Bumping, new layoffs,
a reporter’s job recall keep
personnel door spinning
Five reporters volunteered to leave;
others keep eye out for new pastures
A month after Tribune Co. reapers rudely dispatched nearly a third of the news and editorial staff at The Baltimore Sun, the revolving personnel door is spinning again from the after-effects.
Several laid-off employees have exercised bumping rights under the union contract, moving back to former job classifications – at the cost of jobs or assignment transfers for less-senior staffers.
And in a newsroom seething in angst and discontent, several reporters have taken voluntary layoffs – with the happier result of saving the job of colleague Nick Madigan, and protecting others.
Two weeks and three days after departing the newsroom amid the supportive applause of his friends, Madigan is scheduled to return on Monday thanks to the latest voluntary departures -- of reporters Sara Neufeld, Rona Kobell and Rona Marech. Others leaving by choice are Stephen Kiehl and Tyeesha Dixon, both of whom are taking up the study of law. Given the rapid decline of the newspaper industry, that sounds like a mighty good career move.
Neufeld, as noted in earlier postings here and on her own baltimoresun.com education blog, decided to leave in hopes of saving Madigan’s job – Sara being young and unencumbered by family responsibilities, while Nick is the sole provider for his wife and young son and has a mortgage to pay.
Kobell's farewell note
Kobell, an environmental reporter and mother of a young daughter, was completing a journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan when she made a similar decision. She posted a message about that on her former blog at the newspaper Web site. It said, in part:
This year, I wrote a screenplay. I read good books. I put more miles on my bike than I did on my car. I picked up my daughter early from school and took her out for ice cream and to the library. I went out with my husband. I cooked dinner occasionally. I traveled - to Russia and Argentina and Northern Michigan and New York. I had time - a luxury foreign to journalists and working mothers - to think about what I want. And what I want is to keep doing all of those things. The two journalists in danger of losing their jobs want to keep them; to the extent that I can make that happen, I want to do that, too.
Rona Marech was on maternity leave during the newsroom massacre. Asked about her departure, which was effective this week, she wrote in an email:
Yes, I volunteered for a lay-off…. On July 1, I'm moving to Berlin for the year with my husband and baby. Josh was awarded a fellowship and will be teaching at a university in Berlin (and is also on research leave from his job at U. of Maryland for a semester). I'm hoping to freelance and have an adventure.
In addition to Madigan, the voluntary layoffs protected the jobs of reporters James Drew and Nicole Fuller – even as multi-talented copy editor Arthur Hirsch and sports writer Childs Walker bump back to the metro news reporting staff.
Bumping back to copy desk jobs
Coming back from layoffs, according to colleagues, are copy editors Connie Knox, a longtime union officer; Mark Fleming, who worked on the newspaper’s 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Shipbreakers” series by former Sun reporters Will Englund and Gary Cohn; and Jeffrey Landaw, for years a late-edition rear guard for breaking global news whose incredible breadth of knowledge saved The Sun from innumerable errors. As The Sun moved toward importing all its national and world news from Tribune’s nonunion content production staff in Chicago, Landaw found himself working as a copy editor in the sports department – where arcane facts of the likes of eastern European history are pretty much irrelevant.
Unfortunately, their returns meant layoffs for colleagues Norine Schiller, who had been at The Sun for 11 years, and Helen Jones, who had been at the newspaper longer – but because earlier positions she held have been eliminated, according to a colleague, could count only her nine years as a copy editor for seniority purposes.
Norine said she had been anticipating her own layoff as she watched the personnel numbers game play out – and like others losing jobs, she had no ill feelings for those bumping back inside to remain employed: “I don’t begrudge the people coming back one bit.”
Unlike the initial firings and layoffs that sent some 61 employees out without notice in less than 24 hours at the end of April, the subsequent personnel moves – layoffs, bumping and the departure and apparently lone company recall, of Madigan – have seemed deferentially polite by comparison.
Schiller said she might have as much as a week of work remaining before her tenure ends. A month ago, colleagues getting axed arrived for their evening shift and found their computer access denied. Electronic pass cards that got employees into the staff garage would not open the gate as they were leaving. Carried out amid the presence of a beefed up security guard presence, the firings and layoffs were a virtual ambush utterly lacking in respect for dedicated professionals.
Morale: How low can it go?
Despite the company’s more mannerly demeanor in the latest reshuffling of personnel, morale in the newsroom has reached a new low, according to accounts from those still there.
They tell of extreme disorganization as the newsroom staffing reassignments announced in detail less than 24 hours after the mass firings and layoffs moved reporters from their focus on important beats toward Web contributions and blogging. New editors were assigned to oversee areas of coverage in which they lacked experience or knowledge, and some found themselves writing headlines and overseeing page layouts for the first time. Reporters who had worked in partnership with well-versed editors found themselves alone in decision-making on coverage, and their stories getting minimal editing before rolling on the press.
And they’ve seen the only employee protection from arbitrary dismissal – the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild – eviscerated by buyouts, layoffs and selective transfers to newly-created Web-oriented jobs outside union jurisdiction. The contract expires in 2011, and union-jurisdiction survivors of the Purge of 2009 will find what little job security remains to be on very shaky ground.
For the folks getting their jobs back, there is inevitably fear that the return to work may prove no better than a reprieve. And it makes for a strange atmosphere when many, if not most, of the employees are keeping an eye out for jobs elsewhere and the opportunity to escape an oppressive and depressing work environment.
No stranger to layoffs
For Norine Schiller, a layoff is not a new experience. But at least this one was better-timed.
Layoffs around 1979-1980 from her first two newspaper jobs, at the Catonsville edition of the Star and at the Carroll County Evening Sun, came a day before and a day after Christmas; and after marrying and moving to Connecticut, she was among nearly 50 people shown the exit at the New Haven Register in 1990 – in her birthday week, she said.
As Norine noted in a Facebook comment after receiving the news on her latest layoff Thursday:
I have had a month to expect and mentally prepare for this possibility, so I am not floored by it -- unlike all the others who were shown the door the same day. I have made some volunteering arrangements to broaden my experience a little bit. Also, the other three times I was laid off, it was in fall or right at Christmas, so ... hey, summer vacation!
Her husband, Don Schiller, also was a Sun copy editor and was one of several people who briefly held the job I left as night metro editor two years ago in the Buyout Class of 2007. Don missed a buyout opportunity by a month last September as he took an editing job on a private industry’s internal magazine. “Right now we’re pretty happy he did this,” Norine said said of her husband’s new job. They are the parents of two sons, ages 10 and 12.
Looking around for freelance writing opportunities, or a new job, Norine said that for herself and some others leaving the newsroom, “It feels like we’ve gone back 20 years in our careers.”
Arthur Hirsch, meanwhile, was looking forward after three years on the copy desk to his imminent return to “the ringside seat” he enjoyed as a reporter.
“I learned a lot; the copy desk was a very good experience,” said Hirsch, who since 2002 has been teaching nonfiction writing as an adjunct instructor at Johns Hopkins University. He added that he missed the role of being an observer of people’s lives and “being able to ask questions.”
Hirsch, bumping over from the copy desk, is expected to be moving into an open news beat he had inquired about as “a faith and values writer” – working with editor and former Sun religion and national reporter Matthew Hay Brown. “He knows more about the subject than I do. I can learn from him.”
He was relieved that in returning to the reporting ranks, thanks to the voluntary departures of Neufeld, Kobell, Marech, Kiehl and Dixon, “I will not be pushing someone else out the door.”
Timely symposium looks to future
"The End of Local News? If Communities Lose Newspapers, Who Will Fill the Void?" That’s the title for a symposium in Baltimore scheduled from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 2, in Westminster Hall at 519 West Fayette Street. (Not to be gloomy and doomy, but the hall is a former church built in the cemetery where Edgar Allan Poe is buried.)
Panelists include Baltimore Sun editor Monty Cook (he probably still won’t apologize for the rude manner of last month’s staff massacre); Mark Potts, former reporter for the Chicago Tribune and Washington Post, co-founder of WashingtonPost.com and proponent of hyperlocal, user-generated news sites; Jayne Miller, chief investigative reporter, WBAL-TV; John J. Oliver Jr., publisher, The Afro-American newspaper; and Timothy A. Franklin, Louis A.Weil, Jr. Endowed Chair, Indiana University School of Journalism, who is Cook’s predecessor as Sun editor.
The symposium was arranged by Sandra A. Banisky, who left her job as deputy managing editor of The Sun to become the Abell Professor in Baltimore Journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Details on the event, which is open to the public : http://newsdesk.umd.edu/sociss/release.cfm?ArticleID=1905
More food for thought
If you really want another peek at the future of local journalism, check out this look at Tribune’s next big thing about to have its rollout in Chicago – and likely a model for what’s to come at The Baltimore Sun. (Personal prediction: When it comes to Baltimore, The Sun’s journalistically embarrassing free tabloid ‘b’ will be quietly rolled into the Web project and then killed.)
This comes, by the way, via the blog of symposium panelist Potts:
http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2009/05/the-future-is-chicagonow.html
Yet another very worthwhile read, particularly considering that its author, James Warren, is a former Chicago Tribune managing editor (and, as my not-so-shabby friend and former colleague Bill Glauber notes, a terrific journalist): http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/james_warren/2009/05/shhhh_newspaper_publishers_are_quietly_holding_a_very_very_important_conclave_today_will_you_soon_be.php.
Finally, this appears at baltimoresun.com on Saturday May 30 -- yup, I update these posts occasionally -- on the union concessions vote aimed at saving a couple of Maine newspapers. Interestingly, The Sun provided far more detail on this story than on its own recent cutbacks . But it is an interesting development in the wider story of newspaper failures: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/sns-ap-us-newspaper-sale,0,2814742.story.
That should be enough to keep you off the streets and out of trouble until Tuesday.
Showing posts with label Tribune Co.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tribune Co.. Show all posts
Friday, May 29, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Newspapers: Errors to regret
Fired national reporter
gets his last Sun byline
too late for the edition
David Wood moves on
with thanks for the memories
Maybe this is what happens in a newspaper world without copy editors – or without enough copy editors. Or without enough people around to talk about what’s right or wrong in a story or about a story, or how it’s played on the front page.
