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: 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.

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.

Newspaper weights and measures

Sun puts new spin
on ‘The Vanishing’
as staff, paper shrink

Something is missing in my Sunday paper – you know, The Baltimore Sun. An entire section has vanished. I seem to recall it as Section B, or Maryland Closeup, and though I'm told it happened a week or two ago, I just noticed yesterday.

Over the past two years, as The Sun was moving its elements around, eliminating some sections and consolidating others, there was usually a note to readers explaining the changes. Sometimes there was even a little audacity in suggesting the changes were improvements.

And after my initial wee-hours posting of this blog, I received an email and a Facebook note from friends who informed me that I missed the note to readers. As one of the fired editors put it, "The section was dropped two weeks ago, and a brief announcement was published saying that some content formerly in the section would be printed in the A section. Not, I concede, a conspicuous notice, but it was there."

I didn't find it on the electronic archive, so I'll have to wander down to the library later to see if I can find a copy of the notice I missed.

The disappearance of Maryland Closeup came just days before the newspaper’s purge of nearly a third of its editing, news and opinion staff through what has been charitably described as “layoffs.”

I called it a massacre. Firings. I had a comment from a reader criticizing my use of the word “fired,” saying it carries an implication that the employees had done something wrong. They hadn’t. But they were fired anyway.

In this world, you don’t have to do anything wrong to get fired. You can do a job better than anyone, and get fired because your higher salary was considered excess baggage by corporate bean-counters.

And these wonderful people, friends I worked with in my former life in the newsroom, did nothing wrong. They did their jobs well, demonstrated their professionalism and dedication by working longer hours than the standard 40 under their union contract (mostly without putting in for overtime), won honors for the newspaper, and were rewarded with unending abuse by the company – including a worthless, arbitrary employee evaluation system intended to justify giving one worker a $50 raise, while another gets $10 or less.

One of my thoughts in asking for a buyout in the newsroom reduction Class of 2007 was not wanting to ever fill out another evaluation of the small newsroom contingent I ostensibly supervised. It didn’t seem to matter what praise I wrote, how I graded. They all did their jobs to the point of excellence, but you couldn’t tell from the raises they would get.

Weights and measures

On a whim Sunday night, I drove down the road to my local Giant supermarket and picked up copies of The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post, carried them over to the produce section and plopped them on a scale.

From a purely size-and-price standpoint, here’s how they measured up: The Post was half a pound heavier, and cost 38 cents less.

And the Post news report had Section B – and a Section C. That’s “Outlook” and “Metro,” respectively. And all three newsy sections, A, B, C, had an ample supply of Washington Post staff bylines, as opposed to The Sun’s sparse news beyond the Baltimore Beltway. (And they were followed by the sections for Sports, Style & Arts, Travel, Business, and a crappy advertising-driven Jobs. Sealed in a plastic bag were the Post's magazine, full comics section, TV Week, Parade, ad inserts and coupons.

Fair to compare? Maybe not. After all, Washington is the nation’s capital and the Post has greater resources and a definitively wider reach in its global coverage. The only purely local story on the front page is about Virginia politics. And Metro has entirely too much Virginia, and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties news for this Baltimore-and-burbs reader. I’ve never understood why The Post so disdains wider coverage of Maryland news, allowing its competitor 30 miles up the B-W Parkway free reign over metro Baltimore for the past two decades.

I’ve never been a Post subscriber. Only The Sun – and I buy it still. I thought about canceling in protest, as some readers of this blog say they have. But I still have friends on the inside, and don’t want to see the rug pulled out from under them through declining circulation numbers despite their own employer’s seeming intent on diminishing its value and angering readers. One equally dismayed newspaper friend suggested we go out and sell subscriptions to The Sun despite it all, in an effort to keep the print product alive.

Seems strange to me that the newspaper has gone to such lengths to get rid of 30-year employees and 30-year readers, though.

Baltimore Sun publisher/president/CEO Timothy E. Ryan (a triple-threat player!) has a “to the readers” note on Page 3 about the newsroom changes and how proud the newspaper is to provide “award-winning journalism to more readers than any other local news media organization.”

“We truly value the more than 1 million people who read us every week.” (Doubtless a one-page online click is counted as one of that million, and people who buy the paper on multiple days count as more than one reader. Numbers are so easy to manipulate.)

There’s also some bragging about how the newspaper benefits in being part of “the Baltimore Sun Media Group (BSMG)” that includes 28 community newspapers in the Baltimore metro area – most if not all of which, the note doesn’t mention, have been cut in staffing and frequency of publication.

That latest note to readers is just spin, I’m afraid. The readers are getting less than ever before, unless they rely on digital sources for their news. There’s an awful lot of readers, or would-be readers, who are not equipped or able to do that, and The Baltimore Sun has fired them, too.

BSMG, hmmmmm. There’s probably other uses for those letters. Maybe I should hold a contest.

