Could a nonprofit
ride to the rescue
of its own creator?
I've been watching my blog Statcounter reports of late, fascinated with the flow of visitors to The Real Muck since its public flogging of The Baltimore Sun began two weeks ago over the insulting treatment of dedicated employees in the firing of nearly a third of the newsroom staff.
The links to my accounts of the newspaper’s death spiral from more than a dozen blogs and Web sites brought readers by the thousands – so many that I could hardly keep up with watching where the visitors came from, the links that brought them, and which of my links they followed to other information and opinion sources.
But now that the shock value has worn off and the numbers are dropping into the very low hundreds, my eye caught an interesting digital footprint this week – of a visitor from the Abell Foundation. And Statcounter reported three previous visits from the same computer there.
I hope for another – for today’s entry – because of the Abell Foundation’s history, and a longshot hope in some quarters that it could factor in an eventual purchase of The Baltimore Sun that would return the nearly 172-year-old newspaper to local ownership, perhaps even a nonprofit.
You’d have to think that the price for buying The Sun is dropping, seeing as how its owner – Chicago-based Tribune Co. – is in bankruptcy and, while supposedly reorganizing under protection from creditors, is running its print media properties across the country into the ground.
What would it take to save this newspaper, here in Baltimore? Once upon a time (1986), Times Mirror Corp. valued it at about $400 million – paying some $600 million to the A.S. Abell Co. for The Sun and related properties, then selling off WMAR-TV for $200 million to comply with federal regulations on media cross-ownership.
The privately-held Abell company, largely owned by a small core of families, had created the A.S. Abell Co. Foundation in 1953 – launching it with an initial company contribution of $100,000. It grew, of course, but the sale of the company in 1986 had an enormous impact on the scope of what was renamed the Abell Foundation --- its assets multiplying tenfold to about $112 million, according to its own history (http://www.abell.org/aboutthefoundation/history.html).
What could be more appropriate than the Abell Foundation reclaiming the company that gave it birth, or at least playing a supporting role in its rescue from midwestern marauders.
And as I said in a radio panel discussion last week, if the Abell Foundation is looking around for donors to such a cause, I pledge $1,000 (from my personal ‘fortune’ as a Tribune retiree) – and would work for the newspaper six months for free to help out in the transition. (Then it's back to my seven-day weekends.)
The Sun was acquired by Tribune in its multibillion-dollar Times Mirror merger/takeover nine years ago, and then investor Sam Zell took the company private in an $8.2 billion deal a year and a half ago with a resulting debt burden that figured in the bankruptcy.
So, Sam – what would it take for a buyer to acquire The Baltimore Sun from Tribune? Clearly it’s worth a lot less than $400 million, now that Tribune has overseen substantial reductions in revenue and circulation through a combination of bad management, rapid growth of the Internet as an information source, industry-wide failures to adapt to that digital revolution, and now a global recession.
And you can hardly add ‘goodwill’ to the price – that’s pretty much been squandered. You and your yes-men flunkies treat its employees like chattel, and disserve readers by eliminating from the daily newspaper reason after reason why anyone would want to buy it.
Stock tables? Who needs them? And kill the business section while you’re at it.
National and world news? Who cares. Bury it inside. Makes it easier to import it all from Chicago in news modules, and run whatever fits.
Maryland section? Kill it. Put local news on the front page – only local news, unless you can find a Chicago module if anything really important happens like another war, or Mount Hood erupting.
Sports? Shrink it to a tabloid with half the space. Oops. That didn’t work. Must have had too many complaints. So make the section look larger, but still have half the space.
TV schedules? Kill the magazine, and create an unreadable Sunday section for the listings. Comics? Kill most of them. Sunday comics? Shrink what’s left, and make them unreadable in the back of the TV section.
Features section? Shrink it, eliminate it whenever possible.
Typefaces? Design style? Throw them out, and make The Sun look like all the other Tribune newspapers. And say the reason you did it was to improve readability. Not true? Who cares. Tell them anyway.
Oh, and don’t forget -- fire the writers, fire the columnists, fire the editors, fire the photographers, fire the page designers, fire the artists, fire the editorial writers, fire the infrastructure… fire the… fire… fire… fire… who?
Hmmm. Surely they can find someone who’s really to blame.
A reporter with real heart
My friend and former colleague, Sara Neufeld, who covered the Baltimore schools beat with distinction and reached out to the community through blogging about city education at baltimoresun.com, announced on her blog today she is volunteering to leave -- in order to save the job of a less senior colleague.
Her blog entry begins:
This is a hard post to write, but as a reporter (for the next five days, at least), I mustn't bury the lead: I volunteered today to be laid off by The Sun.
After the 61 layoffs in our newsroom two weeks ago, former reporters laid off from other job classifications (i.e., columnists, copy editors) have the option of going back into the reporting lineup. As a result of that "bumping," some of the reporters with low seniority are being laid off this week, including a friend with many more personal responsibilities than I have. That friend's situation inspired me to offer my job, but I think it will also be the right move for me personally, sorry as I am to leave the Baltimore schools beat that I've come to care so much about.
And this blog...
Read the full account at: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/education/blog/2009/05/sara_neufeld_baltimore_sun.html#more
Noted in passing
Tribune Co. received permission Tuesday from a federal bankruptcy judge to pay more than $13 million in bonuses to almost 700 employees for their work last year – but because of constraints in the law, not to pay more than $2 million in severance payments to more than 60 employees laid off shortly before the company filed for bankruptcy protection, Associated Press reported.
“Judge Kevin Carey authorized the bonus payments after Tribune chief financial officer Chandler Bigelow III testified that the bonuses are critical to keeping key managers motivated as Tribune tries to adjust to a tough economic climate for media companies,” AP reported.