The case in point was on the front page of The Baltimore Sun on Monday: A Memorial Day-timed story on the growing problem of care, treatment and after-effects for war veterans physically and mentally maimed by the enemy’s almost ubiquitous weapon of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan, the improvised explosive device.
The story was terrific.
The byline wasn’t. It read, “BY A BALTIMORE SUN STAFF WRITER.”
Some readers called the city desk, praising the story and wondering at the lack of a name in the byline.
Credit goes to the newspaper staffers who, after learning of the byline omission, belatedly added the name of the author atop the story on the Baltimoresun.com Web site – and a correction at the end of the story as well. Tuesday's print edition had a correction in the usual place, at the bottom of Page 2 -- but the correction had an error. It said the story had appeared on Sunday's front page when, in fact, it was in the Monday paper. But that's an easy mistake to make, seeing as how Memorial Day feels like a Sunday. Deja-vu will get you every time.
What the print edition correction lacked was the customary expression of regret for an error. It needed even more regret, though -- a public expression of regret that the author, distinguished reporter David Wood, was fired without notice nearly four weeks ago along with nearly a third of the news and editorial staff in the latest cost-cutting move ordered by The Baltimore Sun’s absentee overlords in Chicago.
And, on the Web edition, that is why even after David Wood’s byline was added, you won’t find the usual @baltsun.com behind it. He doesn’t live there anymore.
Interestingly, his biography still lives there – or still did on Monday – at Baltimoresun.com. I found it using a Google search of “David Wood reporter.” It begins this way:
David Wood, 62, has been a journalist since 1970, a staff correspondent for Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Newhouse News Service and The Baltimore Sun. He covers military issues, foreign affairs and combat operations, and is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting. He recently won the Headliner Award for his Iraq coverage.
Actually, Wood will turn 64 next month, so the biographical sketch is a little dated. And for a little more than a week, he’s had a new job writing for AOL’s politicsdaily.com – one of the few, if not the only, recently expelled Sun staffer to land a new gig.
The Real Muck had reported his unexpected departure from The Sun in an earlier posting on the personnel massacre and its aftermath, but the newspaper’s byline omission provided an excuse to call him for some details about his brief stint there. As night metro editor, unfortunately, I had only talked to him a few times before my voluntary buyout and retirement from The Sun two years ago.
Wood had mostly good words for The Sun, which offered him a job three years ago after he had taken a buyout from Newhouse.
“I went up to Baltimore and went into the newsroom, and it was this wonderful crazy place where people were shouting at each other about stories across the newsroom and jabbering into telephones,” Wood said. “It was a wonderfully vibrant, hard-driving place…. We were going to do great journalism.”
He added: “It was a really good place to be for a couple of years.”
Wood's hiring in July 2006 was probably the last of a national reporter by The Baltimore Sun before owner Tribune Co.’s plunge into private ownership and bankruptcy, and his coverage of the Defense Department included travel to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He worked mostly out of the newspaper’s Washington Bureau, where a large national staff had operated in The Sun’s glory days – but at the end had just two people remaining, Wood and Paul West.
The weekend preceding the mass firings, Wood said, he had been “horribly sick” but managed to work that Monday and produce a story for the front page. The next day he was out sick again, and that Wednesday was coming back from a visit to his doctor when “my wife called and said there were all these layoffs at The Sun.”
Wood said he called Paul West about the situation, and was told that “it’s worse than you know – you were one of the ones fired. I was thinking of driving to your house and telling you.”
A tough week to imagine.
“I still haven’t called downtown [to The Sun] to talk about it,” Wood said, adding that he did get a call from former national and deputy managing editor Marcia Myers expressing her regret. (Myers was assigned to new duties and a lesser title under the subsequent newspaper staff reorganization; her husband, deputy opinion editor Larry Williams, lost his job in the cutbacks.)
Wood said he was not immediately aware that his last story to appear in The Sun was missing his byline – and had largely forgotten about the story itself. He had worked on it “for almost a year,” Wood said, and “turned in a version in March.” It was a longish story, and space in the newspaper was tight, so it was held – “and then it suddenly appeared,” Wood said of its front-page play on Monday.
‘‘Nobody from the copy desk ever called to check on anything… they just ran it, which is a little unnerving. I love copy editors calling and saying, ‘You said this, but did you mean to say this?' I love those people.”
Copy editors, he said, improve stories – and protect writers from mistakes. It’s an oversight role that has been substantially reduced at The Baltimore Sun and other newspapers across the nation.
The byline omission evidently was an innocent mistake, but particularly embarrassing for the newspaper under the circumstances of the massive staff reduction that sent more than 60 employees packing in a hurry.
Wood said he received a call Monday from newsroom veteran David Nitkin, recently promoted to the new job of “head of Maryland news” – a title shared with Dave Alexander, who had been the online deputy editor. He said Nitkin was calling from vacation, “horribly upset” at the mistake.
“He thought it was just a glitch,” Wood said. “Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But he was just terrific to call.”
Looking back on his not-quite three years at The Sun, Wood said, “I got a good ride, a chance to travel a lot. The Sun got a lot of good stuff from me and I got a good ride from them. I was fortunate to be able to accept that kind of opportunity.”
And now he’s moved on, to a job at politicsdaily.com that Wood calls “a terrific honor and responsibility.”
“I was very lucky to get a job like that,” he said. “There’s a lot of reporters out there who I wish were working, because we need them.”
More grief to come
Crunch day at The Baltimore Sun is Wednesday – the deadline for eligible layoff victims to claim rights under the union contract to “bump” back into job classifications they formerly held, which will determine whether some of the least senior surviving newsroom employees lose their jobs.
Several reporters have volunteered for severance -- notable among them education writer Sara Neufeld, who decided to leave in order to save a colleague’s job.
Since Neufeld’s gesture, I hear at least two others have requested layoffs – Rona Marech and Rona Kobell.
The Sun might well have been the only U.S. newspaper with two reporters named Rona.
Now it’s apparently going to be Ronaless.
Kobell, a longtime friend who has a young daughter and just completed a journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan, posted her farewell at her Baltimore Sun blog and it is well worth reading at http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bay_environment/blog.
Sadly, it seems obvious this won’t be the last farewell at the newspaper.
Another Memorial Day tale
Bonnie and I took a cruise Saturday aboard the S.S. John W. Brown, the last World War II Liberty Ship in operation -- thanks to its restoration by the Baltimore-based nonprofit Project Liberty Ship. We joined more than 400 paying passengers for the six-hour jaunt on the Patapsco River and Chesapeake Bay, including one old soldier who last sailed on the Brown on his journey to the war zone in 1943.
You can check out the story, and some of Bonnie's photos, at http://baltimorebrew.com/blog/?p=2642#more-2642.
gets his last Sun byline
too late for the edition
David Wood moves on
with thanks for the memories
Maybe this is what happens in a newspaper world without copy editors – or without enough copy editors. Or without enough people around to talk about what’s right or wrong in a story or about a story, or how it’s played on the front page.
The case in point was on the front page of The Baltimore Sun on Monday: A Memorial Day-timed story on the growing problem of care, treatment and after-effects for war veterans physically and mentally maimed by the enemy’s almost ubiquitous weapon of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan, the improvised explosive device.
The story was terrific.
The byline wasn’t. It read, “BY A BALTIMORE SUN STAFF WRITER.”
Some readers called the city desk, praising the story and wondering at the lack of a name in the byline.
Credit goes to the newspaper staffers who, after learning of the byline omission, belatedly added the name of the author atop the story on the Baltimoresun.com Web site – and a correction at the end of the story as well. Tuesday's print edition had a correction in the usual place, at the bottom of Page 2 -- but the correction had an error. It said the story had appeared on Sunday's front page when, in fact, it was in the Monday paper. But that's an easy mistake to make, seeing as how Memorial Day feels like a Sunday. Deja-vu will get you every time.
What the print edition correction lacked was the customary expression of regret for an error. It needed even more regret, though -- a public expression of regret that the author, distinguished reporter David Wood, was fired without notice nearly four weeks ago along with nearly a third of the news and editorial staff in the latest cost-cutting move ordered by The Baltimore Sun’s absentee overlords in Chicago.
And, on the Web edition, that is why even after David Wood’s byline was added, you won’t find the usual @baltsun.com behind it. He doesn’t live there anymore.
Interestingly, his biography still lives there – or still did on Monday – at Baltimoresun.com. I found it using a Google search of “David Wood reporter.” It begins this way:
David Wood, 62, has been a journalist since 1970, a staff correspondent for Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Newhouse News Service and The Baltimore Sun. He covers military issues, foreign affairs and combat operations, and is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting. He recently won the Headliner Award for his Iraq coverage.
Actually, Wood will turn 64 next month, so the biographical sketch is a little dated. And for a little more than a week, he’s had a new job writing for AOL’s politicsdaily.com – one of the few, if not the only, recently expelled Sun staffer to land a new gig.
The Real Muck had reported his unexpected departure from The Sun in an earlier posting on the personnel massacre and its aftermath, but the newspaper’s byline omission provided an excuse to call him for some details about his brief stint there. As night metro editor, unfortunately, I had only talked to him a few times before my voluntary buyout and retirement from The Sun two years ago.
Wood had mostly good words for The Sun, which offered him a job three years ago after he had taken a buyout from Newhouse.
“I went up to Baltimore and went into the newsroom, and it was this wonderful crazy place where people were shouting at each other about stories across the newsroom and jabbering into telephones,” Wood said. “It was a wonderfully vibrant, hard-driving place…. We were going to do great journalism.”
He added: “It was a really good place to be for a couple of years.”
Wood's hiring in July 2006 was probably the last of a national reporter by The Baltimore Sun before owner Tribune Co.’s plunge into private ownership and bankruptcy, and his coverage of the Defense Department included travel to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He worked mostly out of the newspaper’s Washington Bureau, where a large national staff had operated in The Sun’s glory days – but at the end had just two people remaining, Wood and Paul West.
