
Some houses were pretty clever; most were predictably mundane or unimaginative.
Sunday’s TV section… well, maybe too many people have been fired in the marketing wing – an extra set of eyes that might have prevented this Baltimore Sun Media Group message, under the image of a cute designer-breed dog with the power cord of a table lamp in its mouth:
“Selling your merchandise and pets has never been easier.”
To which I can only plead: “Please, daddy, don’t sell Fluffy!”
Then again, maybe that’s just another indication of bad economic times.
to Baltimore Sun design,
and curious note to readers
The Baltimore Sun took on a noticeably different look on Monday as the newspaper adopted the typographical style demanded by its Tribune Company overlords – throwing away the work of Sun staffers in recent years that produced the last of several redesigns.
A small notice at the bottom of the front page, with the heading “To our readers,” offered this explanation:
“Today you may notice that we have changed the newspaper’s type styles to improve readability.”
Then again, you may notice the change another way – to make less obvious the smuggling of content from Tribune’s central editing and production staff in Chicago into The Baltimore Sun.
There wasn’t much from the Windy City on this inaugural day of the style overhaul – the heavy local content seeming almost to have been planned as a cover-up. But increasingly, Baltimore Sun readers will find the balance shifting, their newspaper becoming less and less uniquely Baltimore – and more and more driven by content that’s cheaper to produce, using the Tribune chain’s nonunion central staff to feed all of its publications.
That’s part of the reason for the firing without notice nearly two weeks ago of nearly a third of the news and editorial staff – writers, copy editors, photographers, page designers, graphic artists, newsroom editorial assistants, even one of the few remaining librarians. (Another, clearly, was that little matter of breaking the Sun chapter of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild.)
The Tribune typeface, to my aging eyes, seems less readable. It’s also uglier – visually and morally.
And the notice “To our readers” was disingenuous at best.
At worst? Maybe it was a little notice bearing a big lie from Sun president/publisher/CEO Timothy E. Ryan.
'House ad' hilarity
Don’t know if anyone noticed the back-page house ad appearing in The Baltimore’s Sun’s unreadable ‘tv&comics’ section on Sunday.
A house ad is a self-promoting message often used to fill pages and holes where paid advertising is lacking, and can probably be deducted from the bottom line for tax purposes as a business expense. In flusher times, many house ads were planned and scheduled for specific parts of the newspaper to promote classified ad sales, special marketing sections, newspaper-sponsored events and the like -- and when important news needed additional space on a page, moving or eliminating a “scheduled” house ad required permission from higher-ups.
Some houses were pretty clever; most were predictably mundane or unimaginative.
Sunday’s TV section… well, maybe too many people have been fired in the marketing wing – an extra set of eyes that might have prevented this Baltimore Sun Media Group message, under the image of a cute designer-breed dog with the power cord of a table lamp in its mouth:
“Selling your merchandise and pets has never been easier.”
To which I can only plead: “Please, daddy, don’t sell Fluffy!”
Then again, maybe that’s just another indication of bad economic times.
Friday, May 8, 2009
The Mourning Sun
Buttons, bumper stickers were party favors at union-sponsored wake for fired staffers.Employees find no news
in publisher Ryan’s talk
on newspaper’s future
Closest executives come
in publisher Ryan’s talk
on newspaper’s future
Closest executives come
to any layoffs apology is 'regret'
and 'could have been handled better'
In case you were wondering, there was no apology Thursday from top Baltimore Sun executives for the mass firings without notice last week of nearly a third of the news staff.
The question of an apology was posed at a companywide meeting in the newspaper building’s cafeteria Thursday morning and, according to several accounts from staff survivors who attended, the best that CEO/president/publisher Timothy E. Ryan and editor J. Montgomery Cook could offer was regret at the layoffs.
Employees crowded shoulder to shoulder for the meeting at which newspaper CEO/president/publisher Timothy E. Ryan was to present a vision of the future for The Baltimore Sun, and there was an undercurrent of anger evident in the audience. What Ryan had to offer, several said, was no more than contained in statements already issued by the company about the turn toward alternative platforms brought on by new technology.
“Basically, it was just BS,” one employee said later at another gathering – a wake, of sorts, held by the newspaper union Thursday night to honor and celebrate the careers of the more than five dozen people sent packing last week in the Tuesday evening and Wednesday afternoon bloodletting carried out under the watchful eyes of extra security guards brought in for the occasion.
Some of those fired, as noted in earlier postings at The Real Muck, had worked more than 30 years for the newspaper. The action partially targeted older, more experienced and higher-paid staffers, as the newspaper shielded others much less senior with moves into newly-created nonunion jobs.
According to another employee's account of the meeting, it was Ryan who said he regretted the way the layoffs were handled -- and that "had to be dragged out of him like blood from the proverbial stone."
"He said it 'could have been handled better' in 'some' instances. When pressed as to whether he would actually apologize to those former employees, he simply said, "That's my position," referring to the "handled better" statement."
Ryan confirmed at the cafeteria meeting that Monday, as reported here earlier, will be “Font Day” – when readers find the typographical style of The Baltimore Sun uniformly changed to match that of other newspapers in the Tribune chain, discarding the work of earlier redesigns that had taken months of work, including presentations to reader focus groups for their opinions.
This blogger was never a big fan of the results from focus groups, feeling that many people participating would have a tendency to do what was expected – to say they liked something, even when they would have misgivings. But the style that came out of all that work was far more attractive and readable than what the public will find in The Sun on Monday.
The key to the change is expedience – making it easier for the newspaper to be largely filled with “content” created in Chicago and distributed throughout the Tribune empire in page modules that leave holes for local advertising and local news. While local news takes over the front page, what national and world news is seen on inside pages in The Baltimore Sun may depend more on the number of pages available that day than on news judgment. Larger Tribune newspapers likely will have more pages, and more of the modules.
Also coming Monday will be expanded roles for newly named local content editors, who will be editing stories, moving them electronically into modules and writing the headlines – with the likelihood that no copy editor will be available for a second look before the newspaper starts spinning off the presses at the Sun Park printing plant three miles away.
The result, say surviving staffers and those who lost jobs, will inevitably be more errors in the newspaper and increased danger of inadvertent libel – the kind of mistake that brings lawyers with threats of lawsuits. So a little advice to Tim Ryan: Don’t skimp on the insurance.