“We need to motivate and incentivize the key people who will implement change," Bigelow said. "These are really good people we're talking about. They're the best and the brightest of the company."
If anyone finds a list of Tribune’s “best” and “ brightest" needing that additional monetary motivation and incentives to do their jobs, please send me the link. I have a list of many of the real best and brightest at The Baltimore Sun, and their reward: Fired without notice, with extra security guards called in to make sure they didn’t steal anything on their way out the door.
Open Letter to Tim Ryan
A friend and former colleague, Arnold R. “Skip” Isaacs, emailed a letter Wednesday to triple-threat Sun publisher/president/CEO Timothy E. Ryan and top editor J. Montgomery Cook, and gave permission to The Real Muck to share it:
Dear Mr. Ryan and Mr. Cook --
I am writing this letter with more sadness and regret than you can probably imagine.
I was a reporter and editor for the Baltimore Sun for nearly 19 years, during which I had various adventures, many enjoyable, some not, some fairly dangerous. I did not agree with every decision the Sun's management made in those years. But there was not a day or a moment that I was not grateful to be working for an honorable newspaper, whose owners recognized their responsibility to readers and their community as well as to their own profit and who expected me and my colleagues and our editors to do our jobs honestly and thoroughly with no agenda except to find and tell the truth in whatever story we were covering.
In our worst nightmares none of us could have imagined how badly the present owners and managers have damaged that tradition. Nor could we have conceived that any Sun executives would treat any employees the way you and those under your direction treated the men and women whose jobs you eliminated last month.
No doubt you will blame business conditions for the drastic shrinkage of the paper and loss of journalistic quality. That can be debated elsewhere. But business conditions didn't require canning people without notice in the middle of covering or editing a story, or letting them find out when they couldn't log onto their computers, then shoving them out the door under the eyes of security guards without time to absorb the event or for an appropriate goodby to colleagues. There is no possible business reason for those practices. The only reason is a thuggish indifference to common decency and human dignity.
The wrecking crew in Chicago and your leadership have bankrupted the Sun in more than the legal and financial sense. You are also intellectually bankrupt and morally bankrupt, bankrupt of principles, bankrupt of social conscience, bankrupt of basic decency. Not to mention bankrupt of any idea of what good journalism is and why it matters. I am sure that nearly all present and former employees share my feeling that only new ownership, as soon as possible, has any hope of restoring the serious purpose and public responsibility the Sun once had. If and when there is a change, no doubt many would be happy to see you booted out of the building with the same contempt you showed those you terminated earlier this month. But that will not really even the score, for this reason: You will deserve that contempt. The good journalists you kicked out the door did not.
Sincerely
Arnold R. Isaacs
Thanks for all the comments
Responses at this site and through emails to Muck postings continue to amaze and delight.
From Tim Windsor, on the newspaper’s explanation for its typeface changes:
Not to minimize the pain and suffering of the 61 newly-former Sun employees, but to me the low point of the past several weeks was the obvious dissembling of the reader's note you quote above. There were many ways to acknowledge the change; saying it was for readability was an unnecessary lie. All a news organization has is its reputation for truth. Beyond that clear line lies Pravda and the house organs of a dozen Banana Republics.
From ‘anonymous’:
Didn't The Sun pay a bazillion dollars to have someone create the "Mencken" font used "exclusively" by the paper? Seems to me at that time the Mencken font was praised for it's "readability."
From Len Lazarick, of the recently defunct Baltimore Examiner, who wrote just before the ‘Sun lies’ posting here:
This was much like the explanation when they trimmed the page size and told readers something like "this will make the paper easier to carry."
How can you have any credibility as a newspaper when you can't speak the truth to your own readers?
TV worth watching
Friends Laura Lippman and David Simon are heading to Los Angeles for television appearances later this week.
Laura, a former Sun reporter who has produced some 17 books of fiction (most of them in the mystery genre), is scheduled for an appearance Thursday night on CBS’ Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Not familiar with her? Visit http://www.lauralippman.com/. Not familiar with Ferguson? You go to bed too early.
David, a writer, TV producer and former Sun reporter best known as creator of the HBO series ‘The Wire,’ is among the guests Friday night on HBO’s ‘Real Time With Bill Maher.’ David testified last week at a Senate committee hearing on “The Future of Journalism.” If you haven’t seen the transcript already, here’s a link: http://commerce.senate.gov/public/_files/DavidSimonTestimonyFutureofJournalism.pdf
Showing posts with label Times Mirror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Times Mirror. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Sun massacre brings byline strike
Newspaper CEO Ryan
to present vision ahead,
but will he apologize?
Retirees, alumni mourn Sun decline;
Newspaper Guild offers counseling
Many staff bylines are likely to be missing from Thursday’s editions of The Baltimore Sun, and from stories on the newspaper Web site, in an action by members of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild protesting “layoffs and heavy handed tactics by owner Tribune Co.”
But it may just as well be an act of mourning in the wake of last week’s mass firings without notice of nearly a third of The Sun’s news and editorial staff. Sort of akin to a flag at half mast -- bylines symbolically gone.
The protest comes as the newspaper’s publisher/president/CEO Timothy E. Ryan was to address employees on the company’s vision going forward – an event that was expected to take place in the company cafeteria Thursday morning.
The question that this blog would offer first to Mr. Ryan: Will you issue a public apology for the manner in which dedicated, longtime employees were fired?
I’m not sure there is a way to go forward without acknowledging mistakes of the past, and the Chicago-based Tribune Co., which acquired The Baltimore Sun as part of its merger/takeover of Times Mirror Corp. a decade ago, has a lot of mistakes to acknowledge and rude and disrespectful actions that require an apology.