The weekend preceding the mass firings, Wood said, he had been “horribly sick” but managed to work that Monday and produce a story for the front page. The next day he was out sick again, and that Wednesday was coming back from a visit to his doctor when “my wife called and said there were all these layoffs at The Sun.”
Wood said he called Paul West about the situation, and was told that “it’s worse than you know – you were one of the ones fired. I was thinking of driving to your house and telling you.”
A tough week to imagine.
“I still haven’t called downtown [to The Sun] to talk about it,” Wood said, adding that he did get a call from former national and deputy managing editor Marcia Myers expressing her regret. (Myers was assigned to new duties and a lesser title under the subsequent newspaper staff reorganization; her husband, deputy opinion editor Larry Williams, lost his job in the cutbacks.)
Wood said he was not immediately aware that his last story to appear in The Sun was missing his byline – and had largely forgotten about the story itself. He had worked on it “for almost a year,” Wood said, and “turned in a version in March.” It was a longish story, and space in the newspaper was tight, so it was held – “and then it suddenly appeared,” Wood said of its front-page play on Monday.
‘‘Nobody from the copy desk ever called to check on anything… they just ran it, which is a little unnerving. I love copy editors calling and saying, ‘You said this, but did you mean to say this?' I love those people.”
Copy editors, he said, improve stories – and protect writers from mistakes. It’s an oversight role that has been substantially reduced at The Baltimore Sun and other newspapers across the nation.
The byline omission evidently was an innocent mistake, but particularly embarrassing for the newspaper under the circumstances of the massive staff reduction that sent more than 60 employees packing in a hurry.
Wood said he received a call Monday from newsroom veteran David Nitkin, recently promoted to the new job of “head of Maryland news” – a title shared with Dave Alexander, who had been the online deputy editor. He said Nitkin was calling from vacation, “horribly upset” at the mistake.
“He thought it was just a glitch,” Wood said. “Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But he was just terrific to call.”
Looking back on his not-quite three years at The Sun, Wood said, “I got a good ride, a chance to travel a lot. The Sun got a lot of good stuff from me and I got a good ride from them. I was fortunate to be able to accept that kind of opportunity.”
And now he’s moved on, to a job at politicsdaily.com that Wood calls “a terrific honor and responsibility.”
“I was very lucky to get a job like that,” he said. “There’s a lot of reporters out there who I wish were working, because we need them.”
More grief to come
Crunch day at The Baltimore Sun is Wednesday – the deadline for eligible layoff victims to claim rights under the union contract to “bump” back into job classifications they formerly held, which will determine whether some of the least senior surviving newsroom employees lose their jobs.
Several reporters have volunteered for severance -- notable among them education writer Sara Neufeld, who decided to leave in order to save a colleague’s job.
Since Neufeld’s gesture, I hear at least two others have requested layoffs – Rona Marech and Rona Kobell.
The Sun might well have been the only U.S. newspaper with two reporters named Rona.
Now it’s apparently going to be Ronaless.
Kobell, a longtime friend who has a young daughter and just completed a journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan, posted her farewell at her Baltimore Sun blog and it is well worth reading at http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bay_environment/blog.
Sadly, it seems obvious this won’t be the last farewell at the newspaper.
Another Memorial Day tale
Bonnie and I took a cruise Saturday aboard the S.S. John W. Brown, the last World War II Liberty Ship in operation -- thanks to its restoration by the Baltimore-based nonprofit Project Liberty Ship. We joined more than 400 paying passengers for the six-hour jaunt on the Patapsco River and Chesapeake Bay, including one old soldier who last sailed on the Brown on his journey to the war zone in 1943.
You can check out the story, and some of Bonnie's photos, at http://baltimorebrew.com/blog/?p=2642#more-2642.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Newspapers: A very unmerry birthday
Little cause to celebrate
as Baltimore Sun turns 172,
a shadow of its storied past
The Baltimore Sun turned 172 on Sunday, but the birthday was not much cause for celebration as the pain and uncertainty from its mass firings/layoffs of nearly a third of the news and editorial staff continues.
Latest to go appears to be reporter Nick Madigan, but unlike many others at the newspaper in recent weeks, Nick saw his layoff coming – in painfully slow motion.
Even an act of amazing generosity by a colleague, aimed at saving his job at the cost of her own, could not save Nick because of the seniority numbers game that determined who is in line for the personnel axe.
Jobs started rolling like severed heads at The Sun at the end of April, in two days of instant layoffs that targeted news and editorial managers and then union-jurisdiction staffers. The bloodbath, carried out amid extra security in the newspaper building, claimed at least 61 jobs.
But because of a union contract – a rarity in the anti-union Tribune empire – seniority protected some longtime employees initially given layoffs, enabling them to bump into job classifications they had previously held. Longtime copy editors, for example, could go back to being reporters.
Who was vulnerable to being bumped? Some of the younger staffers were protected by the company with moves into newly-created jobs that were outside union jurisdiction – enabling the company to zero in for firing on older, and higher-paid, employees. Some others with only a few years at The Sun stayed in jobs they loved and hunkered down as best they could in these uncertain times for the print newspaper industry.
The night of May 8, when the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild held a party – a wake, really – to honor both the union and nonunion victims of the purge, it was apparent that job bumping was imminent and some still-employed colleagues like Nick Madigan were on shaky ground. No one was comfortable with the prospect of staffers wanting to keep their jobs having to bump others out the door. It was just another ugly reality of life under the Tribune Company.
That’s when veteran education reporter Sara Neufeld told Nick that, to save his job, she was going to volunteer for a layoff. She’s young, and hasn’t started a family, while Nick is married, the father of a four-year-old son, and faced with a mortgage on the house he and his wife bought after moving from Los Angeles to Baltimore four years ago.
Nick said he didn’t want Sara to quit her job if the only reason was to save his, but that she assured him she had wanted to pursue other opportunities and suddenly found herself with a reason to do so. As it turned out, Sara’s act didn’t help Nick directly, but rather another employee further up the seniority chain.
Still, Nick was stunned at what he called Sara’s “amazingly selfless” offer, a far cry from the manner in which many of their colleagues were driven out of the newspaper they loved.
“I was very touched by what Sara did, and it proves that there are some very fine people at the paper,” said Nick, who left the newsroom Friday to a round of applause from colleagues. “I’m sad to leave The Sun, not only because I'll miss the crew of characters who put it out every day – some of them good friends and all of them very dedicated – but also because its newsroom is probably the last one I'll work for, and after a 29-year career in newspapers and wire services, that's hard to take.”
Nick has written from around the United States and more than 20 other countries, including France, Morocco, Britain, Mexico, Haiti and Cuba. For The New York Times, he covered the Columbia shuttle disaster, the trials of Michael Jackson and Winona Ryder, the William Kennedy Smith rape case and other stories in California, Texas, North Carolina, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. He also worked on the staffs of the Palm Beach Post, Variety and United Press International, for which he covered the Invasion of Grenada among other stories throughout the Caribbean.
He left his position as a contract writer for The New York Times’ Los Angeles bureau in 2005 to take the job as national media writer for The Sun. But after two years, The Sun, which had begun cutting its personnel and narrowing the scope of its staff’s coverage, eliminated Nick’s beat. He was assigned to the “Sun Rising” team, which was tasked with beefing up coverage of breaking news for the Web site and expanding stories for subsequent print editions. More recently, he’s been covering criminal justice stories, notably the case of Nicholas Browning, who murdered his parents and brothers, and the Rodgers Forge parents who starved their infant son.
On one of my increasingly rare visits to the newsroom a few months ago, I found Nick working a police story and expressed hope that he hadn’t been thrust into a beat he didn’t want or enjoy. But Nick said, enthusiastically, that he was doing the job he always loved – news reporter. He had no complaint about the role.
Not that it much matters now, but Nick said he received his last “performance evaluation” from the company Wednesday, and it was, he said, “pretty damn good.”
(The company went to enormous lengths to create its performance-evaluation system and force a change in the union contract so that annual raises could be based on merit – although it proved to be grossly arbitrary in determining the winners and losers, and was more demoralizing than constructive. And now that The Sun is simply firing people – many of them among the most talented and experienced – it proves the evaluation system to have been an irrelevant waste of time and resources.)
As for Sara, a Sun staffer since 2003 and earlier an education reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, she emailed a note to friends about her decision, in addition to announcing her imminent departure on her education-beat blog at baltimoresun.com. (The responses from readers are telling about how highly her work was regarded by the community that The Sun ostensibly wants to reach online.)
In her note to friends, Sara wrote of the reporters with low seniority about to lose their jobs through bumping:
“One is a friend who is the sole provider of his family of three and stands to lose his house. As he was telling me about his plight last week, I found myself blurting out that I'd like to give my job to save his.
“I was shocked by my words as soon as they were out of my mouth, but ever since then, it's been increasingly clear to me that leaving now will be the right thing for me as well as for whatever reporter whose job I save (unfortunately, I don't think it will be his, but it depends on how the bumping situation plays out over the next few days).
“I'll get five months of severance and vacation time, and I am confident from some job inquiries I've made recently that something will come through during that period. And, though I'm really sad to leave some wonderful colleagues and a great beat, I'll get out of what has become an increasingly unhappy environment. I would also be incredibly sad to leave my adopted home of Baltimore, but so far most of my prospects are in New York City, which would put me with my sister and a quick train ride from the rest of my family.
“So, I don't know what's next, except that 16 years after I fell in love with newspaper reporting as a high school sophomore, it's time to try something new, likely in education. I'm lucky that I've developed a second passion for the subject I've covered for nearly a decade, and public schools aren't going away nearly as quickly as newspapers are.”
Today, Monday, will be Sara’s last day at The Sun.
Nick said his treatment by top Sun editors was at least humane, given the advance notice a week earlier from Sam Davis, the newsroom’s assistant managing editor for administration who has found himself in the unfortunate role of a messenger with bad news for so many employees. Nick said he was advised to hang on to the possibility of a call-back until the bumping deadline of May 27 should others ahead of him in seniority rankings decide not to come back or, like Sara, volunteer for a layoff.