Unfortunately, the pain of layoffs is unlikely to end – with the possibility of longtime newsroom employees exercising bumping rights to reclaim jobs they formerly held in other classifications. Copy editors who held higher designations as slot editors or makeup editors may seek to move down, and some copy editors may opt to return to earlier jobs as reporters.
The result would be some going back to work, and others being bumped into the ranks of the unemployed.
Trouble is, they’re all like family, and it’s tough to decide the worth of pushing out a colleague in order to keep working in the uncertain employ of the Tribune Company, which has owned The Baltimore Sun for a decade and is seen by many as running the newspaper into the ground.
Some at the party hold the newly-created jobs that took them out of the union, and others find themselves worrying about losing jobs in the bumps that could come. Yet they joined in fellowship even with those at the party whose decisions could push them out of jobs.
It is none of their fault. They are just victims of Tribune – whether inside or outside for now. And they hug each other, all feeling the same pain from an ill wind out of Chicago.
This blogger was never a big fan of the results from focus groups, feeling that many people participating would have a tendency to do what was expected – to say they liked something, even when they would have misgivings. But the style that came out of all that work was far more attractive and readable than what the public will find in The Sun on Monday.
The key to the change is expedience – making it easier for the newspaper to be largely filled with “content” created in Chicago and distributed throughout the Tribune empire in page modules that leave holes for local advertising and local news. While local news takes over the front page, what national and world news is seen on inside pages in The Baltimore Sun may depend more on the number of pages available that day than on news judgment. Larger Tribune newspapers likely will have more pages, and more of the modules.
Also coming Monday will be expanded roles for newly named local content editors, who will be editing stories, moving them electronically into modules and writing the headlines – with the likelihood that no copy editor will be available for a second look before the newspaper starts spinning off the presses at the Sun Park printing plant three miles away.
The result, say surviving staffers and those who lost jobs, will inevitably be more errors in the newspaper and increased danger of inadvertent libel – the kind of mistake that brings lawyers with threats of lawsuits. So a little advice to Tim Ryan: Don’t skimp on the insurance.
Unfortunately, the pain of layoffs is unlikely to end – with the possibility of longtime newsroom employees exercising bumping rights to reclaim jobs they formerly held in other classifications. Copy editors who held higher designations as slot editors or makeup editors may seek to move down, and some copy editors may opt to return to earlier jobs as reporters.
The result would be some going back to work, and others being bumped into the ranks of the unemployed.
Trouble is, they’re all like family, and it’s tough to decide the worth of pushing out a colleague in order to keep working in the uncertain employ of the Tribune Company, which has owned The Baltimore Sun for a decade and is seen by many as running the newspaper into the ground.
Some at the party hold the newly-created jobs that took them out of the union, and others find themselves worrying about losing jobs in the bumps that could come. Yet they joined in fellowship even with those at the party whose decisions could push them out of jobs.
It is none of their fault. They are just victims of Tribune – whether inside or outside for now. And they hug each other, all feeling the same pain from an ill wind out of Chicago.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Sun massacre brings byline strike
Newspaper CEO Ryan
to present vision ahead,
but will he apologize?
Retirees, alumni mourn Sun decline;
Newspaper Guild offers counseling
Many staff bylines are likely to be missing from Thursday’s editions of The Baltimore Sun, and from stories on the newspaper Web site, in an action by members of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild protesting “layoffs and heavy handed tactics by owner Tribune Co.”
But it may just as well be an act of mourning in the wake of last week’s mass firings without notice of nearly a third of The Sun’s news and editorial staff. Sort of akin to a flag at half mast -- bylines symbolically gone.
The protest comes as the newspaper’s publisher/president/CEO Timothy E. Ryan was to address employees on the company’s vision going forward – an event that was expected to take place in the company cafeteria Thursday morning.
The question that this blog would offer first to Mr. Ryan: Will you issue a public apology for the manner in which dedicated, longtime employees were fired?
I’m not sure there is a way to go forward without acknowledging mistakes of the past, and the Chicago-based Tribune Co., which acquired The Baltimore Sun as part of its merger/takeover of Times Mirror Corp. a decade ago, has a lot of mistakes to acknowledge and rude and disrespectful actions that require an apology.
The firings and shrinking of the newspaper were, as expected, the main topic on the discussion menu Wednesday as the Sun’s alumni and retirees – nearly all of them from newsroom jobs – held their annual luncheon at the Engineering Club, about the same three-block distance from the newspaper building and the downtown church basement where the union was simultaneously holding a job fair and counseling session for the displaced workers.
The retirees and alumni included many distinguished journalists, and they shared revulsion for the manner in which their brethren were shown the door by the current (absentee) Lords of Calvert Street.
Bob Timberg, a former White House correspondent and three-decade veteran of The Sun, lamented the firings and added a name I had missed: David Wood, who covered the Defense Department with distinction. “He was a great reporter,” said Timberg, whose latest book was the definitive “John McCain, An American Odyssey.”
But greatness doesn’t necessarily count at The Baltimore Sun.
Steve Luxenberg, a former city editor who left The Sun more than two decades ago for the more promising pasture of The Washington Post, told the gathering that he had witnessed many management meetings in his years at the southern end of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and “it only takes one person to stand up and say, ‘You’re not going to treat people this way.’”
But evidently there was no one so brave in the top management at The Baltimore Sun to stand up and say ‘No.’
Arnold R. “Skip” Isaacs, a longtime Sun staffer and foreign correspondent who left in the 1990s, called it “a combination of cluelessness and cowardice – it’s hard to discern anything else.”
And John Plunkett, a former assistant managing editor who helps organize the annual reunion, said: “This was done by the standard business school method – not to tell anyone it was going to happen.”
The retirees organization was still trying to compile a list of all those fired, Plunkett noted.
The layoffs/firings went beyond the newsroom, having been going on for several weeks in commercial departments of the newspaper. About eight union members there have lost jobs in the latest round of job reductions, according to Angie Kuhl, the Sun’s Guild unit chair – in addition to nonunion managers who also were eliminated from the payroll.
“Tribune’s tactics are deplorable,” Cet Parks, the union’s executive director, said in an announcement of the byline strike. “Employees who poured their hearts and souls into putting out a great newspaper every day were told to get out and stay out. No fanfare, no thank you, no outplacement help, just hit the streets. Maybe that’s big business Tribune way, but it isn’t right. Through its actions Tribune has demonstrated that it has little regard or respect for its employees.”
“These decisions were made without any discussions on alternative costs saving methods,” added Brent Jones, a Sun editor and Guild representative. “We wanted to do something to show our former co‑workers that we're upset with how they were treated last week. We produce this paper and expect our voices to be heard.”