The final photo

In recounting the last day at work for veteran, award-winning Sun photographer Chiaki Kawajiri, The Real Muck last week noted her final assignment before being given a mutually tearful layoff by her department boss: A lawyer with his pet bird.

The photo taken Wednesday afternoon appeared in Sunday’s editions, accompanying an article by Personal Finance columnist Eileen Ambrose. The early Sunday edition hitting newsstands on Saturday had an enormous photo on the front page of a dog wearing a dollar-sign neckband, and the lawyer-with-parrot photo on an inside page. The later editions had both the large dog and a shrunken lawyer-with-bird on the inside page.

Not to criticize the maximum waste of space in a news-shrunken newspaper with a two column-by-13-inch photo of a dog with jewelry, but there was no credit line saying whose photo it was. Probably a stock-agency photo of a dog, but usually a credit line will identify the source.

There also was no credit identifying Chiaki under her final photo for the newspaper. It just reads: Baltimore Sun Photo. I'm told that the lack of a credit on Chiaki's last photo was her own request.

Attention TV News

Since The Baltimore Sun does not seem likely to throw a farewell party for the 60-plus staffers given the bum’s rush last week, the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild is planning a reception for them – for the fired union-jurisdiction staffers as well as the editors and managers who were in the nonunion “merit system.”

The party – to which newspaper alumni and friends are invited – is being held from 6 p.m, to 10 p.m. Thursday in the Rockefeller Room of the Standard Building at 501 St. Paul -- at the corner of the Franklin Street hill just up from the Sun building. Anyone thinking about starting up a real Baltimore/Central Maryland newspaper (or buying the old one) will find plenty of available talent -- top talent!

Also in the works: A job fair for the suddenly unemployed newspaper staffers, beginning at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday (May 6) at St. Ignatius Church, 805 North Calvert St.

Also on Wednesday, the personnel massacre and downward spiral of the newspaper are sure to be the main topic of conversation at the annual luncheon of the Baltimore Sun Retirees Association, beginning at 11 a.m. with a cash bar, at the Engineering Club, 11 West Mount Vernon Place.

The Sun’s firing of many of its best, brightest and most senior employees has been grossly under-reported by the area television news programs that for years have relied on the newspaper to cue its own coverage of what’s happening in and around Baltimore. The old A.S. Abell Co. founded and owned WMAR-TV (Channel 2) until its 1986 sale of The Sun and broadcast properties to Times Mirror Corp. required divestiture under federal regulations. It has in recent years had news partnerships with the various stations, and currently with WJZ-TV (Channel 13).

We’ll see if Channel 13, in particular, takes this hint.

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.

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.

Newspapers then and now

Sun's 150th anniversary edition
looked into the future
without seeing own fate


I wasn’t looking for it. Bonnie sent me to the basement in search of an old newspaper I could pose with for a photograph. Just happened that the yellowing edition sitting on top of one of my many boxes of mementos and old newspapers was the 150th anniversary production of The Baltimore Sun.

Ironic headline:

News may be a passing thing,
but newspapers will last forever

That topped a Maryland front page column by then-Sun pundit Roger Simon, who expected that the commemorative edition would be found and looked at 150 years down time’s highway by “your great-great-great-great grandchildren” – who not only would be able to read, but “write and add and operate their fusion-powered VCRs.”

“And I also know,” Roger wrote, “that newspapers will still be around 150 years from today. If there is one thing I am sure of, it is that.”

The question he looked at was whether TV would replace newspapers. It was, after all, the edition of Sunday May 17, 1987, when the VCR was state-of-the-art and the World Wide Web didn’t exist.

On May 17, 2012, The Baltimore Sun will celebrate its 175 anniversary – if it still exists.

The differences between the 1987 newspaper and that of today in appearance and content are stunning. Today’s newspaper, now three inches narrower, is much more attractive visually. But even allowing for the inflated news hole created for the special 150th anniversary, The Sun now is but a mid-day shadow of the newspaper from 22 years ago.

The commemorative edition came almost at the mid-point of my 40-year stay at The Sun, and nearly every byline brings a memory of folks who don’t work there anymore. A few are now deceased, many I haven’t been in touch with for years, but some are still part of my life. Local readers of this blog might remember a few of the names, and some have become nationally known.

Here’s a run-through of staff bylines from this 1987 edition, starting on the front page and turning through the paper, section by section: Vernon A. Guidry Jr., Phillip Davis, Deborah I. Greene, Mary Knudson, Charles W. Corddry, Anthony Barbieri Jr., John E. Woodruff, G. Jefferson Price III, Antero Pietila, Mark Matthews, Karen Hosler, Nancy J. Schwerzler, Lyle Denniston, Luther Young, Doug Struck, John W. Frece, Richard H.P. Sia, Michael Ollove, Michael J. Clark, Roger Simon, Michael Olesker, David Michael Ettlin (Me!), William F. Zorzi Jr., Peter Jensen, Rafael Alvarez, Katie Gunther Kodat, David Simon, Michael K. Burns, Joel McCord, Albert Sehlstedt Jr., Lynda Robinson.