The firings and shrinking of the newspaper were, as expected, the main topic on the discussion menu Wednesday as the Sun’s alumni and retirees – nearly all of them from newsroom jobs – held their annual luncheon at the Engineering Club, about the same three-block distance from the newspaper building and the downtown church basement where the union was simultaneously holding a job fair and counseling session for the displaced workers.
The retirees and alumni included many distinguished journalists, and they shared revulsion for the manner in which their brethren were shown the door by the current (absentee) Lords of Calvert Street.
Bob Timberg, a former White House correspondent and three-decade veteran of The Sun, lamented the firings and added a name I had missed: David Wood, who covered the Defense Department with distinction. “He was a great reporter,” said Timberg, whose latest book was the definitive “John McCain, An American Odyssey.”
But greatness doesn’t necessarily count at The Baltimore Sun.
Steve Luxenberg, a former city editor who left The Sun more than two decades ago for the more promising pasture of The Washington Post, told the gathering that he had witnessed many management meetings in his years at the southern end of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and “it only takes one person to stand up and say, ‘You’re not going to treat people this way.’”
But evidently there was no one so brave in the top management at The Baltimore Sun to stand up and say ‘No.’
Arnold R. “Skip” Isaacs, a longtime Sun staffer and foreign correspondent who left in the 1990s, called it “a combination of cluelessness and cowardice – it’s hard to discern anything else.”
And John Plunkett, a former assistant managing editor who helps organize the annual reunion, said: “This was done by the standard business school method – not to tell anyone it was going to happen.”
The retirees organization was still trying to compile a list of all those fired, Plunkett noted.
The layoffs/firings went beyond the newsroom, having been going on for several weeks in commercial departments of the newspaper. About eight union members there have lost jobs in the latest round of job reductions, according to Angie Kuhl, the Sun’s Guild unit chair – in addition to nonunion managers who also were eliminated from the payroll.
“Tribune’s tactics are deplorable,” Cet Parks, the union’s executive director, said in an announcement of the byline strike. “Employees who poured their hearts and souls into putting out a great newspaper every day were told to get out and stay out. No fanfare, no thank you, no outplacement help, just hit the streets. Maybe that’s big business Tribune way, but it isn’t right. Through its actions Tribune has demonstrated that it has little regard or respect for its employees.”
“These decisions were made without any discussions on alternative costs saving methods,” added Brent Jones, a Sun editor and Guild representative. “We wanted to do something to show our former co‑workers that we're upset with how they were treated last week. We produce this paper and expect our voices to be heard.”
Gus Sentementes, a Sun reporter and Guild representative, said, “The wisdom and experience that has left The Sun in this period is shocking. Out‑of‑town and out‑of‑touch ownership has extracted a heavy toll on the newspaper.”
To say nothing of the heavy toll on Sun readers, this blogger adds.
Not everyone on the staff agreed with the byline strike. Michael Dresser, a longtime Sun staffer and Guild member, said his byline will appear Thursday.
"That fact does not represent an endorsement of the actions of Tribune management. I am shocked and saddened by the handling of the recent layoffs and dismayed [at] the entire direction of Tribune's response to its current economic difficulties," Mike wrote. "Nevertheless, I have long opposed byline strikes on principle and have refused to participate on past occasions."
He added: "I have many reasons for opposing byline strikes. I don't care to share most of them with management. I will openly state my belief that they are inherently undemocratic because they are called with no debate and no vote.
"I have been a Guild member for 38 years and have always been proud to be one. But on this point I have no intention of backing down -- ever. I have never seen a byline strike that accomplished anything positive. It's a tactic that should have been left behind in the 20th Century."
Coming up: ‘Font Day’
According to sources, the “font” style of The Baltimore Sun will be changed as of Monday’s editions to conform with that of the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers in the Tribune chain, pretty much discarding the style developed in recurring redesigns of The Sun in recent years.
This change has nothing to with making the newspaper look more appealing – it’s all about conforming with the look of news content that will be written, edited and composed in page “modules” by nonuion employees in Chicago. You’ll be seeing those news modules from Chicago in The Sun within a few weeks, the sources predict.
to present vision ahead,
but will he apologize?
Retirees, alumni mourn Sun decline;
Newspaper Guild offers counseling
Many staff bylines are likely to be missing from Thursday’s editions of The Baltimore Sun, and from stories on the newspaper Web site, in an action by members of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild protesting “layoffs and heavy handed tactics by owner Tribune Co.”
But it may just as well be an act of mourning in the wake of last week’s mass firings without notice of nearly a third of The Sun’s news and editorial staff. Sort of akin to a flag at half mast -- bylines symbolically gone.
The protest comes as the newspaper’s publisher/president/CEO Timothy E. Ryan was to address employees on the company’s vision going forward – an event that was expected to take place in the company cafeteria Thursday morning.
The question that this blog would offer first to Mr. Ryan: Will you issue a public apology for the manner in which dedicated, longtime employees were fired?
I’m not sure there is a way to go forward without acknowledging mistakes of the past, and the Chicago-based Tribune Co., which acquired The Baltimore Sun as part of its merger/takeover of Times Mirror Corp. a decade ago, has a lot of mistakes to acknowledge and rude and disrespectful actions that require an apology.
The firings and shrinking of the newspaper were, as expected, the main topic on the discussion menu Wednesday as the Sun’s alumni and retirees – nearly all of them from newsroom jobs – held their annual luncheon at the Engineering Club, about the same three-block distance from the newspaper building and the downtown church basement where the union was simultaneously holding a job fair and counseling session for the displaced workers.