Gus Sentementes, a Sun reporter and Guild representative, said, “The wisdom and experience that has left The Sun in this period is shocking. Out‑of‑town and out‑of‑touch ownership has extracted a heavy toll on the newspaper.”
To say nothing of the heavy toll on Sun readers, this blogger adds.
Not everyone on the staff agreed with the byline strike. Michael Dresser, a longtime Sun staffer and Guild member, said his byline will appear Thursday.
"That fact does not represent an endorsement of the actions of Tribune management. I am shocked and saddened by the handling of the recent layoffs and dismayed [at] the entire direction of Tribune's response to its current economic difficulties," Mike wrote. "Nevertheless, I have long opposed byline strikes on principle and have refused to participate on past occasions."
He added: "I have many reasons for opposing byline strikes. I don't care to share most of them with management. I will openly state my belief that they are inherently undemocratic because they are called with no debate and no vote.
"I have been a Guild member for 38 years and have always been proud to be one. But on this point I have no intention of backing down -- ever. I have never seen a byline strike that accomplished anything positive. It's a tactic that should have been left behind in the 20th Century."
Coming up: ‘Font Day’
According to sources, the “font” style of The Baltimore Sun will be changed as of Monday’s editions to conform with that of the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers in the Tribune chain, pretty much discarding the style developed in recurring redesigns of The Sun in recent years.
This change has nothing to with making the newspaper look more appealing – it’s all about conforming with the look of news content that will be written, edited and composed in page “modules” by nonuion employees in Chicago. You’ll be seeing those news modules from Chicago in The Sun within a few weeks, the sources predict.
to present vision ahead,
but will he apologize?
Retirees, alumni mourn Sun decline;
Newspaper Guild offers counseling
Many staff bylines are likely to be missing from Thursday’s editions of The Baltimore Sun, and from stories on the newspaper Web site, in an action by members of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild protesting “layoffs and heavy handed tactics by owner Tribune Co.”
But it may just as well be an act of mourning in the wake of last week’s mass firings without notice of nearly a third of The Sun’s news and editorial staff. Sort of akin to a flag at half mast -- bylines symbolically gone.
The protest comes as the newspaper’s publisher/president/CEO Timothy E. Ryan was to address employees on the company’s vision going forward – an event that was expected to take place in the company cafeteria Thursday morning.
The question that this blog would offer first to Mr. Ryan: Will you issue a public apology for the manner in which dedicated, longtime employees were fired?
I’m not sure there is a way to go forward without acknowledging mistakes of the past, and the Chicago-based Tribune Co., which acquired The Baltimore Sun as part of its merger/takeover of Times Mirror Corp. a decade ago, has a lot of mistakes to acknowledge and rude and disrespectful actions that require an apology.
The firings and shrinking of the newspaper were, as expected, the main topic on the discussion menu Wednesday as the Sun’s alumni and retirees – nearly all of them from newsroom jobs – held their annual luncheon at the Engineering Club, about the same three-block distance from the newspaper building and the downtown church basement where the union was simultaneously holding a job fair and counseling session for the displaced workers.
The retirees and alumni included many distinguished journalists, and they shared revulsion for the manner in which their brethren were shown the door by the current (absentee) Lords of Calvert Street.
Bob Timberg, a former White House correspondent and three-decade veteran of The Sun, lamented the firings and added a name I had missed: David Wood, who covered the Defense Department with distinction. “He was a great reporter,” said Timberg, whose latest book was the definitive “John McCain, An American Odyssey.”
But greatness doesn’t necessarily count at The Baltimore Sun.
Steve Luxenberg, a former city editor who left The Sun more than two decades ago for the more promising pasture of The Washington Post, told the gathering that he had witnessed many management meetings in his years at the southern end of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and “it only takes one person to stand up and say, ‘You’re not going to treat people this way.’”
But evidently there was no one so brave in the top management at The Baltimore Sun to stand up and say ‘No.’
Arnold R. “Skip” Isaacs, a longtime Sun staffer and foreign correspondent who left in the 1990s, called it “a combination of cluelessness and cowardice – it’s hard to discern anything else.”
And John Plunkett, a former assistant managing editor who helps organize the annual reunion, said: “This was done by the standard business school method – not to tell anyone it was going to happen.”
The retirees organization was still trying to compile a list of all those fired, Plunkett noted.
The layoffs/firings went beyond the newsroom, having been going on for several weeks in commercial departments of the newspaper. About eight union members there have lost jobs in the latest round of job reductions, according to Angie Kuhl, the Sun’s Guild unit chair – in addition to nonunion managers who also were eliminated from the payroll.
“Tribune’s tactics are deplorable,” Cet Parks, the union’s executive director, said in an announcement of the byline strike. “Employees who poured their hearts and souls into putting out a great newspaper every day were told to get out and stay out. No fanfare, no thank you, no outplacement help, just hit the streets. Maybe that’s big business Tribune way, but it isn’t right. Through its actions Tribune has demonstrated that it has little regard or respect for its employees.”
“These decisions were made without any discussions on alternative costs saving methods,” added Brent Jones, a Sun editor and Guild representative. “We wanted to do something to show our former co‑workers that we're upset with how they were treated last week. We produce this paper and expect our voices to be heard.”
Gus Sentementes, a Sun reporter and Guild representative, said, “The wisdom and experience that has left The Sun in this period is shocking. Out‑of‑town and out‑of‑touch ownership has extracted a heavy toll on the newspaper.”
To say nothing of the heavy toll on Sun readers, this blogger adds.
Not everyone on the staff agreed with the byline strike. Michael Dresser, a longtime Sun staffer and Guild member, said his byline will appear Thursday.
"That fact does not represent an endorsement of the actions of Tribune management. I am shocked and saddened by the handling of the recent layoffs and dismayed [at] the entire direction of Tribune's response to its current economic difficulties," Mike wrote. "Nevertheless, I have long opposed byline strikes on principle and have refused to participate on past occasions."
He added: "I have many reasons for opposing byline strikes. I don't care to share most of them with management. I will openly state my belief that they are inherently undemocratic because they are called with no debate and no vote.
"I have been a Guild member for 38 years and have always been proud to be one. But on this point I have no intention of backing down -- ever. I have never seen a byline strike that accomplished anything positive. It's a tactic that should have been left behind in the 20th Century."