And that’s just the front and Maryland sections.

In Sports, there’s Tim Kurkjian, Don Markus, Bill Glauber, Alan Goldstein, James H. Jackson, Dale Austin, Mike Littwin, Bob Maisel, Kent Baker, Mark Hyman, Vito Stellino, Bill Free, John Eisenberg.

In Business, Stephen E. Nordlinger, Brian Sullam, Thomas Easton, Jesse Glasgow, Ted Shelsby.

In People, A.M. Chaplin, Nora Frenkiel, Abby Karp, Laura Charles.

Sun Magazine has a note from its editor Susan Baer, and articles by Fred Rasmussen and Carleton Jones.


Perspective has a cover story on the newspaper’s 150 years, written by Washington Bureau Chief Ernest B. Furgurson, with a note from section editor and future Sun Pulitzer winner Will Englund. Inside are reproductions of Sun stories by old-time staffers including Drew Pearson, Lee McCardell, David Maulsby, and The Evening Sun’s H.L. Mencken. There’s opinion by staffers Jerelyn Eddings and Barry Rascovar. The names at the top of the editorial page are those of editor J.R.L. Sterne, publisher Reg Murphy and managing editor James I. Houck.

There. Now I’ve utterly bored you with about 60 names.

Oops. There’s more. I forgot to open the plastic-sealed 200-page commemorative magazine, “150 People Who Shaped the Way We Live,” most of whom were dead even then. Rip. Tear. Ah, here they are, the bylines adding these then-Sun staffers: John Dorsey, Scott Shane, Sam Fulwood III, Alice Steinbach (another Pulitzer winner), Tom Horton, Susan Reimer, Mike Bowler, Patrick A. McGuire.

Of all the bylined names, I count just four still at the newspaper. The Maryland, Business and Perspective sections are for all intents gone or reinvented with much less space for content. I didn’t pull out the old comics sections, which now are reduced in size and space, and hidden in back of the weekly TV listings.

So what does all this mean?

Both editions spread out across my kitchen were produced using computers, although the type and pictures in 1987 were not purely electronic. Just looking at the editions side by side doesn’t tell the story about what’s happening now to the newspaper industry, about why newspapers are dying – the latest biggie to fall being the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News last week.

A front-page story by Phil Davis and Deborah Greene on the party celebrating The Sun’s 150 years noted this about its far-flung staff: correspondents in seven foreign capitals; news bureaus in Washington, San Francisco and New York; and reporters throughout Maryland, “from Easton to Towson, from Bel Air to Westminster.”

From all that geographical spread, little exists today. If news happens in Easton, a reporter has to head out from Baltimore – or The Washington Post might agree to cover it for both newspapers. The Sun news offices in Harford, Carroll, Howard, Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties are being closed to save on rent. The once-powerful Washington Bureau has two regulars left on staff.

The story across the top of the 1987 Maryland section, by science reporter Luther Young, examines the challenge of predicting the future, with the views of folks including a philospopher, business expert, planners, and even the late science fiction writer Jack Chalker, who was my best friend back in high school. I’d like to say no one foresaw the fate of newspapers, but that’s not the case.

Sun publisher Reg Murphy, who was hired by the A.S. Abell Co. and helped engineer the 1986 sale of its privately-held newspaper to Times Mirror Corp., was among those asked to look into the future.

“Information will be, if not the most important industry in the world in the foreseeable future, then one of the most important,” Murphy was quoted as saying. He added that newspapers “are not going away, although they may not be printed on broadsheet newsprint then. You never can guess what the new inventions will be, just that they will occur.”

It’s unclear what time frame Murphy was talking about as “then.”

But it seems clear today that “then” is coming quicker than he or any of us folks who were part of the 1987 newspaper might have envisioned, and for folks still in the newspaper business, “then” is not without pain.

I have another little memento of 1987" I just pulled from a kitchen cabinet. It's a white mug with the newspaper's front-page "vignette" logo in gold and the anniversary slogan: The Story of Our Lives for 150 Years.

Seems perfect for a cup of tea to go with my fortune cookie.

Today's fortune cookie message

Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.

Daily number: 599

R.I.P. Baltimore Examiner

Another paper bites the dust
as freebie not-quite-daily folds

The Baltimore Examiner announced its death today, effective with its edition of Sunday, Feb. 15, bringing an end to a local experiment in daily journalism: Give it away for free.

It was a money-losing proposition from the get-go, but owner Clarity Media Group said it had banked on revenue growth through eventual synergy with its sister Washington Examiner some 40 miles down the highway.

Didn’t happen. The company blamed the economy, which indisputably has cut deeply into advertising revenue through the newspaper industry. But when it’s hard enough to make money giving news away for free online, you have to question the model of giving it away for free in print.

To my view, the Baltimore Examiner was a noble experiment in that it brought a little competition to a monopoly news organization, The Baltimore Sun – my longtime employer. Unfortunately, the economy conspired there, too, so instead of improving the product, The Sun has gradually downsized itself.