The retirees and alumni included many distinguished journalists, and they shared revulsion for the manner in which their brethren were shown the door by the current (absentee) Lords of Calvert Street.
Bob Timberg, a former White House correspondent and three-decade veteran of The Sun, lamented the firings and added a name I had missed: David Wood, who covered the Defense Department with distinction. “He was a great reporter,” said Timberg, whose latest book was the definitive “John McCain, An American Odyssey.”
But greatness doesn’t necessarily count at The Baltimore Sun.
Steve Luxenberg, a former city editor who left The Sun more than two decades ago for the more promising pasture of The Washington Post, told the gathering that he had witnessed many management meetings in his years at the southern end of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and “it only takes one person to stand up and say, ‘You’re not going to treat people this way.’”
But evidently there was no one so brave in the top management at The Baltimore Sun to stand up and say ‘No.’
Arnold R. “Skip” Isaacs, a longtime Sun staffer and foreign correspondent who left in the 1990s, called it “a combination of cluelessness and cowardice – it’s hard to discern anything else.”
And John Plunkett, a former assistant managing editor who helps organize the annual reunion, said: “This was done by the standard business school method – not to tell anyone it was going to happen.”
The retirees organization was still trying to compile a list of all those fired, Plunkett noted.
The layoffs/firings went beyond the newsroom, having been going on for several weeks in commercial departments of the newspaper. About eight union members there have lost jobs in the latest round of job reductions, according to Angie Kuhl, the Sun’s Guild unit chair – in addition to nonunion managers who also were eliminated from the payroll.
“Tribune’s tactics are deplorable,” Cet Parks, the union’s executive director, said in an announcement of the byline strike. “Employees who poured their hearts and souls into putting out a great newspaper every day were told to get out and stay out. No fanfare, no thank you, no outplacement help, just hit the streets. Maybe that’s big business Tribune way, but it isn’t right. Through its actions Tribune has demonstrated that it has little regard or respect for its employees.”
“These decisions were made without any discussions on alternative costs saving methods,” added Brent Jones, a Sun editor and Guild representative. “We wanted to do something to show our former co‑workers that we're upset with how they were treated last week. We produce this paper and expect our voices to be heard.”
Gus Sentementes, a Sun reporter and Guild representative, said, “The wisdom and experience that has left The Sun in this period is shocking. Out‑of‑town and out‑of‑touch ownership has extracted a heavy toll on the newspaper.”
To say nothing of the heavy toll on Sun readers, this blogger adds.
Not everyone on the staff agreed with the byline strike. Michael Dresser, a longtime Sun staffer and Guild member, said his byline will appear Thursday.
"That fact does not represent an endorsement of the actions of Tribune management. I am shocked and saddened by the handling of the recent layoffs and dismayed [at] the entire direction of Tribune's response to its current economic difficulties," Mike wrote. "Nevertheless, I have long opposed byline strikes on principle and have refused to participate on past occasions."
He added: "I have many reasons for opposing byline strikes. I don't care to share most of them with management. I will openly state my belief that they are inherently undemocratic because they are called with no debate and no vote.
"I have been a Guild member for 38 years and have always been proud to be one. But on this point I have no intention of backing down -- ever. I have never seen a byline strike that accomplished anything positive. It's a tactic that should have been left behind in the 20th Century."
Coming up: ‘Font Day’
According to sources, the “font” style of The Baltimore Sun will be changed as of Monday’s editions to conform with that of the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers in the Tribune chain, pretty much discarding the style developed in recurring redesigns of The Sun in recent years.
This change has nothing to with making the newspaper look more appealing – it’s all about conforming with the look of news content that will be written, edited and composed in page “modules” by nonuion employees in Chicago. You’ll be seeing those news modules from Chicago in The Sun within a few weeks, the sources predict.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Newspaper weights and measures
Sun puts new spin
on ‘The Vanishing’
as staff, paper shrink
Something is missing in my Sunday paper – you know, The Baltimore Sun. An entire section has vanished. I seem to recall it as Section B, or Maryland Closeup, and though I'm told it happened a week or two ago, I just noticed yesterday.
Over the past two years, as The Sun was moving its elements around, eliminating some sections and consolidating others, there was usually a note to readers explaining the changes. Sometimes there was even a little audacity in suggesting the changes were improvements.
And after my initial wee-hours posting of this blog, I received an email and a Facebook note from friends who informed me that I missed the note to readers. As one of the fired editors put it, "The section was dropped two weeks ago, and a brief announcement was published saying that some content formerly in the section would be printed in the A section. Not, I concede, a conspicuous notice, but it was there."
I didn't find it on the electronic archive, so I'll have to wander down to the library later to see if I can find a copy of the notice I missed.
The disappearance of Maryland Closeup came just days before the newspaper’s purge of nearly a third of its editing, news and opinion staff through what has been charitably described as “layoffs.”
I called it a massacre. Firings. I had a comment from a reader criticizing my use of the word “fired,” saying it carries an implication that the employees had done something wrong. They hadn’t. But they were fired anyway.
In this world, you don’t have to do anything wrong to get fired. You can do a job better than anyone, and get fired because your higher salary was considered excess baggage by corporate bean-counters.
And these wonderful people, friends I worked with in my former life in the newsroom, did nothing wrong. They did their jobs well, demonstrated their professionalism and dedication by working longer hours than the standard 40 under their union contract (mostly without putting in for overtime), won honors for the newspaper, and were rewarded with unending abuse by the company – including a worthless, arbitrary employee evaluation system intended to justify giving one worker a $50 raise, while another gets $10 or less.