Coming up: ‘Font Day’
According to sources, the “font” style of The Baltimore Sun will be changed as of Monday’s editions to conform with that of the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers in the Tribune chain, pretty much discarding the style developed in recurring redesigns of The Sun in recent years.
This change has nothing to with making the newspaper look more appealing – it’s all about conforming with the look of news content that will be written, edited and composed in page “modules” by nonuion employees in Chicago. You’ll be seeing those news modules from Chicago in The Sun within a few weeks, the sources predict.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Newspaper weights and measures
Sun puts new spin
on ‘The Vanishing’
as staff, paper shrink
Something is missing in my Sunday paper – you know, The Baltimore Sun. An entire section has vanished. I seem to recall it as Section B, or Maryland Closeup, and though I'm told it happened a week or two ago, I just noticed yesterday.
Over the past two years, as The Sun was moving its elements around, eliminating some sections and consolidating others, there was usually a note to readers explaining the changes. Sometimes there was even a little audacity in suggesting the changes were improvements.
And after my initial wee-hours posting of this blog, I received an email and a Facebook note from friends who informed me that I missed the note to readers. As one of the fired editors put it, "The section was dropped two weeks ago, and a brief announcement was published saying that some content formerly in the section would be printed in the A section. Not, I concede, a conspicuous notice, but it was there."
I didn't find it on the electronic archive, so I'll have to wander down to the library later to see if I can find a copy of the notice I missed.
The disappearance of Maryland Closeup came just days before the newspaper’s purge of nearly a third of its editing, news and opinion staff through what has been charitably described as “layoffs.”
I called it a massacre. Firings. I had a comment from a reader criticizing my use of the word “fired,” saying it carries an implication that the employees had done something wrong. They hadn’t. But they were fired anyway.
In this world, you don’t have to do anything wrong to get fired. You can do a job better than anyone, and get fired because your higher salary was considered excess baggage by corporate bean-counters.
And these wonderful people, friends I worked with in my former life in the newsroom, did nothing wrong. They did their jobs well, demonstrated their professionalism and dedication by working longer hours than the standard 40 under their union contract (mostly without putting in for overtime), won honors for the newspaper, and were rewarded with unending abuse by the company – including a worthless, arbitrary employee evaluation system intended to justify giving one worker a $50 raise, while another gets $10 or less.
One of my thoughts in asking for a buyout in the newsroom reduction Class of 2007 was not wanting to ever fill out another evaluation of the small newsroom contingent I ostensibly supervised. It didn’t seem to matter what praise I wrote, how I graded. They all did their jobs to the point of excellence, but you couldn’t tell from the raises they would get.
Weights and measures
On a whim Sunday night, I drove down the road to my local Giant supermarket and picked up copies of The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post, carried them over to the produce section and plopped them on a scale.
From a purely size-and-price standpoint, here’s how they measured up: The Post was half a pound heavier, and cost 38 cents less.
And the Post news report had Section B – and a Section C. That’s “Outlook” and “Metro,” respectively. And all three newsy sections, A, B, C, had an ample supply of Washington Post staff bylines, as opposed to The Sun’s sparse news beyond the Baltimore Beltway. (And they were followed by the sections for Sports, Style & Arts, Travel, Business, and a crappy advertising-driven Jobs. Sealed in a plastic bag were the Post's magazine, full comics section, TV Week, Parade, ad inserts and coupons.
Fair to compare? Maybe not. After all, Washington is the nation’s capital and the Post has greater resources and a definitively wider reach in its global coverage. The only purely local story on the front page is about Virginia politics. And Metro has entirely too much Virginia, and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties news for this Baltimore-and-burbs reader. I’ve never understood why The Post so disdains wider coverage of Maryland news, allowing its competitor 30 miles up the B-W Parkway free reign over metro Baltimore for the past two decades.
I’ve never been a Post subscriber. Only The Sun – and I buy it still. I thought about canceling in protest, as some readers of this blog say they have. But I still have friends on the inside, and don’t want to see the rug pulled out from under them through declining circulation numbers despite their own employer’s seeming intent on diminishing its value and angering readers. One equally dismayed newspaper friend suggested we go out and sell subscriptions to The Sun despite it all, in an effort to keep the print product alive.
Seems strange to me that the newspaper has gone to such lengths to get rid of 30-year employees and 30-year readers, though.
Baltimore Sun publisher/president/CEO Timothy E. Ryan (a triple-threat player!) has a “to the readers” note on Page 3 about the newsroom changes and how proud the newspaper is to provide “award-winning journalism to more readers than any other local news media organization.”
“We truly value the more than 1 million people who read us every week.” (Doubtless a one-page online click is counted as one of that million, and people who buy the paper on multiple days count as more than one reader. Numbers are so easy to manipulate.)
There’s also some bragging about how the newspaper benefits in being part of “the Baltimore Sun Media Group (BSMG)” that includes 28 community newspapers in the Baltimore metro area – most if not all of which, the note doesn’t mention, have been cut in staffing and frequency of publication.
That latest note to readers is just spin, I’m afraid. The readers are getting less than ever before, unless they rely on digital sources for their news. There’s an awful lot of readers, or would-be readers, who are not equipped or able to do that, and The Baltimore Sun has fired them, too.
BSMG, hmmmmm. There’s probably other uses for those letters. Maybe I should hold a contest.
The final photo
In recounting the last day at work for veteran, award-winning Sun photographer Chiaki Kawajiri, The Real Muck last week noted her final assignment before being given a mutually tearful layoff by her department boss: A lawyer with his pet bird.
The photo taken Wednesday afternoon appeared in Sunday’s editions, accompanying an article by Personal Finance columnist Eileen Ambrose. The early Sunday edition hitting newsstands on Saturday had an enormous photo on the front page of a dog wearing a dollar-sign neckband, and the lawyer-with-parrot photo on an inside page. The later editions had both the large dog and a shrunken lawyer-with-bird on the inside page.
Not to criticize the maximum waste of space in a news-shrunken newspaper with a two column-by-13-inch photo of a dog with jewelry, but there was no credit line saying whose photo it was. Probably a stock-agency photo of a dog, but usually a credit line will identify the source.
There also was no credit identifying Chiaki under her final photo for the newspaper. It just reads: Baltimore Sun Photo. I'm told that the lack of a credit on Chiaki's last photo was her own request.
Attention TV News
Since The Baltimore Sun does not seem likely to throw a farewell party for the 60-plus staffers given the bum’s rush last week, the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild is planning a reception for them – for the fired union-jurisdiction staffers as well as the editors and managers who were in the nonunion “merit system.”