The Examiner was launched in April 2006, a little more than a year before I retired – so I had a good view about how it was regarded by The Sun: Not highly. The new paper, a tabloid, initially seemed helter-skelter in its presentation of the news, and the stories were of necessity brief. A lot of little stories and, for awhile, swimming in ample space that served to scatter them.

At first determined not to be beaten/embarrassed by the Examiner on breaking news, the novelty soon wore off, and The Sun focused less on the little competitor and more on its strengths in news coverage and newspaper design. And for the most part, Sun readers wanted that paper – after all, they were paying for it.

The Examiner’s delivery brought annoyance from many who professed not to want it, but found it on their lawn on driveway or sidewalk each day. That’s a problem when, at first, you declare a daily circulation of a quarter-million and start throwing it around willy-nilly. Its target was upscale neighborhoods that advertisers would want to reach, but the audience had more sophistication than the Examiner’s overall content.

And some who wanted the newspaper found they could not count on its arrival. In my suburban neighborhood, the Examiner was there for a while, then vanished, then would show up sometimes, then disappear again. (In its delivery heyday locally, I could walk along a neighboring street late at night and find that morning’s Examiner lying untouched on half of the driveways.)

Recently, the Examiner opted to change its model to home delivery only on Thursdays and Sundays. But I never saw one on my lawn or driveway, or even in the gutter. On rare occasions I’d spot it on a driveway along a nearby street, usually having been left lying on the concrete for days in its thin plastic bag.

Always, there was the newspaper’s Web site – every bit as free as the print edition. And when the Examiner cut back home delivery (keeping a smaller daily in-town distribution through vending boxes), it promoted the daily Web edition as an alternative.

There were readers – or professed readers – who were outspoken in their belief that The Sun was a blatantly left-leaning newspaper, and favored the Examiner’s conservative voice. (The Examiner endorsed McCain/Palin in the presidential election, and its editorials and some opinion articles leaned well to the right of Maryland’s and Baltimore’s largely Democratic bent.)

To add local voice, the Examiner hired conservative black columnist Gregory Kane, who took a buyout in leaving The Sun for what, sadly, turned out not to be a long-term gig. It also brought aboard Michael Olesker, a liberal-leaning columnist who had written for Hearst’s long-gone Baltimore News American before putting in two decades at The Sun (his career there sadly ending amid complaints of plagiarism, which could just as well have been due to profound carelessness or laziness on his part).

They both were friends of mine at The Sun and, like me, are graduates of Baltimore City College (third-oldest public high school in the nation). Olesker and I were in the same 10th-grade homeroom. So I greatly grieved his exit from The Sun, and was glad to see him surface at the Examiner.

Another old Sun friend, Gary Gately, came aboard at the Examiner for a year as an assistant managing editor – until the newspaper decided it had too many assistant managing editors and bid him bye-bye. But during his tenure, for the few months I worked two blocks away editing at the weekly Baltimore Business Journal, I’d wander past the Pratt Street office tower housing his newspaper and usually find him on a cigarette break with colleagues. So I got to meet quite a few of the Examiner’s reporters and editors.

A casual conversation with Gately and sports editor Jon Gallo led to a freelance venture writing stories on new Baltimore Orioles baseball players, providing me with press credentials for spring training in Florida last year. I’d always wanted to write baseball stories, and the Examiner bought and published seven from me. I worked a little harder than one might imagine during a nearly two-week stint in Florida, but got to see plenty of baseball – and in the end managed to keep my expenses low enough so that they pretty much matched the income. (Tax bite: Zero.)

The Sun had three folks covering spring training, while the Examiner was relying on the Associated Press. It left an opening for my freelance opportunity – one that I wasn’t going to have anywhere else. For that, thanks, Examiner! (And if any other news organization around town is looking for some freelance coverage this year, I’m very available….)

It also provided a regular check for my friend Rafael Alvarez who, after taking his buyout from The Sun, tried his hand at television writing (The Wire series on HBO, and the first season of Life on NBC before being fired after the writers’ strike) and then expanded his newspaper freelancing.

So the Examiner has been good to some of my friends, and a place for news folks to hang a hat and ply their trade for the benefit of however many folks actually read the newspaper.

I hope a lot of folks were reading it, and that they’ll miss it.

Good or bad, depending on your view, it was a real newspaper. And its death further diminishes an ailing industry.

Locally, there’s still The Sun – although a much smaller newspaper than the one I worked at for 40 years. Its daily business and metro news sections have been incorporated into the main news section, its foreign bureaus are gone, its once-vaunted national reporting minimized. Sports and features sections are smaller.

Hardly a wonder people are looking elsewhere for news these days.

The Fourth Estate is simply a mess.

Today’s fortune cookie message

All your hard work will soon be paid off.

Daily number: 018

The future of newspapers

Blogger Ettlin, on last day working in Baltimore Sun newsroom, May 31, 2007.

