Movie review: Julie & Julia

Adams, Streep
and plenty of butter

combine in recipe

for charming film

For the second time in less than a year, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams are together again on the big screen – sort of.

The movie this time around, “Julie & Julia,” combines food, relationships and writing, all of which are close to my heart (and tummy). That, along with the appealing co-stars and an overdose of charm, accounts for why I so enjoyed it during a preview screening Thursday night courtesy of the Maryland Film Festival.

You’d also think it makes for a perfect chick flick, but wife Bonnie Schupp wasn’t as enamored and gave “J&J” a pair of downer digits. Her main complaint: Insufficient conflict.

Well, we managed to disagree with each other on the ride home – but with even less actual conflict than contained in the plot. She also felt it dragged a bit.

But since this is my blog (and I do most of the cooking in our kitchen), I get an extra vote. That’s only fair.

In parallel story lines half a century apart, Streep playfully depicts the mid-life period in which Child takes her first cooking lessons and embarks with two friends on the book project that would help make her famous, while Adams takes on the role of wannabe writer Julie Powell, who at the suggestion of her husband begins blogging on a subject near to her heart: Cooking.

And it’s not just any kind of cooking, but taking on all 524 recipes in Child and friends’ famed “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” in 365 days.

Predictably, the blog gets some notice and by the end of the story, Julie seems to be on her way toward a book deal, and Julia is last seen as a copy of her own just-published book arrives in the mail. Two women – both writers and cooks -- some 50 years apart, one channeling the other.

A few quibbles: What served for conflict between Julie and her husband seemed contrived, and the setting of the last meal from the book – on a rooftop with a magical million-dollar New York view – came a little out of nowhere, given their bland 900-square-foot apartment on the floor above a working-class neighborhood pizzaria.

Streep and Adams were last paired as nuns in the harder-hitting drama “Doubt,” focusing on suspected priestly sexual abuse of a young Catholic boy. Bonnie and I also disagreed on that film – she liked it a lot, and I was ambivalent. It was hardly a chick flick.

In their new film, written for the screen and directed by Nora Ephron, Streep was amazingly believable as Julia, and Adams an appealing and alluring 30-year-old Julie. I would have been thrilled to sit down at the dinner table with either of them, but I’ll settle for the movie. It was just charming, and the world needs a little more of that these days.

Julie & Julia opens nationwide Aug. 7. I can only hope your theater offers up some French pastries instead of the usual popcorn and butter-flavored oil that doubtless would make both characters ill.

For more about the film, check out its Web site at http://www.julieandjulia.com/.

Speaking of food blogs

My old pal Cheryl Tan, who formerly wrote at The Baltimore Sun and Wall Street Journal among other accomplishments, has a deal on writing a book and been blogging on food since April, so she can’t be accused of playing copycat here.

And her blog is a terrific read. Check it out at http://www.atigerinthekitchen.com/.

It usually makes me hungry, but then some of the food she discovers also makes me cringe… and laugh at the same time.

Blogging vacation

I am amazed that dozens of people have visited The Real Muck each day, even though I’d taken a break through largely unintended summer laziness since my last posting on June 11 – on the Holocaust museum shooting.

Since then, the world has rolled on quite nicely – well, with a few newsy bumps in the road. Pop star Michael Jackson and football quarterback Steve McNair went belly-up, each in bizarre fashion, and there’s been unrest in Iran, American refocusing of war efforts back in the country where it first belonged, and my favorite baseball team lingers in last-place despite many new and promising players. At least in baseball, I look forward to next year with a little more optimism.

Among the subjects covered earlier by The Real Muck, a few need updates… like the last man out at The Baltimore Sun in the wake of the newsroom personnel massacre, and the season-ender for the Baltimore Burn women’s tackle football team.

At The Sun, talented reporter Gadi Dechter took a voluntary layoff last month, collecting a few weeks’ pay and saving a job slot for some other colleague at the downsizing Tribune Co.-owned newspaper. Dechter first made a name for himself locally at the weekly City Paper, where he reported on local media including The Sun – which then brought him aboard and gave him the beat on higher education, and subsequently the State House.

Unlike most others leaving the newspaper recently, Dechter had a new job already lined up – at Bloomberg News Service. He bid farewell in a heartfelt note telling of his fears of being inexperienced and inadequate when he joined The Sun, and thanking colleagues for giving him support and encouragement. He was, and remains, a class act – and from the day he arrived on the staff had far more talent than he gave himself credit for.