The party – to which newspaper alumni and friends are invited – is being held from 6 p.m, to 10 p.m. Thursday in the Rockefeller Room of the Standard Building at 501 St. Paul -- at the corner of the Franklin Street hill just up from the Sun building. Anyone thinking about starting up a real Baltimore/Central Maryland newspaper (or buying the old one) will find plenty of available talent -- top talent!
Also in the works: A job fair for the suddenly unemployed newspaper staffers, beginning at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday (May 6) at St. Ignatius Church, 805 North Calvert St.
Also on Wednesday, the personnel massacre and downward spiral of the newspaper are sure to be the main topic of conversation at the annual luncheon of the Baltimore Sun Retirees Association, beginning at 11 a.m. with a cash bar, at the Engineering Club, 11 West Mount Vernon Place.
The Sun’s firing of many of its best, brightest and most senior employees has been grossly under-reported by the area television news programs that for years have relied on the newspaper to cue its own coverage of what’s happening in and around Baltimore. The old A.S. Abell Co. founded and owned WMAR-TV (Channel 2) until its 1986 sale of The Sun and broadcast properties to Times Mirror Corp. required divestiture under federal regulations. It has in recent years had news partnerships with the various stations, and currently with WJZ-TV (Channel 13).
We’ll see if Channel 13, in particular, takes this hint.
on ‘The Vanishing’
as staff, paper shrink
Something is missing in my Sunday paper – you know, The Baltimore Sun. An entire section has vanished. I seem to recall it as Section B, or Maryland Closeup, and though I'm told it happened a week or two ago, I just noticed yesterday.
Over the past two years, as The Sun was moving its elements around, eliminating some sections and consolidating others, there was usually a note to readers explaining the changes. Sometimes there was even a little audacity in suggesting the changes were improvements.
And after my initial wee-hours posting of this blog, I received an email and a Facebook note from friends who informed me that I missed the note to readers. As one of the fired editors put it, "The section was dropped two weeks ago, and a brief announcement was published saying that some content formerly in the section would be printed in the A section. Not, I concede, a conspicuous notice, but it was there."
I didn't find it on the electronic archive, so I'll have to wander down to the library later to see if I can find a copy of the notice I missed.
The disappearance of Maryland Closeup came just days before the newspaper’s purge of nearly a third of its editing, news and opinion staff through what has been charitably described as “layoffs.”
I called it a massacre. Firings. I had a comment from a reader criticizing my use of the word “fired,” saying it carries an implication that the employees had done something wrong. They hadn’t. But they were fired anyway.
In this world, you don’t have to do anything wrong to get fired. You can do a job better than anyone, and get fired because your higher salary was considered excess baggage by corporate bean-counters.
And these wonderful people, friends I worked with in my former life in the newsroom, did nothing wrong. They did their jobs well, demonstrated their professionalism and dedication by working longer hours than the standard 40 under their union contract (mostly without putting in for overtime), won honors for the newspaper, and were rewarded with unending abuse by the company – including a worthless, arbitrary employee evaluation system intended to justify giving one worker a $50 raise, while another gets $10 or less.
One of my thoughts in asking for a buyout in the newsroom reduction Class of 2007 was not wanting to ever fill out another evaluation of the small newsroom contingent I ostensibly supervised. It didn’t seem to matter what praise I wrote, how I graded. They all did their jobs to the point of excellence, but you couldn’t tell from the raises they would get.
Weights and measures
On a whim Sunday night, I drove down the road to my local Giant supermarket and picked up copies of The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post, carried them over to the produce section and plopped them on a scale.
From a purely size-and-price standpoint, here’s how they measured up: The Post was half a pound heavier, and cost 38 cents less.
And the Post news report had Section B – and a Section C. That’s “Outlook” and “Metro,” respectively. And all three newsy sections, A, B, C, had an ample supply of Washington Post staff bylines, as opposed to The Sun’s sparse news beyond the Baltimore Beltway. (And they were followed by the sections for Sports, Style & Arts, Travel, Business, and a crappy advertising-driven Jobs. Sealed in a plastic bag were the Post's magazine, full comics section, TV Week, Parade, ad inserts and coupons.
Fair to compare? Maybe not. After all, Washington is the nation’s capital and the Post has greater resources and a definitively wider reach in its global coverage. The only purely local story on the front page is about Virginia politics. And Metro has entirely too much Virginia, and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties news for this Baltimore-and-burbs reader. I’ve never understood why The Post so disdains wider coverage of Maryland news, allowing its competitor 30 miles up the B-W Parkway free reign over metro Baltimore for the past two decades.
I’ve never been a Post subscriber. Only The Sun – and I buy it still. I thought about canceling in protest, as some readers of this blog say they have. But I still have friends on the inside, and don’t want to see the rug pulled out from under them through declining circulation numbers despite their own employer’s seeming intent on diminishing its value and angering readers. One equally dismayed newspaper friend suggested we go out and sell subscriptions to The Sun despite it all, in an effort to keep the print product alive.
Seems strange to me that the newspaper has gone to such lengths to get rid of 30-year employees and 30-year readers, though.
Baltimore Sun publisher/president/CEO Timothy E. Ryan (a triple-threat player!) has a “to the readers” note on Page 3 about the newsroom changes and how proud the newspaper is to provide “award-winning journalism to more readers than any other local news media organization.”
“We truly value the more than 1 million people who read us every week.” (Doubtless a one-page online click is counted as one of that million, and people who buy the paper on multiple days count as more than one reader. Numbers are so easy to manipulate.)
There’s also some bragging about how the newspaper benefits in being part of “the Baltimore Sun Media Group (BSMG)” that includes 28 community newspapers in the Baltimore metro area – most if not all of which, the note doesn’t mention, have been cut in staffing and frequency of publication.
That latest note to readers is just spin, I’m afraid. The readers are getting less than ever before, unless they rely on digital sources for their news. There’s an awful lot of readers, or would-be readers, who are not equipped or able to do that, and The Baltimore Sun has fired them, too.
BSMG, hmmmmm. There’s probably other uses for those letters. Maybe I should hold a contest.
The final photo
In recounting the last day at work for veteran, award-winning Sun photographer Chiaki Kawajiri, The Real Muck last week noted her final assignment before being given a mutually tearful layoff by her department boss: A lawyer with his pet bird.