A columnist friend presents
a troubling question to ponder

My friend Dan Rodricks, the longtime Baltimore Sun columnist, posted a question on Facebook today, fishing for others’ thoughts:

If newspaper publishers want to win the day, why not shut down all their free web sites? To increase the value of the metropolitan dailies, like the one I work for, why not shut down the web and make the print editions the only way to get this valuable resource? We never should have given the news away for free, with any expectation that the print editions could survive. Now, with revenues and old-fashion paid circulation falling, why shouldn't we go back the other way -- on recycled paper, of course -- and say to the public: "If you want this, pay for it?"

I had a front-row seat in the same newsroom some 35 years ago when the first computers walked in – and it wasn’t pretty. The computers weren’t very good, but the printers recognized the threat right away. Their jobs were on the line.

For awhile, the computers hummed along with clanking Linotype machines. Some pages were put together the old-fashioned way, as pieces of cast metal and every line of a story a chunk of words you could hold and feel in your hand; others were assembled as a cut-and-paste job after the words spilled out of a darkroom-like enclosure in columns on glossy paper.

Printers made the usual mistakes: Sometimes a line would literally drop and vanish. Or maybe a few paragraphs would slip on deadline out of big Bob Bowman’s hand as he rushed toward the chase – the metal frame holding the page – and he’d reassemble them line by line, bending over the scattered slugs of metal on the hard wooden floor and reading them backwards since that’s the way type was cast. The amusing result, when it wasn’t caught on time in proofreading, was called “scrambled type.”

For a while, the Harris computers up in the newsroom imitated the printers. Scroll the dozen or so lines visible on the little greenish “video display terminal” display too quickly, and it would delete a line here and duplicate another there, usually making critical paragraphs unintelligible.

But the printers knew what was happening, and fought back at contract time. The pages still made of metal, they controlled – largely the classified advertising. And for one memorable Sunday edition, they inserted some extra pieces of metal, actually a lot of pieces of metal, in various sizes and fonts declaring many times on every page throughout the classified section: “Fuck The Sun Up The Ass.”

The phones started ringing minutes after the first edition – known as the “Bulldog” – hit the streets that Saturday afternoon. Supervisors dispatched to the composing room rooted through the pages trying to eliminate every hunk of terrorist type, but among the dozens of pages of classified ads, it was an impossible task. The subsequent editions included a full-page explanation and apology to readers.

The printers eventually won lifetime contracts that took nearly three decades for successor owners (Times Mirror and Tribune) to eliminate through attrition and buyouts, the last of them departing with settlements far more lucrative than those offered over the past decade in departments whose unions had no such lifetime guarantees.

Sign of times to come

In the end, the composing room where pages were set into type and assembled, which took up an entire floor of the newspaper building, had been reduced to a small office area where a sardonic sign was posted reading: “Decomposing Room.”

But who could imagine how much “decomposing” was in the newspaper’s future.

Departments had given way, one by one, as computers got smaller and better – engravers, lithographers, proofreaders, even telephone operators – the list goes on. (So far, security guard seems a safe occupation, although that task has long been outsourced to lowest-bidder, low-paying companies, as has janitorial work. Late at night, in the largely emptied newsroom, Spanish becomes the dominant language.)

I never thought online newspapers would happen so quickly. But one day, the computers caught up with photographic images and it became a simple matter to integrate “type” and “art” on an electronic page, and then posting on the Internet picked up speed, and newspaper companies started putting news and pictures together in pages anyone could see anywhere in the world much faster than a print edition could be manufactured and delivered.

And, as my friend Dan observed, most big newspaper gave it away for free. Some tried selling it, but retreated because so many others were not.

Mail-order subscriptions were as good as dead, and home-delivery editions – well, we know what’s happening in circulation numbers industry-wide. Fewer and fewer people are buying newspapers.

The question I pose is whether all those folks who are no longer buying newspapers are, instead, reading them online.

I bet not – at least not in the sense of turning pages. Newspaper sites are click-on driven, with stories tallied up as “page views.” Advertising is an annoyance, and the news sites try their best to force clicks onto ads to suggest that readers noticed them. Counts are what counts in this strange electronic information age.

And the “pages” mostly don’t look like newspaper pages. Click on a headline to read a story, click back to find another. Packaging of news is awkward, so threads of content are hard to follow. Few sites reproduce a full newspaper image beyond that of the front page.

People are reading newspapers less, and getting their news and information through alternative sources – not all of them as responsible as major daily newspapers.

And the newspapers themselves continue to contribute to their own demise by shrinking content, and original reporting. At The Sun, which once had its own network of foreign bureaus, unique international journalism is largely dead. It once had correspondents based in London, Paris, Rio, Bonn, New Delhi, Moscow, Tel Aviv (later Jerusalem), Johannesburg, Mexico City, Tokyo, and Beijing, and maybe a few others, though not all at the same time. They’re gone now.

The foreign editor took a buyout. There was no one left to manage and edit, really – just stories off wire service stories and from Tribune correspondents working for sister newspapers.

