From a source, a description of The Baltimore Sun newsroom, the day after nearly a third of the staff was laid off:

“Greetings from inside the tomb, where you can hear the air conditioning running.
There may be life on other planets, but I can safely report that there’s no life at the Sun.
Certain people are running around in a self-important way, giving orders and avoiding eye contact. Security guards–not the ones we know–pretend to be casually passing though the newsroom.
A muffin and a Mountain Dew sit on Ray Frager’s desk, just where he left them when he was called in to be fired Tuesday night.
AME-level editors were writing cutlines and headlines last night because no one thought that you actually need people to do those jobs.
Welcome to the Sun, where no one can hear you scream.”

    Tribune Company, it turns out, has been gutting copy desks at many of its other papers and, according to this source, has a pretty chilling strategy for preventing factual errors, typos and libelous statements once the guys and gals in green eye-shades are gone: depend on the reporters to turn in clean copy “because it may not get another read.”

     They also plan to use lots of canned copy and packaged content “modules”  from the home office in Chicago.  So says newspaper design veteran Charles Apple, in his blog on the website visualeditors.com.

Apple offers a pretty detailed, insiderer-y glimpse of what may be in store for Baltimore.  Many thanks to Michael Hill for recommending the link.

((Breaking News: Sun memo sent today on newsroom reorganization. Click through to read……))

Read the rest of this entry »

By FERN SHEN
Baltimore Sun management described its massive layoffs yesterday – 61 editorial-side staffers cut, a third of the 205-person newsroom – as a strategy for “success, not just survival, ” part of their transition into  ”a 24-hour local news-gathering media company.”

These brief comments in a small story on the Sun’s business page were pretty much all the explanation they were offering.

((UPDATE: Sun publisher Tim Ryan today sent a memo to staff   ‘regretting’ the impact of layoffs, explaining they’re part of a restructuring that will leave them better positioned to “help our company succeed and win in the future.”  Click through to read it.)) 

Brutal though it is, they seem to be saying, it’s the only way. Will Baltimore buy that?
Read the rest of this entry »

The slashing, which trimmed 20 percent of the newsroom staff, followed the layoff of 21 senior editors and newsroom managers on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to a press release issued by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild and a Sun spokeswoman, who spoke to the Associated Press.

Guild and newsrooms sources described the yesterday’s layoffs, which moved beyond editors to Guild-covered workers.

Among those axed: five photographers, four columnists, critics, graphics and page design staff and copy editors.

Some familiar bylines you won’t be seeing in the Sun, it seems: music critic Rashod Ollison, sportswriters Rick Maese and David Steele. In some cases, classifications have been changed: Mary McCauley moved from critic to reporter, Laura Vozzella and Peter Hermann moved from columnist to reporter.
(David Ettlin has a detail-rich post about the layoffs today on his blog, “The Real Muck.”)
Read the rest of this entry »

The Baltimore Sun yesterday laid off at least 15 editorial-side staffers, including the copy desk chief and a deputy managing editor.

A reporter called the layoffs “unprecedented” at the Sun because of the number of people asked, at one time, to essentially leave the paper against their will.

 Until this point, said general assignment reporter Gus Sentementes, the cutbacks at the Sun have come mostly in the form of buyouts, “so that, at the end of the day, they were essentially ‘voluntary.’”

“The people who remained, remained because they wanted to do the work, because they’ve been in the profession for years, because they can’t do anything else,” said Sentementes, who is also a volunteer for the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. 

When those people were told to leave yesterday, he said, “it was very emotional.”  
* Baltimore Business Journal and Daily Record coverage here.
* John McIntyre’s farewell on his blog.
* Editor & Publisher article saying “the exodus of editors is expected to reach 20.”
* For David Simon’s comments on his Facebook page, read on.
Read the rest of this entry »