The photo taken Wednesday afternoon appeared in Sunday’s editions, accompanying an article by Personal Finance columnist Eileen Ambrose. The early Sunday edition hitting newsstands on Saturday had an enormous photo on the front page of a dog wearing a dollar-sign neckband, and the lawyer-with-parrot photo on an inside page. The later editions had both the large dog and a shrunken lawyer-with-bird on the inside page.
Not to criticize the maximum waste of space in a news-shrunken newspaper with a two column-by-13-inch photo of a dog with jewelry, but there was no credit line saying whose photo it was. Probably a stock-agency photo of a dog, but usually a credit line will identify the source.
There also was no credit identifying Chiaki under her final photo for the newspaper. It just reads: Baltimore Sun Photo. I'm told that the lack of a credit on Chiaki's last photo was her own request.
Attention TV News
Since The Baltimore Sun does not seem likely to throw a farewell party for the 60-plus staffers given the bum’s rush last week, the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild is planning a reception for them – for the fired union-jurisdiction staffers as well as the editors and managers who were in the nonunion “merit system.”
The party – to which newspaper alumni and friends are invited – is being held from 6 p.m, to 10 p.m. Thursday in the Rockefeller Room of the Standard Building at 501 St. Paul -- at the corner of the Franklin Street hill just up from the Sun building. Anyone thinking about starting up a real Baltimore/Central Maryland newspaper (or buying the old one) will find plenty of available talent -- top talent!
Also in the works: A job fair for the suddenly unemployed newspaper staffers, beginning at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday (May 6) at St. Ignatius Church, 805 North Calvert St.
Also on Wednesday, the personnel massacre and downward spiral of the newspaper are sure to be the main topic of conversation at the annual luncheon of the Baltimore Sun Retirees Association, beginning at 11 a.m. with a cash bar, at the Engineering Club, 11 West Mount Vernon Place.
The Sun’s firing of many of its best, brightest and most senior employees has been grossly under-reported by the area television news programs that for years have relied on the newspaper to cue its own coverage of what’s happening in and around Baltimore. The old A.S. Abell Co. founded and owned WMAR-TV (Channel 2) until its 1986 sale of The Sun and broadcast properties to Times Mirror Corp. required divestiture under federal regulations. It has in recent years had news partnerships with the various stations, and currently with WJZ-TV (Channel 13).
We’ll see if Channel 13, in particular, takes this hint.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Newspaper ironies
Dismantling of print edition
picks up speed as Sun editor
focuses on all things digital
'No longer a newspaper company'
In a talk last week at Johns Hopkins University, top editor J. Montgomery Cook declared – to some public amazement – that The Baltimore Sun is no longer a newspaper company.
Unfortunately, he’s right… or nearly so. It’s becoming clear at every turn that the newspaper is being slashed one staffer, one page, one section at a time, to the point of self-fulfilling prophecy: No longer a newspaper company, soon if not already.
You can hear Monty’s talk online, courtesy of Johns Hopkins, at http://ips.jhu.edu/content/media-center/detail.cfm?mediaId=40&categoryId=5. While his characterization of the company was personally painful to me, as a 40-year, now-retired newsroom writer and editor, I was disturbed by his views on the roles of reporters – comments that seemed in opposition to objective journalism. He speaks of wanting reporters to be “passionate,” in nearly the same breath as he uses the words fairness and balance.
But there’s so much to be upset about these days in the print media and at my old haunt, which just last week eliminated the Tuesday features section – a day on which the section’s focus, ironically, was on the digital age. Monday’s features section had been cut earlier. It seems to be part of a dismantling of the newspaper’s entire features department, as some of its daily content is scattered to parts of the surviving news and sports sections and the staff survivors focus on Sunday sections and online content.
As a subscriber for home delivery, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t notice another recent change – the increase in the street-sale price of the daily newspaper to a dollar. There’s that saying, almost a cliché, about doing more with less. When you purchase the newspaper now, it is a case of less for more.
Departures
Saturday night, friends held a farewell party for Howard Libit, who in nearly 15 years at The Sun had risen from two-year intern reporter in the suburban Howard County office to assistant managing editor for news. He did not get the ax; he got a job offer from a company engaged in corporate communications.
Amid all the turmoil in the newspaper business, and the burdens of overwork imposed on employees and managers trying to keep it and themselves going, the grass on the other side of the fence held obvious appeal. And it is yet another loss of great talent for The Sun, and for print journalism.
He’s escaped just before the next bloodletting. Staffers are expecting word on deep personnel cuts at The Sun within the next two weeks. One top editor has already been told he is leaving – Paul M. Moore, deputy managing editor and former ombudsman for the newspaper (the last to hold that position before it was eliminated).
Moore is listed among the top executives of the newspaper – with Timothy E. Ryan, former vice president for circulation, at the top as publisher, president and CEO, and Monty Cook as editor. Then come Paul Moore and fellow deputy editor Marcia Myers, along with the editor and deputy editor overseeing the opinion pages. There’s also a half-dozen vice presidents for such struggling areas as advertising, marketing, finance, business development, and operations and technology.
Watching the names these days may become kind of like the era when observers noted the faces lining the front of the reviewing stand for the Soviet Union’s or People’s Republic of China’s May Day parades to determine who was still in favor or power.
Some names you rarely see – notable among them the copy editors who read each story and write the headlines, and serve, unheralded, as a last check on accuracy. There’s anticipation that the next bloodletting will shrink their numbers at a time when some of the work of these union-represented professionals is being replaced with content created and edited in Chicago by non-union employees of parent Tribune Co.
Monty’s talk at Hopkins was interesting. He speaks about the importance of The Sun’s investigative and “watchdog” reporting that are to remain part if its content, but also notes the end of the multi-part series. So those investigative stories inevitably are going to be a lot shorter.
And as for “watchdog” content, that has been a matter of investigating why a particular malfunctioning street light hasn’t been fixed, or the trash in an alley hasn’t been removed for weeks or months on end. Matters that a complaint to your City Council representative ought to be able to fix with one phone call are eating up ever-shrinking newspaper space at the expense of serious content. Pothole journalism.
Numbers games
Monty speaks of a transition for the newspaper into new areas brought on by the digital revolution, and how it is evolving with the production of content for whatever information platforms people use. “Every job will have a digital focus,” he says.
Tweets are big these days, after all. But I haven’t figured how they generate revenue. It’s just part of the overall company goal Monty paints to “cement in people’s minds” that when something happens, they turn to The Baltimore Sun for information.
He cites growth in online “page views” and “unique visitors” and claims that “The Sun’s total audience is larger today than it was five years ago.”