One of my thoughts in asking for a buyout in the newsroom reduction Class of 2007 was not wanting to ever fill out another evaluation of the small newsroom contingent I ostensibly supervised. It didn’t seem to matter what praise I wrote, how I graded. They all did their jobs to the point of excellence, but you couldn’t tell from the raises they would get.
Weights and measures
On a whim Sunday night, I drove down the road to my local Giant supermarket and picked up copies of The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post, carried them over to the produce section and plopped them on a scale.
From a purely size-and-price standpoint, here’s how they measured up: The Post was half a pound heavier, and cost 38 cents less.
And the Post news report had Section B – and a Section C. That’s “Outlook” and “Metro,” respectively. And all three newsy sections, A, B, C, had an ample supply of Washington Post staff bylines, as opposed to The Sun’s sparse news beyond the Baltimore Beltway. (And they were followed by the sections for Sports, Style & Arts, Travel, Business, and a crappy advertising-driven Jobs. Sealed in a plastic bag were the Post's magazine, full comics section, TV Week, Parade, ad inserts and coupons.
Fair to compare? Maybe not. After all, Washington is the nation’s capital and the Post has greater resources and a definitively wider reach in its global coverage. The only purely local story on the front page is about Virginia politics. And Metro has entirely too much Virginia, and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties news for this Baltimore-and-burbs reader. I’ve never understood why The Post so disdains wider coverage of Maryland news, allowing its competitor 30 miles up the B-W Parkway free reign over metro Baltimore for the past two decades.
I’ve never been a Post subscriber. Only The Sun – and I buy it still. I thought about canceling in protest, as some readers of this blog say they have. But I still have friends on the inside, and don’t want to see the rug pulled out from under them through declining circulation numbers despite their own employer’s seeming intent on diminishing its value and angering readers. One equally dismayed newspaper friend suggested we go out and sell subscriptions to The Sun despite it all, in an effort to keep the print product alive.
Seems strange to me that the newspaper has gone to such lengths to get rid of 30-year employees and 30-year readers, though.
Baltimore Sun publisher/president/CEO Timothy E. Ryan (a triple-threat player!) has a “to the readers” note on Page 3 about the newsroom changes and how proud the newspaper is to provide “award-winning journalism to more readers than any other local news media organization.”
“We truly value the more than 1 million people who read us every week.” (Doubtless a one-page online click is counted as one of that million, and people who buy the paper on multiple days count as more than one reader. Numbers are so easy to manipulate.)
There’s also some bragging about how the newspaper benefits in being part of “the Baltimore Sun Media Group (BSMG)” that includes 28 community newspapers in the Baltimore metro area – most if not all of which, the note doesn’t mention, have been cut in staffing and frequency of publication.
That latest note to readers is just spin, I’m afraid. The readers are getting less than ever before, unless they rely on digital sources for their news. There’s an awful lot of readers, or would-be readers, who are not equipped or able to do that, and The Baltimore Sun has fired them, too.
BSMG, hmmmmm. There’s probably other uses for those letters. Maybe I should hold a contest.
The final photo
In recounting the last day at work for veteran, award-winning Sun photographer Chiaki Kawajiri, The Real Muck last week noted her final assignment before being given a mutually tearful layoff by her department boss: A lawyer with his pet bird.
The photo taken Wednesday afternoon appeared in Sunday’s editions, accompanying an article by Personal Finance columnist Eileen Ambrose. The early Sunday edition hitting newsstands on Saturday had an enormous photo on the front page of a dog wearing a dollar-sign neckband, and the lawyer-with-parrot photo on an inside page. The later editions had both the large dog and a shrunken lawyer-with-bird on the inside page.
Not to criticize the maximum waste of space in a news-shrunken newspaper with a two column-by-13-inch photo of a dog with jewelry, but there was no credit line saying whose photo it was. Probably a stock-agency photo of a dog, but usually a credit line will identify the source.
There also was no credit identifying Chiaki under her final photo for the newspaper. It just reads: Baltimore Sun Photo. I'm told that the lack of a credit on Chiaki's last photo was her own request.
Attention TV News
Since The Baltimore Sun does not seem likely to throw a farewell party for the 60-plus staffers given the bum’s rush last week, the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild is planning a reception for them – for the fired union-jurisdiction staffers as well as the editors and managers who were in the nonunion “merit system.”
The party – to which newspaper alumni and friends are invited – is being held from 6 p.m, to 10 p.m. Thursday in the Rockefeller Room of the Standard Building at 501 St. Paul -- at the corner of the Franklin Street hill just up from the Sun building. Anyone thinking about starting up a real Baltimore/Central Maryland newspaper (or buying the old one) will find plenty of available talent -- top talent!
Also in the works: A job fair for the suddenly unemployed newspaper staffers, beginning at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday (May 6) at St. Ignatius Church, 805 North Calvert St.
Also on Wednesday, the personnel massacre and downward spiral of the newspaper are sure to be the main topic of conversation at the annual luncheon of the Baltimore Sun Retirees Association, beginning at 11 a.m. with a cash bar, at the Engineering Club, 11 West Mount Vernon Place.
The Sun’s firing of many of its best, brightest and most senior employees has been grossly under-reported by the area television news programs that for years have relied on the newspaper to cue its own coverage of what’s happening in and around Baltimore. The old A.S. Abell Co. founded and owned WMAR-TV (Channel 2) until its 1986 sale of The Sun and broadcast properties to Times Mirror Corp. required divestiture under federal regulations. It has in recent years had news partnerships with the various stations, and currently with WJZ-TV (Channel 13).
We’ll see if Channel 13, in particular, takes this hint.
on ‘The Vanishing’
as staff, paper shrink
Something is missing in my Sunday paper – you know, The Baltimore Sun. An entire section has vanished. I seem to recall it as Section B, or Maryland Closeup, and though I'm told it happened a week or two ago, I just noticed yesterday.
