By JOAN JACOBSON

     The story you will not read in today’s print edition of The Baltimore Sun is the jaw- dropping announcement made yesterday by its new Editor, Monty Cook, that he is closing the Sun’s suburban bureaus in Baltimore, Anne Arundel and Howard Counties and moving employees downtown.

Cook told the Associated Press that reporters from the bureaus will continue to cover their suburban beats. What he didn’t say, is that they’ll continue to cover the news from their cars, by phone, Blackberry or with laptops perched under the steering wheel. That’s the only way you can actually cover the news in a timely fashion, which Cook might not understand. He has little or no experience as a reporter (he’s a design guy) and may not know that reporters actually need to be at the scene of a story – be it a murder trial, fatal fire, county council meeting, zoning hearing, etc.  I believe the New Media term they are using these days is “mobile journalism.” It’s great that technology lets reporters file with phones, Blackberries and laptops but let’s not forget that it’s also a stop-gap technique used to cope with the fact that reporters have lost valuable time, driving to now-far-flung news events. It’s another symptom of downsizing by the industry and it means the journalism is going to suffer.

Cook also braced the staff for a newsroom reorganization that will mean more layoffs or buyouts. He also said that the Sun’s web employees will (finally!) move into the newsroom. The significance of the move of web workers is that for years the Sun paid hefty rents at the upscale Cross Keys to keep the Baltimore Sun’s dot com workers segregated from regular Sun employees who are represented by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. God forbid the Sun should have paid a little extra in salaries to the dot com workers so their pay would be comparable to Guild workers. Instead, the money was wasted on rent and duplicating office furniture and computers, etc. Now, what does it matter? Nobody knows from week to week who will be sitting next to them or whether they news will get covered.

Meanwhile, somehow, the remaining staff are still producing great work.  What a blow to hear this news the same week when they published the last of Sara Neufeld’s magnificent three-part profile of Andres Alonso, plus some really moving stories by Peter Hermann (aka the Hermanator) about an ex-cop who died alone, and about the former colleagues who belatedly came to honor him at his funeral.