The highly regarded Sun Washington Bureau has shrunk, inevitably.

Once upon a very long time ago, The Baltimore Sun had a promotional slogan -- The Sun: One of America’s Great Newspapers.

A talented editor named Steve Luxenberg was leaving for better climes (he ended up at The Washington Post), and was smiling at a camera for the candid photo that would appear on a fake front page commemorating his departure. Behind him was a large horizontal poster image bannering the slogan. Steve, perhaps jokingly, put his hand over the word “Great.”

The Sun: One of America’s Newspapers.

Assessing blame

I can blame The Sun for its own decline only to a limit. There was, after all, the 1986 change from privately-held company to corporate ownership, and now being part of the Tribune media empire caught up bankruptcy filings in the ocean of debt created in the privatization purchase by billionaire real estate investor Sam Zell in the name of a fictional employee ownership plan.

But there were many decisions at home that alienated readers, time and again. Among them:

+ The company murdered its once-dominant evening newspaper earlier than necessary, forcing circulation down by duplicating content from the morning edition and figuring rightly that subscribers taking both papers would cancel the evening one. When numbers had dropped close enough to 100,000, the company used the plunging circulation to justify the end. It would have happened eventually, but the killing was premature and alienated many readers who for all their lives had preferred the evening paper.

+ The newspaper more recently alienated mainstay older subscribers with content changes that included eliminating stock tables from the daily edition, wrongly figuring they could readily turn to the Internet.

+ It redesigned the paper several times, always shrinking content in the process; for a time, it shrunk the highly read sports section into a tabloid format with far less space (and in reversing course with a return to a broadsheet format, the section was thinner than before).

+ There was a memorable note, about a year ago, from the powers overseeing the newspaper pushing increased use of photos and graphics, at a time when the news hole was already shrinking. Readers supposedly needed more charts and fewer stories. How about a pie chart in the face?

Slim pickin’s

There’s hardly enough paper in the paper for a modest crab feast.

The daily “Metro” or “Maryland” section is gone, preceded by the daily “Business” section. Now, the daily paper is just three sections – News (including local, national, international and business), Sports and You.

Yup, You. Whatever you’s are left, anyway.

Sometimes I grow wistful for the days when The Sun promoted itself as “Maryland’s Marketplace” and “Maryland’s Newspaper.” But time and again, it would launch expanded coverage of the rural counties, only to retreat to the core metropolitan area. Recently, the last dedicated Eastern Shore reporter was moved westward across the Chesapeake Bay to join a slimmed-down news staff based in Annapolis. In response, he took a buyout, or what’s now called a “voluntary layoff,” in the latest round of staff reductions across the newspaper.

The mission of The Sun – I still think of it as “my newspaper,” having worked there four decades and outlasting half a dozen folks called “publishers” before my buyout ship came in last year – has narrowed. And you can read what’s left for free on the Internet, where you’ll find dozens of other sources for the national and international news that used to be part and parcel of a “great” newspaper. Unfortunately, a lot of that news is coming from fewer sources.

You’ll also find on the Internet a clamor of other voices, some spreading truth and others lies, in a cacophony of information... a buzzing, even. A very loud buzzing.

Pandora’s box was opened, after all, and the bees are everywhere.

Dan, I’m afraid there’s no going back. We’ve given people too many reasons not to read newspapers.

For those who can access it, here’s a link to Dan Rodricks’ posting: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/topic.php?uid=42618730754&topic=6300&ref=mf

Maybe smaller is better

The National Public Radio program “Weekend America” had a related segment today, the thrust being that predictions of the demise of newspapers are premature. Newspapers currently have a profit margin averaging around 11 percent. But the profit is less than it used to be, and declining, and the largest newspapers are having bigger woes than smaller ones – and there are many more in the “smaller” category, where circulations may be around 35,000 daily instead of a quarter-million or more.

I’ve been working lately in a temporary, part-time editing job at the Baltimore Business Journal, a weekly newspaper with a daily Web report that takes up a big part of my two-day schedule. This week, though, I was asked to write a short opinion piece looking at the Tribune bankruptcy in light of my long association with The Sun.

It is supposed to appear in next Friday’s edition; I’ll post a link when it happens.

‘You will succeed in business’

Yeah, right. Sounds like something you’d find in a fortune cookie.

Well, The Real Muck is introducing a new feature: Fortune cookie message of the day, mostly courtesy of our favorite restaurant, the Szechuan Cafe in Pasadena, Maryland.

Here goes. Hold your breath.

Serious trouble will bypass you.

Your three-digit lottery number is 600.

Good luck.

Another newspaper veteran gone

Death of the 'wire room' chief
recalls era of the teletype

The passing last week of an old newspaper friend brought a rush of memories of the good old days – that distant time when news from across the planet arrived a keystroke at a time on clickety-clacking teletype machines through the low-tech graces of Western Union.