But even if he manages a return, there is no certainty of a future for anyone at The Baltimore Sun these days.
Sunday, as noted earlier, was the venerable newspaper’s 172nd birthday. When an institution is that old, such occasions rarely get notice – except maybe at numbers divisible by 25, when the marketing folks take advantage of it as a sales pitch.
The last such occasion included a specially fat commemorative Sunday edition of The Sun and this slogan: “The Story of Our Lives for 150 Years.”
I have that slogan sitting in front of me, emblazoned on a white commemorative mug produced for the 150th birthday. The metallic gold lettering is beginning to chip away with the passage of time and the mug’s delivery of an occasional dose of caffeine.
The Sun will turn 175 on May 17, 2012 – if it lives.
A lot of people have their doubts.
as Baltimore Sun turns 172,
a shadow of its storied past
The Baltimore Sun turned 172 on Sunday, but the birthday was not much cause for celebration as the pain and uncertainty from its mass firings/layoffs of nearly a third of the news and editorial staff continues.
Latest to go appears to be reporter Nick Madigan, but unlike many others at the newspaper in recent weeks, Nick saw his layoff coming – in painfully slow motion.
Even an act of amazing generosity by a colleague, aimed at saving his job at the cost of her own, could not save Nick because of the seniority numbers game that determined who is in line for the personnel axe.
Jobs started rolling like severed heads at The Sun at the end of April, in two days of instant layoffs that targeted news and editorial managers and then union-jurisdiction staffers. The bloodbath, carried out amid extra security in the newspaper building, claimed at least 61 jobs.
But because of a union contract – a rarity in the anti-union Tribune empire – seniority protected some longtime employees initially given layoffs, enabling them to bump into job classifications they had previously held. Longtime copy editors, for example, could go back to being reporters.
Who was vulnerable to being bumped? Some of the younger staffers were protected by the company with moves into newly-created jobs that were outside union jurisdiction – enabling the company to zero in for firing on older, and higher-paid, employees. Some others with only a few years at The Sun stayed in jobs they loved and hunkered down as best they could in these uncertain times for the print newspaper industry.
The night of May 8, when the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild held a party – a wake, really – to honor both the union and nonunion victims of the purge, it was apparent that job bumping was imminent and some still-employed colleagues like Nick Madigan were on shaky ground. No one was comfortable with the prospect of staffers wanting to keep their jobs having to bump others out the door. It was just another ugly reality of life under the Tribune Company.
That’s when veteran education reporter Sara Neufeld told Nick that, to save his job, she was going to volunteer for a layoff. She’s young, and hasn’t started a family, while Nick is married, the father of a four-year-old son, and faced with a mortgage on the house he and his wife bought after moving from Los Angeles to Baltimore four years ago.
Nick said he didn’t want Sara to quit her job if the only reason was to save his, but that she assured him she had wanted to pursue other opportunities and suddenly found herself with a reason to do so. As it turned out, Sara’s act didn’t help Nick directly, but rather another employee further up the seniority chain.
Still, Nick was stunned at what he called Sara’s “amazingly selfless” offer, a far cry from the manner in which many of their colleagues were driven out of the newspaper they loved.
“I was very touched by what Sara did, and it proves that there are some very fine people at the paper,” said Nick, who left the newsroom Friday to a round of applause from colleagues. “I’m sad to leave The Sun, not only because I'll miss the crew of characters who put it out every day – some of them good friends and all of them very dedicated – but also because its newsroom is probably the last one I'll work for, and after a 29-year career in newspapers and wire services, that's hard to take.”
Nick has written from around the United States and more than 20 other countries, including France, Morocco, Britain, Mexico, Haiti and Cuba. For The New York Times, he covered the Columbia shuttle disaster, the trials of Michael Jackson and Winona Ryder, the William Kennedy Smith rape case and other stories in California, Texas, North Carolina, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. He also worked on the staffs of the Palm Beach Post, Variety and United Press International, for which he covered the Invasion of Grenada among other stories throughout the Caribbean.
He left his position as a contract writer for The New York Times’ Los Angeles bureau in 2005 to take the job as national media writer for The Sun. But after two years, The Sun, which had begun cutting its personnel and narrowing the scope of its staff’s coverage, eliminated Nick’s beat. He was assigned to the “Sun Rising” team, which was tasked with beefing up coverage of breaking news for the Web site and expanding stories for subsequent print editions. More recently, he’s been covering criminal justice stories, notably the case of Nicholas Browning, who murdered his parents and brothers, and the Rodgers Forge parents who starved their infant son.
On one of my increasingly rare visits to the newsroom a few months ago, I found Nick working a police story and expressed hope that he hadn’t been thrust into a beat he didn’t want or enjoy. But Nick said, enthusiastically, that he was doing the job he always loved – news reporter. He had no complaint about the role.
Not that it much matters now, but Nick said he received his last “performance evaluation” from the company Wednesday, and it was, he said, “pretty damn good.”
(The company went to enormous lengths to create its performance-evaluation system and force a change in the union contract so that annual raises could be based on merit – although it proved to be grossly arbitrary in determining the winners and losers, and was more demoralizing than constructive. And now that The Sun is simply firing people – many of them among the most talented and experienced – it proves the evaluation system to have been an irrelevant waste of time and resources.)
As for Sara, a Sun staffer since 2003 and earlier an education reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, she emailed a note to friends about her decision, in addition to announcing her imminent departure on her education-beat blog at baltimoresun.com. (The responses from readers are telling about how highly her work was regarded by the community that The Sun ostensibly wants to reach online.)
In her note to friends, Sara wrote of the reporters with low seniority about to lose their jobs through bumping:
“One is a friend who is the sole provider of his family of three and stands to lose his house. As he was telling me about his plight last week, I found myself blurting out that I'd like to give my job to save his.
“I was shocked by my words as soon as they were out of my mouth, but ever since then, it's been increasingly clear to me that leaving now will be the right thing for me as well as for whatever reporter whose job I save (unfortunately, I don't think it will be his, but it depends on how the bumping situation plays out over the next few days).
“I'll get five months of severance and vacation time, and I am confident from some job inquiries I've made recently that something will come through during that period. And, though I'm really sad to leave some wonderful colleagues and a great beat, I'll get out of what has become an increasingly unhappy environment. I would also be incredibly sad to leave my adopted home of Baltimore, but so far most of my prospects are in New York City, which would put me with my sister and a quick train ride from the rest of my family.
“So, I don't know what's next, except that 16 years after I fell in love with newspaper reporting as a high school sophomore, it's time to try something new, likely in education. I'm lucky that I've developed a second passion for the subject I've covered for nearly a decade, and public schools aren't going away nearly as quickly as newspapers are.”
Today, Monday, will be Sara’s last day at The Sun.
Nick said his treatment by top Sun editors was at least humane, given the advance notice a week earlier from Sam Davis, the newsroom’s assistant managing editor for administration who has found himself in the unfortunate role of a messenger with bad news for so many employees. Nick said he was advised to hang on to the possibility of a call-back until the bumping deadline of May 27 should others ahead of him in seniority rankings decide not to come back or, like Sara, volunteer for a layoff.
But even if he manages a return, there is no certainty of a future for anyone at The Baltimore Sun these days.
Sunday, as noted earlier, was the venerable newspaper’s 172nd birthday. When an institution is that old, such occasions rarely get notice – except maybe at numbers divisible by 25, when the marketing folks take advantage of it as a sales pitch.
The last such occasion included a specially fat commemorative Sunday edition of The Sun and this slogan: “The Story of Our Lives for 150 Years.”
I have that slogan sitting in front of me, emblazoned on a white commemorative mug produced for the 150th birthday. The metallic gold lettering is beginning to chip away with the passage of time and the mug’s delivery of an occasional dose of caffeine.
The Sun will turn 175 on May 17, 2012 – if it lives.
A lot of people have their doubts.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Saving The Baltimore Sun
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
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
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.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Sun massacre: More on newspapers
As the big get smaller,
a little competitor expands
through community focus
Introducing a new ‘Voice’
So how incredible is this: Last month, a newspaper was born.
Nope, not a big one like the dying Baltimore Sun. It’s a little thing called the Pasadena Voice, started up as a free sister monthly to the nearby and long-established Severna Park Voice ( the former Severna Park Village Voice) by the Lancione family owners. It’s full of stories about… well, Pasadena, Maryland.
And right under its name atop the front page, the paper declares: “Proudly Serving The Community.”
I have the April 22 edition, the second issue, on my cluttered kitchen table next to my laptop. Its top-page stories focus on “signature programs” envisioned for the community’s two high schools, and the annual season-opening festivities and parade for area kids’ Lake Shore Baseball.
News just above the fold: “Mountain Road Library Branch Faces An Uncertain Future.” I read that story through to the jump on Page 3. The library, at the end of an under-used strip mall, is just a mile from my home.
I pretty much skipped past the B-section, Pasadena Sports, which has more space for content than the daily sports section of The Sun. After all, my two kids are grown and really were not all that athletically competitive, and there was no news on the Baltimore Orioles….
But I took a keen interest in Section-C, Arts & Entertainment, featuring a top-page story on a topic very close to home: My wife Bonnie Schupp’s photographic exhibit, two years in the making, was having its debut showing in Annapolis. (Sorry, by the time you are reading this blog, the show’s over and the photos are stacked again in crates in our basement.)
Every section of the Voice has an element very much in common: Local. It’s heavy on names, and little ordinary pictures of people, and seems to have plenty of local advertising.
Watching the slow collapse of the nearly 172-year-old Baltimore Sun, once renowned for its coverage of news spanning the globe, it seems ironic that the Lanciones might pull this off – despite the heavy presence here of the twice-a-week Maryland Gazette, which lays claim to being the oldest continuously published newspaper in the nation.
The Gazette is a satellite publication in the larger Annapolis Capital family of newspapers, which recently was cutting back on production expenses and staffing. Maybe that put enough blood in the water to bring on competition.
