Remember the Baltimore Sun’s first website: “Sunspot?” That “cutesy” name was just one of the indignities the site’s early staffers had to suffer, recalls a bitter Kevin Naff, Sunspot’s content manager when it was launched in 1996.

Naff (now the editor of The Washington Blade) describes in a recent Huffington Post essay what he felt was a vicious print/web culture clash at the Sun in the late 1990s.

  (The clash is worth exploring, he argues, because it “hastened the industry’s undoing.” With The Baltimore Sun among the nation’s most dramatically ‘undone’ newspapers, Baltimoreans may find Naff’s reminiscence, clearly from the webby side of the clash, of historical interest.)

Newsroom types at the Sun regarded him as “either the enemy to be destroyed or a dilettante to be ignored,” he complains. They “didn’t respect my work ethic, dedication or journalism experience,” he writes. Naff, meanwhile, also had a low opinion of his own digital-side underlings. The poorly-funded SunSpot was, in his view, “a dumping ground for underperformers from print.” Read the rest of this entry »

COLD TYPE: A Baltimore Media Blog

By JOAN JACOBSON

 A spark of hope for the newspaper industry arrived today in the form of a Chicago Tribune story that quoted unnamed sources who said the U.S. Bankruptcy Court overseeing the Tribune Corporation’s reorganization may transfer control of the company from Chicago billionaire Sam “the Gravedancer” Zell to a group of investors and banks that hold more than $8 billion in debt. Read the rest of this entry »

. . . a noontime bento box of tidbits, from and about The Baltimore Sun and local media.

* Bemoaning the loss of the colorful tradition of puking-drunk debauchery in the Preakness infield, now that you can’t bring your own booze to the event? Then you didn’t make it to the 13th paragraph of the Sun’s story today about the first BYOB-less Preakness. It says the price of a beer tomorrow will be: “$3.50 — except for a special from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m., when the price drops to $1.” Party on!   

* Add to the roster of distinguished reporters leaving The Baltimore Sun education reporter Sara Neufeld.  She bid a bittersweet farewell in the Sun’s excellent InsideEd blog yesterday and explained that she volunteered to be laid off, to help a colleague with low seniority who was about to be “bumped.”

* UPDATE: Also yesterday, the newsroom bid farewell to another terrific and prolific reporter, Nick Madigan, one more victim of the “bumping process.”