Over the past two years, as The Sun was moving its elements around, eliminating some sections and consolidating others, there was usually a note to readers explaining the changes. Sometimes there was even a little audacity in suggesting the changes were improvements.
And after my initial wee-hours posting of this blog, I received an email and a Facebook note from friends who informed me that I missed the note to readers. As one of the fired editors put it, "The section was dropped two weeks ago, and a brief announcement was published saying that some content formerly in the section would be printed in the A section. Not, I concede, a conspicuous notice, but it was there."
I didn't find it on the electronic archive, so I'll have to wander down to the library later to see if I can find a copy of the notice I missed.
The disappearance of Maryland Closeup came just days before the newspaper’s purge of nearly a third of its editing, news and opinion staff through what has been charitably described as “layoffs.”
I called it a massacre. Firings. I had a comment from a reader criticizing my use of the word “fired,” saying it carries an implication that the employees had done something wrong. They hadn’t. But they were fired anyway.
In this world, you don’t have to do anything wrong to get fired. You can do a job better than anyone, and get fired because your higher salary was considered excess baggage by corporate bean-counters.
And these wonderful people, friends I worked with in my former life in the newsroom, did nothing wrong. They did their jobs well, demonstrated their professionalism and dedication by working longer hours than the standard 40 under their union contract (mostly without putting in for overtime), won honors for the newspaper, and were rewarded with unending abuse by the company – including a worthless, arbitrary employee evaluation system intended to justify giving one worker a $50 raise, while another gets $10 or less.
One of my thoughts in asking for a buyout in the newsroom reduction Class of 2007 was not wanting to ever fill out another evaluation of the small newsroom contingent I ostensibly supervised. It didn’t seem to matter what praise I wrote, how I graded. They all did their jobs to the point of excellence, but you couldn’t tell from the raises they would get.
Weights and measures
On a whim Sunday night, I drove down the road to my local Giant supermarket and picked up copies of The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post, carried them over to the produce section and plopped them on a scale.
From a purely size-and-price standpoint, here’s how they measured up: The Post was half a pound heavier, and cost 38 cents less.
And the Post news report had Section B – and a Section C. That’s “Outlook” and “Metro,” respectively. And all three newsy sections, A, B, C, had an ample supply of Washington Post staff bylines, as opposed to The Sun’s sparse news beyond the Baltimore Beltway. (And they were followed by the sections for Sports, Style & Arts, Travel, Business, and a crappy advertising-driven Jobs. Sealed in a plastic bag were the Post's magazine, full comics section, TV Week, Parade, ad inserts and coupons.
Fair to compare? Maybe not. After all, Washington is the nation’s capital and the Post has greater resources and a definitively wider reach in its global coverage. The only purely local story on the front page is about Virginia politics. And Metro has entirely too much Virginia, and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties news for this Baltimore-and-burbs reader. I’ve never understood why The Post so disdains wider coverage of Maryland news, allowing its competitor 30 miles up the B-W Parkway free reign over metro Baltimore for the past two decades.
I’ve never been a Post subscriber. Only The Sun – and I buy it still. I thought about canceling in protest, as some readers of this blog say they have. But I still have friends on the inside, and don’t want to see the rug pulled out from under them through declining circulation numbers despite their own employer’s seeming intent on diminishing its value and angering readers. One equally dismayed newspaper friend suggested we go out and sell subscriptions to The Sun despite it all, in an effort to keep the print product alive.
Seems strange to me that the newspaper has gone to such lengths to get rid of 30-year employees and 30-year readers, though.
Baltimore Sun publisher/president/CEO Timothy E. Ryan (a triple-threat player!) has a “to the readers” note on Page 3 about the newsroom changes and how proud the newspaper is to provide “award-winning journalism to more readers than any other local news media organization.”
“We truly value the more than 1 million people who read us every week.” (Doubtless a one-page online click is counted as one of that million, and people who buy the paper on multiple days count as more than one reader. Numbers are so easy to manipulate.)
There’s also some bragging about how the newspaper benefits in being part of “the Baltimore Sun Media Group (BSMG)” that includes 28 community newspapers in the Baltimore metro area – most if not all of which, the note doesn’t mention, have been cut in staffing and frequency of publication.
That latest note to readers is just spin, I’m afraid. The readers are getting less than ever before, unless they rely on digital sources for their news. There’s an awful lot of readers, or would-be readers, who are not equipped or able to do that, and The Baltimore Sun has fired them, too.
BSMG, hmmmmm. There’s probably other uses for those letters. Maybe I should hold a contest.
The final photo
In recounting the last day at work for veteran, award-winning Sun photographer Chiaki Kawajiri, The Real Muck last week noted her final assignment before being given a mutually tearful layoff by her department boss: A lawyer with his pet bird.
The photo taken Wednesday afternoon appeared in Sunday’s editions, accompanying an article by Personal Finance columnist Eileen Ambrose. The early Sunday edition hitting newsstands on Saturday had an enormous photo on the front page of a dog wearing a dollar-sign neckband, and the lawyer-with-parrot photo on an inside page. The later editions had both the large dog and a shrunken lawyer-with-bird on the inside page.
Not to criticize the maximum waste of space in a news-shrunken newspaper with a two column-by-13-inch photo of a dog with jewelry, but there was no credit line saying whose photo it was. Probably a stock-agency photo of a dog, but usually a credit line will identify the source.
There also was no credit identifying Chiaki under her final photo for the newspaper. It just reads: Baltimore Sun Photo. I'm told that the lack of a credit on Chiaki's last photo was her own request.