Food for thought as The Sun goes down: Parent Tribune Company owns much of the Baltimore area’s suburban news and advertising competition through its Patuxent newspapers subsidiary. Like their parent, the Patuxent publications have been cut way back, at a time when the Lanciones were expanding their turf in neighboring Anne Arundel County.
The little guy seems to be making it, while the Tribune empire is in disarray.
I just wish there was more of the news I want in the Pasadena Voice. Come to think of it, I wish there was more of the news I want in The Baltimore Sun.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
A security guard was still posted on the Centre Street skywalk between The Sun building and the employee parking garage in the wake of this week’s personnel massacre in which nearly a third of the newsroom staff was fired. The company had beefed up security Tuesday in advance of executing its massive purge.
It brought to mind the strike some two decades back when The Sun beefed up security in an unseemly manner, hiring a security company with militaristic goons wearing blue berets. The jackboot fashionista force immediately became the object of taunting and ridicule, and striking members of the Newspaper Guild chipped in to purchase the entire stock of 300 Central American dictatorship military-style brown berets from the now-defunct Sunny’s Surplus chain for sake of mockery.
In times of trouble, a good laugh is worth a few bucks.
So here’s today’s good laugh, free, courtesy of a Facebook note from another survivor: A guard on the skywalk beat on one shift today was seen eating four bags of potato chips and reading a copy of USA Today.
How meticulous the planning?
A friend still employed at The Sun was curious about the seniority bumping rights for the copy editors receiving layoff notices. They mostly seemed to have held higher classifications as slot editors or makeup person, but under the union contract might have the right to return to their previous classification as copy editor and bump less-senior staffers into layoffs. Not a pleasant prospect, either, but that’s the theoretical protection of having been employed longer under a union contract.
“There’s nobody for them to bump,” my friend observed, noting that many of the younger, less-experienced copy editors seemed to have been moved to new job titles under the detailed newsroom reorganization plan revealed Thursday evening, a day after the layoff massacre. The new jobs are geared toward online operations and do not appear to be in union jurisdiction, putting those employees under the company “merit system.”
“An audience engagement person, whatever that is,” my friend said, describing one type of new job for The Sun’s brave new world.
“And where was the sign-up sheet for all these jobs?”
And that raises other questions, like whether the jobs were offered to specific employees rather than posted for open application by all qualified newsroom personnel – and whether the company acted legally in ousting older (and likely higher-paid) employees.
One of the editors fired Tuesday evening reported that his severance package included a statement to sign precluding legal action against the company. That may be one of the prices for collecting severance pay.
And even if an employee decides to file suit, the terminated editor said, what is there to gain when the company is bankrupt? A place in line with the other creditors?
Add to the layoff list…
Names keep coming in through email, Facebook messages and blog comments… among them, after nine years, features page designer Carrie Lyle (who sent me a note saying she was one of the victims). I also got this note from fired editorial page designer Todd Windsor:
“I'd also like to point out that the longtime letters editor, Franz Schneiderman, was among those let go Wednesday. Most of you probably don't know how much care Franz put into selecting each day's letters from among dozens and dozens of submissions, then assembling and editing them into an intelligent package... but I think it'll be apparent to everybody now that he's gone.”
And there’s been a few small factual errors that have been corrected in the blog postings as they are being pointed out to me. That’s what comes of working late into the night, without the benefit of a copy editor as wingman. That’s something survivors at The Sun will be getting used to.
Remember this, however: Avoid use of the adjective “notorious.”
And be careful around “guilty” -- it’s very easy to forget the word “not” that you meant to have in front of it, until the lawyers call.
Many will be seeking jobs
The Real Muck received a comment from my former Sun colleague Dan Thanh Dang, who is plugging away at her own blog (ConsumerWingman.com) after leaving a consumer beat at the newspaper last year. In case you haven’t read through the many wonderful comments posted here, this one merits repeating:
I want to ask again, please, if anyone knows of jobs (inside or outside of the industry) that can be filled by our friends in search of jobs, e-mail me or Gus. You can reach us at consumrgrrl@gmail.com or GusSentementes@gmail.com. We run a private jobs blog for Sun staffers in look of work. If you want to join the jobs blog, just e-mail Gus.
We've had some great tips already from a Towson journalism professor, from Spin and from a great, former colleague of ours, Bill Glauber.
Please everyone, keep the leads coming. Every lead counts and our friends can use the help.
a little competitor expands
through community focus
Introducing a new ‘Voice’
So how incredible is this: Last month, a newspaper was born.
Nope, not a big one like the dying Baltimore Sun. It’s a little thing called the Pasadena Voice, started up as a free sister monthly to the nearby and long-established Severna Park Voice ( the former Severna Park Village Voice) by the Lancione family owners. It’s full of stories about… well, Pasadena, Maryland.
And right under its name atop the front page, the paper declares: “Proudly Serving The Community.”
I have the April 22 edition, the second issue, on my cluttered kitchen table next to my laptop. Its top-page stories focus on “signature programs” envisioned for the community’s two high schools, and the annual season-opening festivities and parade for area kids’ Lake Shore Baseball.
News just above the fold: “Mountain Road Library Branch Faces An Uncertain Future.” I read that story through to the jump on Page 3. The library, at the end of an under-used strip mall, is just a mile from my home.
I pretty much skipped past the B-section, Pasadena Sports, which has more space for content than the daily sports section of The Sun. After all, my two kids are grown and really were not all that athletically competitive, and there was no news on the Baltimore Orioles….
But I took a keen interest in Section-C, Arts & Entertainment, featuring a top-page story on a topic very close to home: My wife Bonnie Schupp’s photographic exhibit, two years in the making, was having its debut showing in Annapolis. (Sorry, by the time you are reading this blog, the show’s over and the photos are stacked again in crates in our basement.)
Every section of the Voice has an element very much in common: Local. It’s heavy on names, and little ordinary pictures of people, and seems to have plenty of local advertising.
Watching the slow collapse of the nearly 172-year-old Baltimore Sun, once renowned for its coverage of news spanning the globe, it seems ironic that the Lanciones might pull this off – despite the heavy presence here of the twice-a-week Maryland Gazette, which lays claim to being the oldest continuously published newspaper in the nation.
The Gazette is a satellite publication in the larger Annapolis Capital family of newspapers, which recently was cutting back on production expenses and staffing. Maybe that put enough blood in the water to bring on competition.
Food for thought as The Sun goes down: Parent Tribune Company owns much of the Baltimore area’s suburban news and advertising competition through its Patuxent newspapers subsidiary. Like their parent, the Patuxent publications have been cut way back, at a time when the Lanciones were expanding their turf in neighboring Anne Arundel County.
The little guy seems to be making it, while the Tribune empire is in disarray.
I just wish there was more of the news I want in the Pasadena Voice. Come to think of it, I wish there was more of the news I want in The Baltimore Sun.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
A security guard was still posted on the Centre Street skywalk between The Sun building and the employee parking garage in the wake of this week’s personnel massacre in which nearly a third of the newsroom staff was fired. The company had beefed up security Tuesday in advance of executing its massive purge.
It brought to mind the strike some two decades back when The Sun beefed up security in an unseemly manner, hiring a security company with militaristic goons wearing blue berets. The jackboot fashionista force immediately became the object of taunting and ridicule, and striking members of the Newspaper Guild chipped in to purchase the entire stock of 300 Central American dictatorship military-style brown berets from the now-defunct Sunny’s Surplus chain for sake of mockery.
In times of trouble, a good laugh is worth a few bucks.
So here’s today’s good laugh, free, courtesy of a Facebook note from another survivor: A guard on the skywalk beat on one shift today was seen eating four bags of potato chips and reading a copy of USA Today.
How meticulous the planning?
A friend still employed at The Sun was curious about the seniority bumping rights for the copy editors receiving layoff notices. They mostly seemed to have held higher classifications as slot editors or makeup person, but under the union contract might have the right to return to their previous classification as copy editor and bump less-senior staffers into layoffs. Not a pleasant prospect, either, but that’s the theoretical protection of having been employed longer under a union contract.
“There’s nobody for them to bump,” my friend observed, noting that many of the younger, less-experienced copy editors seemed to have been moved to new job titles under the detailed newsroom reorganization plan revealed Thursday evening, a day after the layoff massacre. The new jobs are geared toward online operations and do not appear to be in union jurisdiction, putting those employees under the company “merit system.”
“An audience engagement person, whatever that is,” my friend said, describing one type of new job for The Sun’s brave new world.
“And where was the sign-up sheet for all these jobs?”
And that raises other questions, like whether the jobs were offered to specific employees rather than posted for open application by all qualified newsroom personnel – and whether the company acted legally in ousting older (and likely higher-paid) employees.
One of the editors fired Tuesday evening reported that his severance package included a statement to sign precluding legal action against the company. That may be one of the prices for collecting severance pay.
And even if an employee decides to file suit, the terminated editor said, what is there to gain when the company is bankrupt? A place in line with the other creditors?
Add to the layoff list…
Names keep coming in through email, Facebook messages and blog comments… among them, after nine years, features page designer Carrie Lyle (who sent me a note saying she was one of the victims). I also got this note from fired editorial page designer Todd Windsor:
“I'd also like to point out that the longtime letters editor, Franz Schneiderman, was among those let go Wednesday. Most of you probably don't know how much care Franz put into selecting each day's letters from among dozens and dozens of submissions, then assembling and editing them into an intelligent package... but I think it'll be apparent to everybody now that he's gone.”
And there’s been a few small factual errors that have been corrected in the blog postings as they are being pointed out to me. That’s what comes of working late into the night, without the benefit of a copy editor as wingman. That’s something survivors at The Sun will be getting used to.
Remember this, however: Avoid use of the adjective “notorious.”
And be careful around “guilty” -- it’s very easy to forget the word “not” that you meant to have in front of it, until the lawyers call.
Many will be seeking jobs
The Real Muck received a comment from my former Sun colleague Dan Thanh Dang, who is plugging away at her own blog (ConsumerWingman.com) after leaving a consumer beat at the newspaper last year. In case you haven’t read through the many wonderful comments posted here, this one merits repeating:
I want to ask again, please, if anyone knows of jobs (inside or outside of the industry) that can be filled by our friends in search of jobs, e-mail me or Gus. You can reach us at consumrgrrl@gmail.com or GusSentementes@gmail.com. We run a private jobs blog for Sun staffers in look of work. If you want to join the jobs blog, just e-mail Gus.