On the gridiron, the Burn ladies finished with a 5-3 record, according to Women’s Football Alliance league statistics -- a hair short of the playoffs as a divisional runner-up. The last game on the schedule didn’t happen as the New Jersey Titans bused in to Baltimore, where a pre-game rain had left a few muddy pools in an otherwise mowed-and-fit City College field, and refused to play. Oddly, the league Web site lists the game as a 6-0 win by the Titans. Go figure.

The Burn lost twice during the season to the undefeated Philadelphia Liberty Belles – the first time on a lopsided score of 43-8, but the second much closer at 13-10 after a late-game heart-breaker Burn fumble near the Belles’ goal line. The difference in the scoring showed just how much the Burn had improved over the course of the season.

The Burn Web site (http://www.baltimoreburnfootball.com/) reports that the first tryouts for the 2010 season will take place at noon on Saturday, August 8, at Herring Run Park. If you check out the Web site’s Picture Gallery, you’ll find many of the 2009 game and team photos were taken by Bonnie, whose free efforts won her the designation “team photographer.” There’s links at the site to Bonnie’s football game photos at SmugMug, where devoted Burn fans (and staffers, players and their friends and relatives) can order prints at nominal prices.

Today's fortune cookie message

You will make a profitable investment.

Daily number: 140

Holocaust memories

Attack in D.C. brings to mind
another sad day at the museum

The murderous attack Wednesday at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by a crazy octogenarian American nazi brought to mind my last journey there, at the behest of a houseguest who had been a child in Germany during World War II – and a victim of sorts.

Leo, our visitor, shared a few of his time-dimmed memories – the first of them being Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938, when Hitler’s thugs began in earnest the genocide that would claim some 6 million European Jews and untold millions of others.

Among the thousands of homes and businesses ransacked as Jews were rounded up, and thousands deported to concentration camps, was a neighborhood confectionery. Leo’s memory was of his asking his parents why the candy store had been destroyed, and not getting much of an answer.

Eventually, Leo said, his family had to move to a town in Poland.

His father – a Nazi official – had been appointed as its de-facto mayor.

Leo’s next shared memory, a little more vivid, comes from late in the war: His mother hurriedly packing the car, and big guns firing in the distance that heralded a Russian advance. His family fled back to Germany, and survived. Leo said his father was sent to some sort of re-education camp, and subsequently came home – and did not speak of his role as a Nazi before dying in the 1950s.

But Leo, as he grew up, learned what happened in the war and eventually moved to America. A retired physician in his early 70s, Leo wanted to visit the Holocaust museum to see firsthand the evidence that so much cruelty and murder had left behind – walk through a rail car that had carried the victims to death camps, see the room filled with their shoes, see the pictures of people who vanished into gas chambers and ovens and mass graves, mothers, fathers, children.

Leo wept. It was the legacy of his father: Guilt and overwhelming sorrow for horrors that had surrounded his childhood.

And I, who grew up Jewish in Northwest Baltimore, put an arm around him offering consolation.

Maybe 88-year-old James W. von Brunn is also a victim. He is, after all, afflicted with a disease all too common in the United States: Hatred. And after voicing it for years, von Brunn, a convicted felon, stepped out of his car and into the museum Wednesday carrying a rifle. In the ensuing exchange of gunfire, von Brunn was critically wounded and a security guard was killed.

Accounts of the event describe von Brunn as, among other things, a white supremacist. His victim Wednesday, Stephen T. Johns, who had worked at the museum for six years, was an African American – and, with the other guards whose quick action protected a crowd of visiting schoolchildren and tourists from injury, a hero.

The slain security guard likely was on duty the day that Leo and I took our sad walk back through time.

To see a few photos from that day, check out Bonnie's Journeys blog at http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2009/06/we-must-remember.html

Women’s tackle football

Tydesha Mayo heads for a score in Burn's May 2 victory against Binghamton. (Photo by Bonnie J. Schupp)

Baltimore Burn need
a field of their own

Team playing all over the (city) map

The Baltimore Burn take the field – but not the same field – Saturday afternoon in a women’s tackle football league season that has been up and down, and all over the Baltimore map.

Trouble is, the Burn lack a regular home field as the team has bounced from high school to high school – from the luxury of artificial turf at Mergenthaler Vo-Tech’s immaculate Art Modell Field, to the rougher grass surface at Northwestern High. The June 6 game will see yet another home field, this one at Patterson High.