Ramon Baier was a clerk in the “wire room” of The Baltimore Sun newspapers, my first job when I arrived in 1967 for what proved to be a 40-year stay. Ray was one of the veteran guys manning that noisy communications hub who showed me the ropes, or at least the plugs and circuit boards, for two training shifts preceding my first afternoon working solo.

The Six Day War broke out a few hours before my arrival, and the chaos I encountered pointed to a couple of possible paths for my future – none of which involved the news business.

But I managed to get through the day, despite then-copy desk chief Sam Abt leaning over my shoulder hollering while I tried to communicate in pigeon-English with a German Telex operator about our not-arriving story whose relay from the Middle East was being awaited on deadline for the first edition. (Sam went on to greater glory at The New York Times as copy editor for its daring publication of “The Pentagon Papers” and later in Paris covering bicycle racing for the International Herald Tribune.)

The wire room was a long and narrow barrier that largely divided the huge fifth-floor newsroom into separate sides for the competing morning and evening newspapers. It had a window looking east from the back side of the building over Guilford Avenue and the five-story rag factory that took up the other side of the street. The windowsill served as a refrigerator part of the year – despite raids by a marauding seagull named Gertrude. (Her thievery ended after wire room clerk Eddie Nolan, a former photographer, planted a Tabasco sandwich there as bait.)

When major news was breaking, a bell on the teletype machine labeled as the “A Wire” would ding seven times as an alert. There’d be a holler out to the wire editor that news was imminent, then the clerk would rip each “take” of the story as it arrived, separate the original and two carbon copies, and plunk them into wire baskets earmarked for delivery by “copy boys” to various editors.

The job did not require a high school diploma. You just needed to be literate enough to recognize and sort the different types of stories – news, features, sports – for the right baskets, and remember when to switch circuits to get the Orioles’ baseball play-by-play from west coast games. It also helped to notice when the news clickety-clacking out of a particular machine sounded important, bell or no.

A little German would have helped, at least on that one evening, but my linguistic ineptitude never came up again.

There was another little deal to worry about in working the afternoon shift, a matter discussed only in whispers: The series of phone calls into the wire room between about 2:30 and 4, when a gruffy-deep voice would ask for such arcane matters as the place horse payout in the second at Santa Anita, the price on the winner in the sixth at Rockingham, or the betting handle at some other track. The call was coming directly from the nerve center of Baltimore’s illegal numbers game – the lottery that flourished across the city years before government got into and largely took over the gambling business – and the strange mix of figures based on horse races across the United States was used to calculate the day’s winning number.

On Fridays, a well-wrapped sub sandwich would be delivered to the newspaper building’s back door for the afternoon wire room clerk, with ham, salami, lettuce, tomato and a twenty-dollar bill.

On a $60-a-week salary, the 20 bucks was a tidy bonus. But it didn’t last long – just 10 weeks during the summer break between my junior and senior years at then-Towson State College preparing for a teaching career.

Going back to school, I lucked into a part-time weekend job as a clerk on the morning paper’s city desk. I had to tell Mr. Gruffy that a new guy had been hired for my old shift, and was asked what I knew about my replacement. All I knew was that he was black. And the voice at the other said, well, don’t worry about it. He’d get the information elsewhere.

It was going to be our last chat, the end of a beautiful relationship – his voice, my 20 bucks. So I suggested rather boldly that I had done such a wonderful job, and probably knew more than I should, and a bonus might help me forget things like the emergency phone number to use in the event of an error on the race wires.

That Friday’s sub came with a little extra lettuce.

For the next 15 months, I worked mostly overnight weekend shifts. The late wire room guy was usually a guy named Lou, and when the newsroom was otherwise deserted we’d play pinochle for a few hours within earshot of the phones and the teletypes. Then we’d finish up, Lou sorting the overnight wire stories and me calling every major police and fire outpost in Maryland to compile a memo for the dayside cops reporter.

Ray Baier, a gentleman who had a keen news sense and a matching sense of humor, mostly worked dayside. Over the years as I moved through jobs as a reporter and editor, I had later shifts. So it was a rare pleasure when we’d intersect for more than a few minutes in passing.

In 1973, the earliest days of the computer revolution, he was named chief of what became the “communications room,” and he oversaw its changing operations until retiring in 1999 after more than 45 years at the newspaper.

The obituary, written by Fred Rasmussen, noted Ray’s account of how low-tech was needed to keep high-tech humming. He stashed a $5 straw broom in a corner of his office, which he used to sweep snow off the newspaper’s rooftop satellite-dish receivers so they could still function in wintry weather.

He was part of an infrastructure unknown to the newspaper-reading public – including the likes of the copy boys, Linotype operators, printers and lithographers – that once made the business one of Baltimore’s largest employers. Many of the newspaper’s jobs have been eliminated, some outsourced; the newsroom itself keeps shrinking, and the paper seems only to grow thinner in content.

And gradually, the folks who remember the good old days are also leaving.

Ray was 72 when he died Nov. 18 of a heart attack.