We've had some great tips already from a Towson journalism professor, from Spin and from a great, former colleague of ours, Bill Glauber.
Please everyone, keep the leads coming. Every lead counts and our friends can use the help.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Baltimore Sun Massacre
Quarter of newsroom staff
fired in a bloodbath
by bankrupt Tribune Co.
Tears, cheers for departees
on a dark day at The Sun
Tribune Company reapers whacked their way through the Baltimore Sun newsroom Tuesday evening and Wednesday afternoon in a bloodbath of layoffs that decimated the staff – editors, columnists, photographers, copy editors, page designers and support personnel.
Except in the sports department, the reporting staff seemed to remain mostly intact – but with some alterations in duties as the company reorients the newspaper toward an online and local news focus.
As much as I expected (and in my last blog posting foreshadowed) new layoffs at The Sun, my former home of 40 years, the extent of the slaughter was unimaginable: At least 15 editors, and 40 other staffers. The Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild issued a statement saying Tribune was cutting 27 percent of the already reduced newspaper staff. Online accounts put the total number of layoffs as high as 61.
With names of the casualties mounting in back-and-forth Facebook messages and updates, it seemed like waiting for word on passengers after an airline disaster. And with messages received overnight here at The Real Muck, names of more apparent victims have been added to this account Thursday morning.
Little more than a week ago, new top editor Monty Cook gave a talk at Johns Hopkins University about how The Baltimore Sun was no longer a newspaper company and had to adapt to the digital age. Nonetheless, he singled out a few particular employees for praise – including my longtime friend and colleague Ann LoLordo who, as opinion editor, oversaw the editorial page and the online “second opinion” blog.
Tuesday evening, LoLordo, the newspaper’s former Jerusalem Bureau chief among other key reporting positions in her storied career, was among at least 15 management people ushered out the door. Accounts that these key editors – some, like Ann, having dedicated more than a quarter-century of their lives to the newspaper – were given 15 minutes to get out of the building and watched over by a beefed-up contingent of security guards could not be confirmed.
But clearly there was not much notice. Ann LoLordo was still listed atop Wednesday’s Opinion page, along with deputy opinion editor Larry E. Williams, who also was sent packing. Of the four news and opinion editors listed under the names of publisher/CEO Timothy E. Ryan and editor J. Montgomery Cook, only Larry Williams’ wife, deputy managing editor Marcia Myers, seemed to have survived the purge. The other deputy, Paul M. Moore, was told earlier that he is leaving – but not immediately and he apparently remained on staff Wednesday.
Forget the Derby
Sports reporter Bill Ordine had his tickets and reservations to cover the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, but instead was packing up his desk Wednesday afternoon. Reached by phone, Ordine said he had been expecting to cover the race but was not surprised at the sudden change in plans because “I was pretty low on the [Newspaper] Guild seniority list.”
A longtime sportswriter in Philadelphia, Ordine came to the Baltimore paper as an assistant city editor before going back to his specialty and a Guild- jurisdiction job. His byline topped the lede story, on horse racing safety, in Wednesday’s sports section.
Below the fold of the morning newspaper was popular sports columnist Rick Maese. With the Los Angeles Angels in town, Maese was writing about the team’s Western Maryland-raised pitcher Nick Adenhart, whose anticipated return would never happen. Adenhart was killed in a car accident three weeks ago, hours after pitching his first game of the baseball season for the Angels. It may have been Maese’s last column in The Sun.
Wednesday afternoon, Maese was back at work at Oriole Park doing an interview when he got the news of his layoff by telephone, according to accounts from colleagues at the newspaper.
Also getting the ax, according to various accounts: Sports columnist David Steele, and sports editors Ray Frager and George VanDaniker.
Other casualties, according to word trickling out through Facebook messages among friends and through telephone interviews, are at least eight members of the newspaper’s stellar photographic staff: editor Chuck Weiss; photographers Monica Lopossay, Glenn Fawcett, Chiaki Kawajiri, Liz Malby and Doug Kapustin; and photo technicians Danielle Bradley and Denise Sanders.
Shopping bags and tears
Ellie Baublitz, who put in 22 years and four months as a Sun editorial assistant after a few years as a community news freelancer, wore a spritely yellow outfit to work Wednesday, to “cheer people up” -- but having heard from a newsroom confidant of the Tuesday Night Massacre, she came prepared.
“I stuffed two shopping bags into my briefcase, just in case I needed them.”
About 2 p.m., as the newsroom awaited an expected announcement, Ellie and fellow editorial assistant Fay Lande were summoned by a top editor into his office and told of their layoffs.
Ellie came out in tears and, by one reporter’s account, “That really broke the newsroom up, when Ellie broke up.”
In a telephone chat Wednesday night, Ellie acknowledged the account as “pretty accurate,” and recounted how colleagues cheered and applauded staffers leaving the building after getting the same fate.
“It was pretty ugly down there,” Ellie said. “They probably did me a favor. The last couple of years have been really bad.”
For Ellie, that included the death of one of her three children and transfer by the newspaper from one suburban office to another, in shutdown after shutdown, until she was commuting from her home in rural Carroll County into the city each day.
She had an interesting spin on the timing of the layoffs. “Friday [May 1] starts the new vacation year, so they had to get rid of us before then. I know how the jackals work.”
After Ellie and Fay got the word, one reporter said, “it was like the Angel of Death walking around the newsroom.”
Designers done in
Staff artists Shirdell McDonald and Wes Harvey, former business editor Bernie Kohn, pop music critic Roshod Ollison, librarian Phyllis Kisner (40 years at The Sun)… all are said to be among the Tribune departees, as well as page designers Dave Zeiler (who also wrote an Apple a Day blog on Apple Computer news), Bill Wachsberger, Todd Windsor and Tracy Logsdon Dieter.
Wachsberger immediately fired off a Facebook message, saying: “it's done. i'm officially laid off and headed to o'sheas. good luck to the survivors.” Others joined the party at Mick O’Shea’s pub, celebrating what was left to celebrate – one another.
Bernie Kohn survived an earlier dismantling of his business section and its staff, and was overseeing what little investigative journalism remained at the paper. Until Monday, when his term in office ended, Kohn had been president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
Wednesday night, the copy desk was mostly vacant. Its chief, John McIntyre, who authored a highly-regarded Sun blog on editing and language, had been fired Tuesday night. According to an unofficial account from the newsroom, much of his current and former staff – some of my close friends in the newsroom, given my last six years there as night metropolitan editor – got the ax, among them: Mike Kane, Beth Hughes, Peggy Cunningham, Mark Fleming (copy editor on The Sun’s 1998 Pulitzer-winning Shipbreakers investigation), Paul Bendel-Simso, Jeffrey Landaw (who was on vacation in Prague). Also whacked: Connie Knox, former Guild president and longtime union activist.
However, the status of the copy editors remained murky, as all those listed appeared to have higher job titles and may have "bumping" rights to return to lesser status -- unfortunately, at the expense of colleagues with lesser seniority, newsroom sources said.
“There’s so few people [on the copy desk], I can’t tell who’s gone forever or who’s off,” a newsroom veteran said, quietly, in a brief telephone chat from the belly of the beast.
In his final posting for his blog at The Sun (http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog), McIntyre was gracious and eloquent despite being fired.
“I expect to continue blogging elsewhere, but you will no longer find me at my post here,” McIntyre ended. “In addition to colleagues who have been great fun, I have had the good fortune to collect a remarkable corps of loyal readers, and I salute you all with gratitude and affection. You have enriched my life.”
DCRTV.com appeared to have the first big listing of the toll of editors, which also included Patricia Fanning, who oversaw medical and science stories (and was held in highest regard by the reporters who worked with her); regional editor Jay Apperson and his counties editors Joe DeCarlo, Dan Clemens and Bill Caufield; and Eileen Canzian, a state editor and former reporter whose tenure at The Sun goes back three decades.
Fanning was said to be editing a story when she got the tap on her shoulder.
Who they gonna call?
Steve Auerweck, a longtime staffer who oversaw newsroom computer operations, was terminated – leaving no one instantly available to help reporters or editors unlock frozen stories or, in what he considered the most important element of his job, act as a liaison between the news operation and Information Technology departments.
So who they gonna call? “There’s the Help Desk in Orlando,” Auerweck said, adding that there was also “someone from IT” in the newspaper building during operational hours. “Clearly they made the decision that what I do can be handled by the Help Desk. It will work for some things; it will fall apart for others.”
Steve's first words after I reached him at home Wednesday night: "I didn't think they could shock me anymore, but they did."
High security for Exodus
Newspaper staffers confirmed that the added security Tuesday evening, as editors were canned, included a guard posted on the skywalk across Centre Street between the building and the employee garage.
“There were security guards stationed in the building and at the end of the bridge… different faces you don’t always see,” said DeCarlo, the editor for Anne Arundel County news. “Additional guards. You’ve got to stop and think, the people we’re talking about here -- nothing bad’s going to happen with that group. This is top- and mid-level management. It’s probably just procedure; they do this for any purge.”
Apperson met with DeCarlo and Clemens and told them he had been fired; they had been unable to find Caulfield, but learned soon after that he was in another office being told of his own termination.
Amid the growing turmoil and shock as colleagues gathered at desks of the departing, DeCarlo said he managed over about an hour and a half to pack up his stuff.
“When I walked out of the newsroom [Tuesday], I said to a couple of people, “The way we put out the paper Monday night will never happen again. It can’t be. Maybe Chicago [corporate home to Tribune and its flagship newspaper] thinks that’s a good idea. We’ll see.”
According to the Newspaper Guild, “Since Tribune acquired The Sun in 1999, the newsroom staff has been cut by more than 60 percent to currently 148 employees from roughly 420.