But numbers are so easy to manipulate to justify change. Monty, whose specialty in coming to The Sun a few years ago was newspaper design, was the leader in creating its much-maligned free daily tabloid, b – which he claims has 125,000 readers weekly. I don’t know how that compares to the weekly print run, or who counts the copies left in the vending boxes each night, or whether the number is any more useful than that of “unique visitors” tallied on a Web site.
Online page views count the same, whether they come from a Pakistani using a Google search on an arcane topic that matches the wording in a Sun article or, ideally, from a reader in suburban Towson intently clicking on particular stories from the newspaper’s Web site.
Monty does not say outright that the print newspaper, the company’s Mother Ship, is dying.
But it is dying – and being murdered.
Killing The Evening Sun
It reminds me of the earlier murder of The Evening Sun, which was in trouble in the early 1990s as part of the trend of circulation shrinkage for afternoon newspapers. Then owned by Los Angeles-based Times Mirror Corp., The Baltimore Sun took steps intended to speed up the evening newspaper’s death by shrinking and consolidating staffs, then making content pretty much identical in both papers except in typography and style and one small new story in a space atop the front page that became nicknamed “the dynamite hole.”
People who subscribed to both the morning and evening papers pretty quickly made the obvious move of canceling one of them – and some of the more stubborn opted to keep the evening paper. But its circulation dropped close enough to the magic number of 100,000 that the company could more readily use that as an excuse to cease publication.
It didn’t create any goodwill, just alienation. In the Baltimore area, many readers staunchly preferred The Evening Sun and resented the moves that first took away its personality and then shut it down. It would have died eventually. But its closing in 1995 was lacking in grace, in respect for the readers. It was a clumsy killing.
The company is being clumsy now. It is giving readers less reason to buy the newspaper in vastly cutting content and raising the price. The readership base out there is not stupid. The company is pushing Webward, burning the print bridge behind it, and leaving many of its customers on the far shore.
Kissing off the elderly
Monty, in his talk, acknowledged with regret that some changes have been painful -- particularly for older readers who have not made the move to the Internet.
“There is a generational divide in this,” he says, “and I’ll be honest with you, that’s the hard part about transitions.”
I don’t know if he thinks, as I do, that those older readers represent a huge part of the audience for The Baltimore Sun’s print edition. It is an audience that is going to leave sooner than it has to because of the changes, and in my opinion that will accelerate the newspaper’s demise.
I was sorry that a scheduling conflict kept me away from Monty’s talk, which was ably reported by the online Baltimore Brew (http://baltimorebrew.com/blog/?p=1825).
The Brew crew followed up with a report (http://baltimorebrew.com/blog/?p=1892) on a staff reorganization announced at The Sun by Monty a day after his Hopkins talk and geared for increased online focus. Among the changes is the naming of the former assistant managing editor for features, Mary Corey, as “head of print” with duties that sound similar to those of deputy managing editor Marcia Myers.
I’ve always liked both of them, and can’t help but wonder what follows.
Had I been present for Monty’s talk, I would have posed a question not raised by the small Hopkins audience:
“Monty, does Tribune allow you to say ‘no’?”
And I will be watching to see, when the expected round of layoffs is announced, whether publisher/CEO Tim Ryan and Monty Cook will allow The Baltimore Sun to report that news about its own cutback as fully as it reports on layoffs and cutbacks at other companies.
A Tribune lesson for journalists
There’s an amazing account from former Sun reporter David Folkenflik, who now covers the media for National Public Radio, about the layoff of 20-year staffer Lou Carlozo by the Chicago Tribune.
Carlozo, an arts reporter, had been writing at his editors’ behest about the effects of the recession on area families and blogging in recent months in "The Recession Diaries" about his own family's pocketbook concerns, Folkenflik reports. But on Wednesday, Carlozo was told that he was losing his job – and then, after he posted a final blog entry about how the recession had caught up to him, the Tribune removed it or, as they say, “spiked” it, in newspaper lingo for killing a story.
But you can read that last blog entry through Folkenflik’s NPR blog posting at Planet Money: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/media/.
Carlozo also posted an account of his firing, in context as part of a wider Tribune bloodletting, at http://trueslant.com/loucarlozo/2009/04/23/i-am-the-news-today-o-boy-a-recession-writer-gets-laid-off/.
Sadly, it gives me much the same feel of what goes on these days at The Baltimore Sun.
picks up speed as Sun editor
focuses on all things digital
'No longer a newspaper company'
In a talk last week at Johns Hopkins University, top editor J. Montgomery Cook declared – to some public amazement – that The Baltimore Sun is no longer a newspaper company.
Unfortunately, he’s right… or nearly so. It’s becoming clear at every turn that the newspaper is being slashed one staffer, one page, one section at a time, to the point of self-fulfilling prophecy: No longer a newspaper company, soon if not already.
You can hear Monty’s talk online, courtesy of Johns Hopkins, at http://ips.jhu.edu/content/media-center/detail.cfm?mediaId=40&categoryId=5. While his characterization of the company was personally painful to me, as a 40-year, now-retired newsroom writer and editor, I was disturbed by his views on the roles of reporters – comments that seemed in opposition to objective journalism. He speaks of wanting reporters to be “passionate,” in nearly the same breath as he uses the words fairness and balance.
But there’s so much to be upset about these days in the print media and at my old haunt, which just last week eliminated the Tuesday features section – a day on which the section’s focus, ironically, was on the digital age. Monday’s features section had been cut earlier. It seems to be part of a dismantling of the newspaper’s entire features department, as some of its daily content is scattered to parts of the surviving news and sports sections and the staff survivors focus on Sunday sections and online content.
As a subscriber for home delivery, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t notice another recent change – the increase in the street-sale price of the daily newspaper to a dollar. There’s that saying, almost a cliché, about doing more with less. When you purchase the newspaper now, it is a case of less for more.
Departures
Saturday night, friends held a farewell party for Howard Libit, who in nearly 15 years at The Sun had risen from two-year intern reporter in the suburban Howard County office to assistant managing editor for news. He did not get the ax; he got a job offer from a company engaged in corporate communications.
Amid all the turmoil in the newspaper business, and the burdens of overwork imposed on employees and managers trying to keep it and themselves going, the grass on the other side of the fence held obvious appeal. And it is yet another loss of great talent for The Sun, and for print journalism.