“We need a field we can call our own,” says co-owner and defensive tackle Debra Miller, adding that for all the cost of renting a school field, a little consistency of place would be nice.

The team played last year in Annapolis, on what Miller says was “a beautiful field.” But it was also too far away from Baltimore for the team to grow its fan base and build up sponsorships and fund-raising. Home game attendance – in the low 100’s at best this year – is clearly not bringing in enough money to pay the bills. (Tickets are $10 for regular admission, but discounted for children, seniors and folks in public safety or the military.

Complicating the Women’s Football Alliance league team’s quest for field space is the fact that it’s not the only women’s tackle football squad in town. Its May 2 game was moved to Northwestern while the Mervo field was being used that day by the Baltimore Nighthawks playing against the Detroit Demolition, both in the Independent Women’s Football League. (According to the league Web site, the Nighthawks fielded only 14 players but managed to hold off Detroit through three scoreless quarters before losing 14-0.)

As for the up-and-down part of its season, the Burn squad won its scheduled road opener through a forfeit when the Connecticut Cyclones sent word it could not field a team. A week later, the Burn’s April 25 home opener at Mervo wasn’t very pretty: A 43-6 loss to the Philadelphia Liberty Belles.

On May 2, at Northwestern, a better-prepared Burn team whipped the Binghamton Tiger Cats 36-0, and that was the score after just half a game. The Tiger Cats’ coach took the visiting team off the field early in the third quarter, complaining about the playing surface and ending the injury-marred game as a Binghamton player lay nearly immobile on the field awaiting an ambulance. (It took nearly 20 minutes after a 911 call before the first responders arrived – a Baltimore fire truck crew – followed about 10 minutes later by a city fire ambulance.)

In a road game in Pennsylvania May 9, the Burn notched a 20-16 win over the Keystone Assault, then returned north May 30 and showed how much it had improved in a road game against the Liberty Belles, losing 13-10 (a far cry from the home-opener loss of 43-8 to the same team). Miller said the Burn had three touchdowns called back on penalties. And a Burn fumble deep in Philadelphia territory late in the game sealed the loss.

Philadelphia, which has defeated Baltimore twice this season, sits in first place undefeated in five games.

The third-place Burn, officially 3-2 on the season, take on the Assault again on Saturday. Kickoff is 4 p.m. at Patterson High, 100 Kane Street.

After that, just two games remain on the regular season schedule – June 13 at Binghamton, and the home finale June 20 against the New Jersey Titans. Exactly where that game will be played – well, we’ll let you know.

The future of newspapers

If you’ve been following The Real Muck reports on the Baltimore Sun layoffs and changes shrinking the print editions while focusing increasingly online, check out this report on a related panel discussion held Tuesday with participants who included its current editor and his predecessor:

http://baltimorebrew.com/blog/?p=2939

The account above, by Joan Jacobson, links to another by panel participant Mark Potts that elaborates somewhat on what he had to say

http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2009/06/choices-in-charm-city-1.html

Far more entertaining is an article by Maryland Daily Record editor Tom Linthicum, who made some remarks from the floor Tuesday. Tom, a colleague in my days at The Sun, interviewed former Sun editors Bill Marimow and John Carroll, former deputy managing editor Marty Kaiser (now heading the Milwaukee newspaper) and former Sun publisher Mike Waller. Their remarks are very interesting and occasionally amusing, like this tidbit from Waller, who was my favorite among the more than half-a-dozen publishers I outlasted at the Baltimore newspaper:

“Tribune management confuses innovation with idiocy. I could wear my underwear over my trousers and Tribune would think that’s innovation. Everybody else would think I was wacko.”


http://www.mddailyrecord.com/article.cfm?category=1&page=1&id=11660&type=UTTM

Daily Record reporter Liz Farmer also reported on the panel:

http://www.mddailyrecord.com/article.cfm?id=11656&type=UTTM

But what about The Real Muck? I’m still thinking about what to say. Some of what I heard leaves me at a loss for words. But I’ll be playing back my tinny digital recording of the event, because something… actually, a lot of things… bother me.

Daily fortune cookie message

All this stuff about newspapers has distracted me from a fun feature on this blog – although it has not kept me from eating too often at the Szechuan Café two miles up the road from my suburban Pasadena paradise.

But here’s tonight’s message of hope: You are never bitter, deceptive or petty.

Daily number: 647

Newspapers: Staff shuffles, angst at The Sun

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.

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.

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.

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