According to several newsroom sources, The Sun is expected to increase its dependence on content from Chicago – helped by a transition to a computer system that links all the newspapers in Tribune’s bankrupt empire. Some pages likely will have modules left open for local news which the remaining Sun staff will produce.
And that switch to the design style of the Chicago Tribune is coming soon to a newspaper near you.
Addendum:
Overnight messages since the initial "massacre" posting included this one from a friend still on the inside:
If you want a description of what it's like to be a survivor, you can use this unattributed quote:"It's a little like being the turkey who survives Thanksgiving but knows Christmas is a month away."
fired in a bloodbath
by bankrupt Tribune Co.
Tears, cheers for departees
on a dark day at The Sun
Tribune Company reapers whacked their way through the Baltimore Sun newsroom Tuesday evening and Wednesday afternoon in a bloodbath of layoffs that decimated the staff – editors, columnists, photographers, copy editors, page designers and support personnel.
Except in the sports department, the reporting staff seemed to remain mostly intact – but with some alterations in duties as the company reorients the newspaper toward an online and local news focus.
As much as I expected (and in my last blog posting foreshadowed) new layoffs at The Sun, my former home of 40 years, the extent of the slaughter was unimaginable: At least 15 editors, and 40 other staffers. The Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild issued a statement saying Tribune was cutting 27 percent of the already reduced newspaper staff. Online accounts put the total number of layoffs as high as 61.
With names of the casualties mounting in back-and-forth Facebook messages and updates, it seemed like waiting for word on passengers after an airline disaster. And with messages received overnight here at The Real Muck, names of more apparent victims have been added to this account Thursday morning.
Little more than a week ago, new top editor Monty Cook gave a talk at Johns Hopkins University about how The Baltimore Sun was no longer a newspaper company and had to adapt to the digital age. Nonetheless, he singled out a few particular employees for praise – including my longtime friend and colleague Ann LoLordo who, as opinion editor, oversaw the editorial page and the online “second opinion” blog.
Tuesday evening, LoLordo, the newspaper’s former Jerusalem Bureau chief among other key reporting positions in her storied career, was among at least 15 management people ushered out the door. Accounts that these key editors – some, like Ann, having dedicated more than a quarter-century of their lives to the newspaper – were given 15 minutes to get out of the building and watched over by a beefed-up contingent of security guards could not be confirmed.
But clearly there was not much notice. Ann LoLordo was still listed atop Wednesday’s Opinion page, along with deputy opinion editor Larry E. Williams, who also was sent packing. Of the four news and opinion editors listed under the names of publisher/CEO Timothy E. Ryan and editor J. Montgomery Cook, only Larry Williams’ wife, deputy managing editor Marcia Myers, seemed to have survived the purge. The other deputy, Paul M. Moore, was told earlier that he is leaving – but not immediately and he apparently remained on staff Wednesday.
Forget the Derby
Sports reporter Bill Ordine had his tickets and reservations to cover the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, but instead was packing up his desk Wednesday afternoon. Reached by phone, Ordine said he had been expecting to cover the race but was not surprised at the sudden change in plans because “I was pretty low on the [Newspaper] Guild seniority list.”
A longtime sportswriter in Philadelphia, Ordine came to the Baltimore paper as an assistant city editor before going back to his specialty and a Guild- jurisdiction job. His byline topped the lede story, on horse racing safety, in Wednesday’s sports section.
Below the fold of the morning newspaper was popular sports columnist Rick Maese. With the Los Angeles Angels in town, Maese was writing about the team’s Western Maryland-raised pitcher Nick Adenhart, whose anticipated return would never happen. Adenhart was killed in a car accident three weeks ago, hours after pitching his first game of the baseball season for the Angels. It may have been Maese’s last column in The Sun.
Wednesday afternoon, Maese was back at work at Oriole Park doing an interview when he got the news of his layoff by telephone, according to accounts from colleagues at the newspaper.
Also getting the ax, according to various accounts: Sports columnist David Steele, and sports editors Ray Frager and George VanDaniker.
Other casualties, according to word trickling out through Facebook messages among friends and through telephone interviews, are at least eight members of the newspaper’s stellar photographic staff: editor Chuck Weiss; photographers Monica Lopossay, Glenn Fawcett, Chiaki Kawajiri, Liz Malby and Doug Kapustin; and photo technicians Danielle Bradley and Denise Sanders.
Shopping bags and tears
Ellie Baublitz, who put in 22 years and four months as a Sun editorial assistant after a few years as a community news freelancer, wore a spritely yellow outfit to work Wednesday, to “cheer people up” -- but having heard from a newsroom confidant of the Tuesday Night Massacre, she came prepared.
“I stuffed two shopping bags into my briefcase, just in case I needed them.”
About 2 p.m., as the newsroom awaited an expected announcement, Ellie and fellow editorial assistant Fay Lande were summoned by a top editor into his office and told of their layoffs.
Ellie came out in tears and, by one reporter’s account, “That really broke the newsroom up, when Ellie broke up.”
In a telephone chat Wednesday night, Ellie acknowledged the account as “pretty accurate,” and recounted how colleagues cheered and applauded staffers leaving the building after getting the same fate.
“It was pretty ugly down there,” Ellie said. “They probably did me a favor. The last couple of years have been really bad.”
For Ellie, that included the death of one of her three children and transfer by the newspaper from one suburban office to another, in shutdown after shutdown, until she was commuting from her home in rural Carroll County into the city each day.
She had an interesting spin on the timing of the layoffs. “Friday [May 1] starts the new vacation year, so they had to get rid of us before then. I know how the jackals work.”
After Ellie and Fay got the word, one reporter said, “it was like the Angel of Death walking around the newsroom.”
Designers done in
Staff artists Shirdell McDonald and Wes Harvey, former business editor Bernie Kohn, pop music critic Roshod Ollison, librarian Phyllis Kisner (40 years at The Sun)… all are said to be among the Tribune departees, as well as page designers Dave Zeiler (who also wrote an Apple a Day blog on Apple Computer news), Bill Wachsberger, Todd Windsor and Tracy Logsdon Dieter.
Wachsberger immediately fired off a Facebook message, saying: “it's done. i'm officially laid off and headed to o'sheas. good luck to the survivors.” Others joined the party at Mick O’Shea’s pub, celebrating what was left to celebrate – one another.
Bernie Kohn survived an earlier dismantling of his business section and its staff, and was overseeing what little investigative journalism remained at the paper. Until Monday, when his term in office ended, Kohn had been president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
Wednesday night, the copy desk was mostly vacant. Its chief, John McIntyre, who authored a highly-regarded Sun blog on editing and language, had been fired Tuesday night. According to an unofficial account from the newsroom, much of his current and former staff – some of my close friends in the newsroom, given my last six years there as night metropolitan editor – got the ax, among them: Mike Kane, Beth Hughes, Peggy Cunningham, Mark Fleming (copy editor on The Sun’s 1998 Pulitzer-winning Shipbreakers investigation), Paul Bendel-Simso, Jeffrey Landaw (who was on vacation in Prague). Also whacked: Connie Knox, former Guild president and longtime union activist.
However, the status of the copy editors remained murky, as all those listed appeared to have higher job titles and may have "bumping" rights to return to lesser status -- unfortunately, at the expense of colleagues with lesser seniority, newsroom sources said.
“There’s so few people [on the copy desk], I can’t tell who’s gone forever or who’s off,” a newsroom veteran said, quietly, in a brief telephone chat from the belly of the beast.
In his final posting for his blog at The Sun (http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog), McIntyre was gracious and eloquent despite being fired.
“I expect to continue blogging elsewhere, but you will no longer find me at my post here,” McIntyre ended. “In addition to colleagues who have been great fun, I have had the good fortune to collect a remarkable corps of loyal readers, and I salute you all with gratitude and affection. You have enriched my life.”
DCRTV.com appeared to have the first big listing of the toll of editors, which also included Patricia Fanning, who oversaw medical and science stories (and was held in highest regard by the reporters who worked with her); regional editor Jay Apperson and his counties editors Joe DeCarlo, Dan Clemens and Bill Caufield; and Eileen Canzian, a state editor and former reporter whose tenure at The Sun goes back three decades.
Fanning was said to be editing a story when she got the tap on her shoulder.
Who they gonna call?
Steve Auerweck, a longtime staffer who oversaw newsroom computer operations, was terminated – leaving no one instantly available to help reporters or editors unlock frozen stories or, in what he considered the most important element of his job, act as a liaison between the news operation and Information Technology departments.
So who they gonna call? “There’s the Help Desk in Orlando,” Auerweck said, adding that there was also “someone from IT” in the newspaper building during operational hours. “Clearly they made the decision that what I do can be handled by the Help Desk. It will work for some things; it will fall apart for others.”
Steve's first words after I reached him at home Wednesday night: "I didn't think they could shock me anymore, but they did."
High security for Exodus
Newspaper staffers confirmed that the added security Tuesday evening, as editors were canned, included a guard posted on the skywalk across Centre Street between the building and the employee garage.
“There were security guards stationed in the building and at the end of the bridge… different faces you don’t always see,” said DeCarlo, the editor for Anne Arundel County news. “Additional guards. You’ve got to stop and think, the people we’re talking about here -- nothing bad’s going to happen with that group. This is top- and mid-level management. It’s probably just procedure; they do this for any purge.”
Apperson met with DeCarlo and Clemens and told them he had been fired; they had been unable to find Caulfield, but learned soon after that he was in another office being told of his own termination.
Amid the growing turmoil and shock as colleagues gathered at desks of the departing, DeCarlo said he managed over about an hour and a half to pack up his stuff.
“When I walked out of the newsroom [Tuesday], I said to a couple of people, “The way we put out the paper Monday night will never happen again. It can’t be. Maybe Chicago [corporate home to Tribune and its flagship newspaper] thinks that’s a good idea. We’ll see.”
According to the Newspaper Guild, “Since Tribune acquired The Sun in 1999, the newsroom staff has been cut by more than 60 percent to currently 148 employees from roughly 420.
According to several newsroom sources, The Sun is expected to increase its dependence on content from Chicago – helped by a transition to a computer system that links all the newspapers in Tribune’s bankrupt empire. Some pages likely will have modules left open for local news which the remaining Sun staff will produce.