Attention TV News
Since The Baltimore Sun does not seem likely to throw a farewell party for the 60-plus staffers given the bum’s rush last week, the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild is planning a reception for them – for the fired union-jurisdiction staffers as well as the editors and managers who were in the nonunion “merit system.”
The party – to which newspaper alumni and friends are invited – is being held from 6 p.m, to 10 p.m. Thursday in the Rockefeller Room of the Standard Building at 501 St. Paul -- at the corner of the Franklin Street hill just up from the Sun building. Anyone thinking about starting up a real Baltimore/Central Maryland newspaper (or buying the old one) will find plenty of available talent -- top talent!
Also in the works: A job fair for the suddenly unemployed newspaper staffers, beginning at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday (May 6) at St. Ignatius Church, 805 North Calvert St.
Also on Wednesday, the personnel massacre and downward spiral of the newspaper are sure to be the main topic of conversation at the annual luncheon of the Baltimore Sun Retirees Association, beginning at 11 a.m. with a cash bar, at the Engineering Club, 11 West Mount Vernon Place.
The Sun’s firing of many of its best, brightest and most senior employees has been grossly under-reported by the area television news programs that for years have relied on the newspaper to cue its own coverage of what’s happening in and around Baltimore. The old A.S. Abell Co. founded and owned WMAR-TV (Channel 2) until its 1986 sale of The Sun and broadcast properties to Times Mirror Corp. required divestiture under federal regulations. It has in recent years had news partnerships with the various stations, and currently with WJZ-TV (Channel 13).
We’ll see if Channel 13, in particular, takes this hint.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Celebrating Police Blotter
Baltimore Sun staff honors
veteran reporter Richard Irwin
for 30 years of crime news
In a morale boost for a troubled newsroom, the staff of The Baltimore Sun had cause for a little celebration Thursday night: The 30th anniversary of longtime cops reporter Richard Irwin’s Police Blotter.
Likely the continuously most-read element inside the newspaper, along with obituaries, the local version of Police Blotter first appeared in the Baltimore News American in February 1979. Its authors were Dick Irwin, Bill Lally and Robert Blatchley.
Seven years later, Hearst Corp. shut down the News American – an afternoon daily that competed head-on with the Baltimore Evening Sun and, to a lesser extent, the morning paper that was then simply called The Sun (Baltimore was formally added to its name and front-page design only a few months ago).
Dick Irwin was surprised when The Evening Sun called, offering a job. It was the same job Dick had just lost with the demise of his newspaper, as a police reporter chiefly responsible for the Blotter. And when The Evening Sun was euthanized by then-owner Times Mirror Corp., the morning newspaper became Dick’s home.
It was my privilege during six years as night metro editor to work with Dick, editing his Police Blotter and shepherding it into the Maryland section from 2001 to 2007. And it was especially wonderful to witness his dedication, night after night, making telephone calls to every police station in the city and Baltimore County in search of the crime reports that were the grist for Blotter – not the murders that make headlines, although he would write them as separate stories, but the endless procession of vandalism, burglary, armed robbery, auto theft, trespassing… even assaults, rapes and lesser shootings… that are so much an unfortunate part of the urban America experience.
Why is it so popular with readers? I always figured it was close to home, reporting police district by police district the crimes that are happening to our neighbors and, on rare occasions, even to newsroom staffers. No one, it seems, is immune to being a crime victim. It could happen to you.
Dick always took it as a personal affront when police would refuse to divulge what he rightfully insisted was public information – people have a right to know details about the crimes committed in their communities, the names of people arrested (heaven help us all when police in this nation can make secret arrests), even the names of cops who, rightfully or not, shoot people. And he loves reporting on cops who perform their jobs especially well, solving crimes or helping a community, and rarely would get public credit anywhere else.
For thirty years, Dick Irwin has been fighting for that noble cause, into the wee hours when most of us are asleep. He arrives in the newsroom around 5 p.m., and when the final edition is done near 2 a.m., he’s still there, making the calls to gather information for the next day’s paper, one police station at a time.
Occasionally, there’ll be a cop who doesn’t recognize the name of Dick Irwin. It’s a cop who will never make detective.
You can find a longer report on the Police Blotter anniversary, a brief video interview of Dick Irwin, and a collection of some entertaining Blotter highlights compiled over the years by now-retired chief makeup editor Tom Gibbons and myself, at crime columnist Peter Hermann’s Baltimore Sun blog at http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.hermann20feb20,0,550771.column
On an uphappier note
The Baltimore Sun is shrinking again – not just in staffing through continuing buyouts and layoffs, but in the size of the newspaper itself. Take a good look at next Tuesday’s edition when, if the change goes according to plan, the newspaper will be an inch and a quarter narrower. This will make the newspaper seem more vertical in appearance, but it will be smaller.
According to folks I talked to who are familiar with the technical aspects, the shrinkage is a result of reducing the size of the press “web” by five inches – reducing the width of the enormous rolls of paper, called newsprint, that wind through the high-speed, three-story-high presses, saving some costs in materials.
In whole numbers, the paper is now about a foot wide. Next Tuesday, it’ll be close to 11 inches. The tabloid width used by the free daily Baltimore Examiner, which went out of business last week, was a little over 10 inches. But at least the much greater length of The Sun will be unchanged, for now.
And soon to come will be a second page of the newspaper produced entirely in Chicago – baseball news in the Sports section. The Real Muck reported recently on Tribune Company’s imposition of a standard “nation & world” page across most of its chain of newspapers, a change detectable by the jarringly different (and ugly) typefaces used by the Chicago Tribune mother ship. Word is that changes wrought by multiple redesign projects aimed at making The Baltimore Sun look better will largely be undone in the effort by Tribune to cut costs by making all of its newspapers look the same. (And while the union-jurisdiction jobs of writers, copy editors and page designers are being eliminated in Baltimore, the work is being shifted to non-union personnel in Chicago.)