He’s escaped just before the next bloodletting. Staffers are expecting word on deep personnel cuts at The Sun within the next two weeks. One top editor has already been told he is leaving – Paul M. Moore, deputy managing editor and former ombudsman for the newspaper (the last to hold that position before it was eliminated).
Moore is listed among the top executives of the newspaper – with Timothy E. Ryan, former vice president for circulation, at the top as publisher, president and CEO, and Monty Cook as editor. Then come Paul Moore and fellow deputy editor Marcia Myers, along with the editor and deputy editor overseeing the opinion pages. There’s also a half-dozen vice presidents for such struggling areas as advertising, marketing, finance, business development, and operations and technology.
Watching the names these days may become kind of like the era when observers noted the faces lining the front of the reviewing stand for the Soviet Union’s or People’s Republic of China’s May Day parades to determine who was still in favor or power.
Some names you rarely see – notable among them the copy editors who read each story and write the headlines, and serve, unheralded, as a last check on accuracy. There’s anticipation that the next bloodletting will shrink their numbers at a time when some of the work of these union-represented professionals is being replaced with content created and edited in Chicago by non-union employees of parent Tribune Co.
Monty’s talk at Hopkins was interesting. He speaks about the importance of The Sun’s investigative and “watchdog” reporting that are to remain part if its content, but also notes the end of the multi-part series. So those investigative stories inevitably are going to be a lot shorter.
And as for “watchdog” content, that has been a matter of investigating why a particular malfunctioning street light hasn’t been fixed, or the trash in an alley hasn’t been removed for weeks or months on end. Matters that a complaint to your City Council representative ought to be able to fix with one phone call are eating up ever-shrinking newspaper space at the expense of serious content. Pothole journalism.
Numbers games
Monty speaks of a transition for the newspaper into new areas brought on by the digital revolution, and how it is evolving with the production of content for whatever information platforms people use. “Every job will have a digital focus,” he says.
Tweets are big these days, after all. But I haven’t figured how they generate revenue. It’s just part of the overall company goal Monty paints to “cement in people’s minds” that when something happens, they turn to The Baltimore Sun for information.
He cites growth in online “page views” and “unique visitors” and claims that “The Sun’s total audience is larger today than it was five years ago.”
But numbers are so easy to manipulate to justify change. Monty, whose specialty in coming to The Sun a few years ago was newspaper design, was the leader in creating its much-maligned free daily tabloid, b – which he claims has 125,000 readers weekly. I don’t know how that compares to the weekly print run, or who counts the copies left in the vending boxes each night, or whether the number is any more useful than that of “unique visitors” tallied on a Web site.
Online page views count the same, whether they come from a Pakistani using a Google search on an arcane topic that matches the wording in a Sun article or, ideally, from a reader in suburban Towson intently clicking on particular stories from the newspaper’s Web site.
Monty does not say outright that the print newspaper, the company’s Mother Ship, is dying.
But it is dying – and being murdered.
Killing The Evening Sun
It reminds me of the earlier murder of The Evening Sun, which was in trouble in the early 1990s as part of the trend of circulation shrinkage for afternoon newspapers. Then owned by Los Angeles-based Times Mirror Corp., The Baltimore Sun took steps intended to speed up the evening newspaper’s death by shrinking and consolidating staffs, then making content pretty much identical in both papers except in typography and style and one small new story in a space atop the front page that became nicknamed “the dynamite hole.”
People who subscribed to both the morning and evening papers pretty quickly made the obvious move of canceling one of them – and some of the more stubborn opted to keep the evening paper. But its circulation dropped close enough to the magic number of 100,000 that the company could more readily use that as an excuse to cease publication.
It didn’t create any goodwill, just alienation. In the Baltimore area, many readers staunchly preferred The Evening Sun and resented the moves that first took away its personality and then shut it down. It would have died eventually. But its closing in 1995 was lacking in grace, in respect for the readers. It was a clumsy killing.
The company is being clumsy now. It is giving readers less reason to buy the newspaper in vastly cutting content and raising the price. The readership base out there is not stupid. The company is pushing Webward, burning the print bridge behind it, and leaving many of its customers on the far shore.
Kissing off the elderly
Monty, in his talk, acknowledged with regret that some changes have been painful -- particularly for older readers who have not made the move to the Internet.
“There is a generational divide in this,” he says, “and I’ll be honest with you, that’s the hard part about transitions.”
I don’t know if he thinks, as I do, that those older readers represent a huge part of the audience for The Baltimore Sun’s print edition. It is an audience that is going to leave sooner than it has to because of the changes, and in my opinion that will accelerate the newspaper’s demise.
I was sorry that a scheduling conflict kept me away from Monty’s talk, which was ably reported by the online Baltimore Brew (http://baltimorebrew.com/blog/?p=1825).
The Brew crew followed up with a report (http://baltimorebrew.com/blog/?p=1892) on a staff reorganization announced at The Sun by Monty a day after his Hopkins talk and geared for increased online focus. Among the changes is the naming of the former assistant managing editor for features, Mary Corey, as “head of print” with duties that sound similar to those of deputy managing editor Marcia Myers.
I’ve always liked both of them, and can’t help but wonder what follows.
Had I been present for Monty’s talk, I would have posed a question not raised by the small Hopkins audience:
“Monty, does Tribune allow you to say ‘no’?”
And I will be watching to see, when the expected round of layoffs is announced, whether publisher/CEO Tim Ryan and Monty Cook will allow The Baltimore Sun to report that news about its own cutback as fully as it reports on layoffs and cutbacks at other companies.
A Tribune lesson for journalists
There’s an amazing account from former Sun reporter David Folkenflik, who now covers the media for National Public Radio, about the layoff of 20-year staffer Lou Carlozo by the Chicago Tribune.
Carlozo, an arts reporter, had been writing at his editors’ behest about the effects of the recession on area families and blogging in recent months in "The Recession Diaries" about his own family's pocketbook concerns, Folkenflik reports. But on Wednesday, Carlozo was told that he was losing his job – and then, after he posted a final blog entry about how the recession had caught up to him, the Tribune removed it or, as they say, “spiked” it, in newspaper lingo for killing a story.
But you can read that last blog entry through Folkenflik’s NPR blog posting at Planet Money: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/media/.
Carlozo also posted an account of his firing, in context as part of a wider Tribune bloodletting, at http://trueslant.com/loucarlozo/2009/04/23/i-am-the-news-today-o-boy-a-recession-writer-gets-laid-off/.
Sadly, it gives me much the same feel of what goes on these days at The Baltimore Sun.
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