And that switch to the design style of the Chicago Tribune is coming soon to a newspaper near you.
Addendum:
Overnight messages since the initial "massacre" posting included this one from a friend still on the inside:
If you want a description of what it's like to be a survivor, you can use this unattributed quote:"It's a little like being the turkey who survives Thanksgiving but knows Christmas is a month away."
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.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Celebrating Police Blotter
Baltimore Sun staff honors
veteran reporter Richard Irwin
for 30 years of crime news
In a morale boost for a troubled newsroom, the staff of The Baltimore Sun had cause for a little celebration Thursday night: The 30th anniversary of longtime cops reporter Richard Irwin’s Police Blotter.
Likely the continuously most-read element inside the newspaper, along with obituaries, the local version of Police Blotter first appeared in the Baltimore News American in February 1979. Its authors were Dick Irwin, Bill Lally and Robert Blatchley.
Seven years later, Hearst Corp. shut down the News American – an afternoon daily that competed head-on with the Baltimore Evening Sun and, to a lesser extent, the morning paper that was then simply called The Sun (Baltimore was formally added to its name and front-page design only a few months ago).
Dick Irwin was surprised when The Evening Sun called, offering a job. It was the same job Dick had just lost with the demise of his newspaper, as a police reporter chiefly responsible for the Blotter. And when The Evening Sun was euthanized by then-owner Times Mirror Corp., the morning newspaper became Dick’s home.
It was my privilege during six years as night metro editor to work with Dick, editing his Police Blotter and shepherding it into the Maryland section from 2001 to 2007. And it was especially wonderful to witness his dedication, night after night, making telephone calls to every police station in the city and Baltimore County in search of the crime reports that were the grist for Blotter – not the murders that make headlines, although he would write them as separate stories, but the endless procession of vandalism, burglary, armed robbery, auto theft, trespassing… even assaults, rapes and lesser shootings… that are so much an unfortunate part of the urban America experience.
Why is it so popular with readers? I always figured it was close to home, reporting police district by police district the crimes that are happening to our neighbors and, on rare occasions, even to newsroom staffers. No one, it seems, is immune to being a crime victim. It could happen to you.
Dick always took it as a personal affront when police would refuse to divulge what he rightfully insisted was public information – people have a right to know details about the crimes committed in their communities, the names of people arrested (heaven help us all when police in this nation can make secret arrests), even the names of cops who, rightfully or not, shoot people. And he loves reporting on cops who perform their jobs especially well, solving crimes or helping a community, and rarely would get public credit anywhere else.
For thirty years, Dick Irwin has been fighting for that noble cause, into the wee hours when most of us are asleep. He arrives in the newsroom around 5 p.m., and when the final edition is done near 2 a.m., he’s still there, making the calls to gather information for the next day’s paper, one police station at a time.
Occasionally, there’ll be a cop who doesn’t recognize the name of Dick Irwin. It’s a cop who will never make detective.
You can find a longer report on the Police Blotter anniversary, a brief video interview of Dick Irwin, and a collection of some entertaining Blotter highlights compiled over the years by now-retired chief makeup editor Tom Gibbons and myself, at crime columnist Peter Hermann’s Baltimore Sun blog at http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.hermann20feb20,0,550771.column
On an uphappier note
The Baltimore Sun is shrinking again – not just in staffing through continuing buyouts and layoffs, but in the size of the newspaper itself. Take a good look at next Tuesday’s edition when, if the change goes according to plan, the newspaper will be an inch and a quarter narrower. This will make the newspaper seem more vertical in appearance, but it will be smaller.
According to folks I talked to who are familiar with the technical aspects, the shrinkage is a result of reducing the size of the press “web” by five inches – reducing the width of the enormous rolls of paper, called newsprint, that wind through the high-speed, three-story-high presses, saving some costs in materials.
In whole numbers, the paper is now about a foot wide. Next Tuesday, it’ll be close to 11 inches. The tabloid width used by the free daily Baltimore Examiner, which went out of business last week, was a little over 10 inches. But at least the much greater length of The Sun will be unchanged, for now.
And soon to come will be a second page of the newspaper produced entirely in Chicago – baseball news in the Sports section. The Real Muck reported recently on Tribune Company’s imposition of a standard “nation & world” page across most of its chain of newspapers, a change detectable by the jarringly different (and ugly) typefaces used by the Chicago Tribune mother ship. Word is that changes wrought by multiple redesign projects aimed at making The Baltimore Sun look better will largely be undone in the effort by Tribune to cut costs by making all of its newspapers look the same. (And while the union-jurisdiction jobs of writers, copy editors and page designers are being eliminated in Baltimore, the work is being shifted to non-union personnel in Chicago.)
A supposed goal of Tribune to maintain the unique character of each of the company’s newspapers is lamentably dead. I wonder how many readers these days will notice, or care.
As a former colleague still at The Sun told me this week, “I hope we get sold soon.”
It might be the only hope Baltimore has for an independent, locally produced newspaper that fully reflects the needs of its readership.
Today's fortune cookie message
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Daily number: 538 (I get that same number in at least a third of these cookies. Very strange. But I play 322 and 812 when the gambling impulse strikes me. In any case, the latest doses of the Szechuan Cafe's orange chicken and hot and sour soup were excellent.)
veteran reporter Richard Irwin
for 30 years of crime news
In a morale boost for a troubled newsroom, the staff of The Baltimore Sun had cause for a little celebration Thursday night: The 30th anniversary of longtime cops reporter Richard Irwin’s Police Blotter.
Likely the continuously most-read element inside the newspaper, along with obituaries, the local version of Police Blotter first appeared in the Baltimore News American in February 1979. Its authors were Dick Irwin, Bill Lally and Robert Blatchley.
Seven years later, Hearst Corp. shut down the News American – an afternoon daily that competed head-on with the Baltimore Evening Sun and, to a lesser extent, the morning paper that was then simply called The Sun (Baltimore was formally added to its name and front-page design only a few months ago).
Dick Irwin was surprised when The Evening Sun called, offering a job. It was the same job Dick had just lost with the demise of his newspaper, as a police reporter chiefly responsible for the Blotter. And when The Evening Sun was euthanized by then-owner Times Mirror Corp., the morning newspaper became Dick’s home.
It was my privilege during six years as night metro editor to work with Dick, editing his Police Blotter and shepherding it into the Maryland section from 2001 to 2007. And it was especially wonderful to witness his dedication, night after night, making telephone calls to every police station in the city and Baltimore County in search of the crime reports that were the grist for Blotter – not the murders that make headlines, although he would write them as separate stories, but the endless procession of vandalism, burglary, armed robbery, auto theft, trespassing… even assaults, rapes and lesser shootings… that are so much an unfortunate part of the urban America experience.
Why is it so popular with readers? I always figured it was close to home, reporting police district by police district the crimes that are happening to our neighbors and, on rare occasions, even to newsroom staffers. No one, it seems, is immune to being a crime victim. It could happen to you.
Dick always took it as a personal affront when police would refuse to divulge what he rightfully insisted was public information – people have a right to know details about the crimes committed in their communities, the names of people arrested (heaven help us all when police in this nation can make secret arrests), even the names of cops who, rightfully or not, shoot people. And he loves reporting on cops who perform their jobs especially well, solving crimes or helping a community, and rarely would get public credit anywhere else.
For thirty years, Dick Irwin has been fighting for that noble cause, into the wee hours when most of us are asleep. He arrives in the newsroom around 5 p.m., and when the final edition is done near 2 a.m., he’s still there, making the calls to gather information for the next day’s paper, one police station at a time.
Occasionally, there’ll be a cop who doesn’t recognize the name of Dick Irwin. It’s a cop who will never make detective.
You can find a longer report on the Police Blotter anniversary, a brief video interview of Dick Irwin, and a collection of some entertaining Blotter highlights compiled over the years by now-retired chief makeup editor Tom Gibbons and myself, at crime columnist Peter Hermann’s Baltimore Sun blog at http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.hermann20feb20,0,550771.column
On an uphappier note
The Baltimore Sun is shrinking again – not just in staffing through continuing buyouts and layoffs, but in the size of the newspaper itself. Take a good look at next Tuesday’s edition when, if the change goes according to plan, the newspaper will be an inch and a quarter narrower. This will make the newspaper seem more vertical in appearance, but it will be smaller.
According to folks I talked to who are familiar with the technical aspects, the shrinkage is a result of reducing the size of the press “web” by five inches – reducing the width of the enormous rolls of paper, called newsprint, that wind through the high-speed, three-story-high presses, saving some costs in materials.
In whole numbers, the paper is now about a foot wide. Next Tuesday, it’ll be close to 11 inches. The tabloid width used by the free daily Baltimore Examiner, which went out of business last week, was a little over 10 inches. But at least the much greater length of The Sun will be unchanged, for now.
And soon to come will be a second page of the newspaper produced entirely in Chicago – baseball news in the Sports section. The Real Muck reported recently on Tribune Company’s imposition of a standard “nation & world” page across most of its chain of newspapers, a change detectable by the jarringly different (and ugly) typefaces used by the Chicago Tribune mother ship. Word is that changes wrought by multiple redesign projects aimed at making The Baltimore Sun look better will largely be undone in the effort by Tribune to cut costs by making all of its newspapers look the same. (And while the union-jurisdiction jobs of writers, copy editors and page designers are being eliminated in Baltimore, the work is being shifted to non-union personnel in Chicago.)
A supposed goal of Tribune to maintain the unique character of each of the company’s newspapers is lamentably dead. I wonder how many readers these days will notice, or care.
As a former colleague still at The Sun told me this week, “I hope we get sold soon.”
It might be the only hope Baltimore has for an independent, locally produced newspaper that fully reflects the needs of its readership.
Today's fortune cookie message
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Daily number: 538 (I get that same number in at least a third of these cookies. Very strange. But I play 322 and 812 when the gambling impulse strikes me. In any case, the latest doses of the Szechuan Cafe's orange chicken and hot and sour soup were excellent.)
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