A supposed goal of Tribune to maintain the unique character of each of the company’s newspapers is lamentably dead. I wonder how many readers these days will notice, or care.
As a former colleague still at The Sun told me this week, “I hope we get sold soon.”
It might be the only hope Baltimore has for an independent, locally produced newspaper that fully reflects the needs of its readership.
Today's fortune cookie message
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Daily number: 538 (I get that same number in at least a third of these cookies. Very strange. But I play 322 and 812 when the gambling impulse strikes me. In any case, the latest doses of the Szechuan Cafe's orange chicken and hot and sour soup were excellent.)
veteran reporter Richard Irwin
for 30 years of crime news
In a morale boost for a troubled newsroom, the staff of The Baltimore Sun had cause for a little celebration Thursday night: The 30th anniversary of longtime cops reporter Richard Irwin’s Police Blotter.
Likely the continuously most-read element inside the newspaper, along with obituaries, the local version of Police Blotter first appeared in the Baltimore News American in February 1979. Its authors were Dick Irwin, Bill Lally and Robert Blatchley.
Seven years later, Hearst Corp. shut down the News American – an afternoon daily that competed head-on with the Baltimore Evening Sun and, to a lesser extent, the morning paper that was then simply called The Sun (Baltimore was formally added to its name and front-page design only a few months ago).
Dick Irwin was surprised when The Evening Sun called, offering a job. It was the same job Dick had just lost with the demise of his newspaper, as a police reporter chiefly responsible for the Blotter. And when The Evening Sun was euthanized by then-owner Times Mirror Corp., the morning newspaper became Dick’s home.
It was my privilege during six years as night metro editor to work with Dick, editing his Police Blotter and shepherding it into the Maryland section from 2001 to 2007. And it was especially wonderful to witness his dedication, night after night, making telephone calls to every police station in the city and Baltimore County in search of the crime reports that were the grist for Blotter – not the murders that make headlines, although he would write them as separate stories, but the endless procession of vandalism, burglary, armed robbery, auto theft, trespassing… even assaults, rapes and lesser shootings… that are so much an unfortunate part of the urban America experience.
Why is it so popular with readers? I always figured it was close to home, reporting police district by police district the crimes that are happening to our neighbors and, on rare occasions, even to newsroom staffers. No one, it seems, is immune to being a crime victim. It could happen to you.
Dick always took it as a personal affront when police would refuse to divulge what he rightfully insisted was public information – people have a right to know details about the crimes committed in their communities, the names of people arrested (heaven help us all when police in this nation can make secret arrests), even the names of cops who, rightfully or not, shoot people. And he loves reporting on cops who perform their jobs especially well, solving crimes or helping a community, and rarely would get public credit anywhere else.
For thirty years, Dick Irwin has been fighting for that noble cause, into the wee hours when most of us are asleep. He arrives in the newsroom around 5 p.m., and when the final edition is done near 2 a.m., he’s still there, making the calls to gather information for the next day’s paper, one police station at a time.
Occasionally, there’ll be a cop who doesn’t recognize the name of Dick Irwin. It’s a cop who will never make detective.
You can find a longer report on the Police Blotter anniversary, a brief video interview of Dick Irwin, and a collection of some entertaining Blotter highlights compiled over the years by now-retired chief makeup editor Tom Gibbons and myself, at crime columnist Peter Hermann’s Baltimore Sun blog at http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.hermann20feb20,0,550771.column
On an uphappier note
The Baltimore Sun is shrinking again – not just in staffing through continuing buyouts and layoffs, but in the size of the newspaper itself. Take a good look at next Tuesday’s edition when, if the change goes according to plan, the newspaper will be an inch and a quarter narrower. This will make the newspaper seem more vertical in appearance, but it will be smaller.
According to folks I talked to who are familiar with the technical aspects, the shrinkage is a result of reducing the size of the press “web” by five inches – reducing the width of the enormous rolls of paper, called newsprint, that wind through the high-speed, three-story-high presses, saving some costs in materials.
In whole numbers, the paper is now about a foot wide. Next Tuesday, it’ll be close to 11 inches. The tabloid width used by the free daily Baltimore Examiner, which went out of business last week, was a little over 10 inches. But at least the much greater length of The Sun will be unchanged, for now.
And soon to come will be a second page of the newspaper produced entirely in Chicago – baseball news in the Sports section. The Real Muck reported recently on Tribune Company’s imposition of a standard “nation & world” page across most of its chain of newspapers, a change detectable by the jarringly different (and ugly) typefaces used by the Chicago Tribune mother ship. Word is that changes wrought by multiple redesign projects aimed at making The Baltimore Sun look better will largely be undone in the effort by Tribune to cut costs by making all of its newspapers look the same. (And while the union-jurisdiction jobs of writers, copy editors and page designers are being eliminated in Baltimore, the work is being shifted to non-union personnel in Chicago.)
A supposed goal of Tribune to maintain the unique character of each of the company’s newspapers is lamentably dead. I wonder how many readers these days will notice, or care.
As a former colleague still at The Sun told me this week, “I hope we get sold soon.”
It might be the only hope Baltimore has for an independent, locally produced newspaper that fully reflects the needs of its readership.
Today's fortune cookie message
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Daily number: 538 (I get that same number in at least a third of these cookies. Very strange. But I play 322 and 812 when the gambling impulse strikes me. In any case, the latest doses of the Szechuan Cafe's orange chicken and hot and sour soup were excellent.)
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