A Day Frozen In Time

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
(Or tuck it away for posterity)

Newspapers as instant history

Occasionally, over the course of my 40 years at The Baltimore Sun, I would be called on to visit a school and talk about newspapers. I would bring a sampling of them – the type with gaudy front pages after a monster storm, a big fire, the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

And I would hold up a copy of my old newspaper from Jan. 16, 1946, when almost nothing of interest happened but it had cost me 40 bucks. It was the day I was born, and the newspaper likely was being printed about the same time (12:04 a.m.) when I was coming down the chute.

Newspapers, I would tell the children (usually ages 12-14), present history in slow motion. Stop-action, even. A frozen day in time. How important that day of history is may depend upon who is reading or keeping that edition.

Wednesday, newspapers across the world froze a day in time for posterity. Some did it really, really well. Some... could have been better.

I say this because I went off to work in the morning (a temporary, part-time editing gig with the weekly Baltimore Business Journal) and neglected to buy a copy of The Washington Post.

I had The Baltimore Sun, of course – it arrived in its usual yellow plastic bag in the grass just off the driveway, in better-than-usual condition. I opened it at work downtown – more about what I saw later.

In the evening, on the way home, the Post was nowhere to be found, not in the vending machines, the gas stations, convenience stores or supermarkets – not even in the semi-redneck parts of my Pasadena community.

By today, Thursday, it and the likes of The New York Times and USA Today are all over eBay -- dozens of listings, including one offering a still-wrapped bundle of the Wednesday Post's final edition at more than $300.

Some newspapers totally get it. They were presenting history writ very, very large, with a front page telling in an instant that your grandchildren should hold it some day and marvel at the keepsake. An heirloom that, if not cared for, will by then be flaking around the edges on the way to becoming dust.

I once bought a copy of The New York Times from the day my late mother was born in 1914, a Sunday, and presented it at her surprise 80th birthday party. (Couldn’t find an intact Baltimore paper.) Taken out of its thick plastic packing, the Sunday Times crumbled a bit in her hands. It wasn’t a very special day in anyone else’s history so just its existence in 1994 was amazing. (I also read from a microfilm printout of that day’s Baltimore Sun a small travel advertisement for fall bookings on the steamship Lusitania – whose sailing the next spring didn’t turn out very well.)

But some newspapers can be so very special. Like the editions of Nov. 5, 2008.

The Baltimore newspaper, a victim of its recent redesign, wasn’t bad. It had a half-page-deep Associated Press photo of a waving Obama from the torso up, against a dark background, with an out-of-focus flag behind him in the nighttime setting at Chicago’s Grant Park. (The better photo, in black-and-white atop Page 5 of the inside-the-paper Election Section, from McClatchy-Tribune, showed Obama, his wife and children walking onto the slightly elevated stage and dwarfed by the enormous crowd assembled as far as the eye could see, and the lighted city skyline a distant but dramatic backdrop.)

The front-page headline, in yellow, declared “It’s Obama” with a much smaller five-liner in white just below and to the right: “Democrat gains historic victory, will be the nation’s first black president.”

Under the fold, played with the main story at center-page, was a smallish John McCain, also in front of an out-of-focus flag, looking constipated.

(A sticker advertisement had to be peeled off the page top, next to Obama’s open hand, taking with it some of the ink and leaving a rectangular patch of gray dots.)

I hate to say my old paper blew it. But I could still find a few copies in vending machines and at stores on the way home. (The newspaper announced it would be selling a reprinted edition of some 45,000 in stores on Thursday, to address demand, and I bought a pair of them for my collection. The Post was producing a commemorative edition of its Wednesday paper costing $1.50, double or more the usual daily price. It didn't get to my neighborhood.)

But here’s what’s fascinating – you can look at the day’s front pages of 714 newspapers from around world online, courtesy of the Newseum (hopefully they’ll all still be available for viewing when you click on the “Archive” link at this site: http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages).

Check out the papers of Nov. 5, 2008. You’ll see The Baltimore Sun, which I feel didn’t quite rise to the moment as visually or powerfully as many of the others.

Among the first couple at the Newseum site, I kind of liked the Los Angeles Daily News’ ‘A NEW DAWN’ and the Tahoe Daily Tribune AMERICA CHOOSES CHANGE and the New Haven Register’s HISTORIC VICTORY and the Palm Beach Post’s HISTORY.

Scroll through this amazing presentation and savor the moment. HISTORY, also writ large on the Kansas City Star and so many others.

The Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey:

OBAMA REACHES THE MOUNTAINTOP

The Albuquerque Journal: HISTORIC DAY IN AMERICA

And in others: YES, HE DID!; FROM DREAM TO HISTORY; PRESIDENT OBAMA

So many of them, all in big, bold caps, telling what we already knew.

They’re newspapers you don’t even have to read, although the stories in them likely are terrific.

Remember this new day in your heart, and tuck your newspaper away somewhere safe.

But if you have a copy you don’t need, my address is P.O Box 1152, Pasadena, MD 21123. I have a little more room in the old steamer trunk.