Michael Anft, of the
Urbanite, takes a viewpoint on the happenings at The Baltimore Sun in this month's issue. Here's a snippet from the
online version:
Shed tears for an on-the-slide daily? Forget it. Why shouldn’t the drawn-out demise of a newspaper bought to model a morally bankrupt corporate culture—the kind that led raiders and bean counters to believe you could milk 20 percent profit margins from operations that had made 2 to 3 percent annually for their previous local owners—be a cause of rejoicing? At the very least, the visibly diminished state of the Sun, with several fewer pages of news per week, might speed the search for a new model to replace newsprint.
It should be noted that The Sun has covered extensively the dislocation of workers at major companies in Baltimore for years. I wrote plenty of stories when Bethlehem Steel shriveled up and blew away a few years back, as retirees fretted over their health insurance. We also covered the fall of GM's Broening Highway plant from many, many different angles.
The coverage of 55+ journalists and others leaving The Sun recently, by comparison, has been far more muted, I think. You certainly won't find much coverage of it within the pages of the Sun. Other local media with a snarky edge seem to enjoy watching the paper stumble, even as real people work within the belly of the beast to try to maintain the newspaper's traditions and standards. The workers, meanwhile, are sometimes accused of being "whiners," when they try to call attention to what's happening.
Indeed, we should go silently into the night.
I haven't heard of any reporters tracking down recently laid-off/bought-out Sun journalists at their homes to ask them how they're gonna pay for their health insurance when their buyout package runs out. I haven't heard of other reporters tracking down recent dislocated Sun employees at their homes and asking them what their plan is for helping cover their kids' tuition. Or making that mortgage payment. God forbid these people who just lost their careers at an institution they loved should speak about the pain of being dislocated. Or express their anger and disappointment toward Tribune Co., lest they be labeled as "whiners."
Yet we (The Sun) wrote extensively about the plight of such workers when other major companies here did massive workforce cuts.
Our articles also noted that when many of these more-troubled companies were dislocating their workers, they actually gave them
far more time to consider voluntary buyouts and, in some cases, gave them
far better benefits -- when compared to what The Sun offered its employees over the summer in the latest round of buyouts. And these employers were actually
in the red, whereas The Baltimore Sun is not. Yet.
I don't dispute Mr. Anft's contention that The Sun was often a brief stop for some ambitious writers, who were on their way to bigger and better papers. But that isn't necessarily why you've seen so many people leave, especially within the last two years. People are coming and going because of the uncertainty: they have families to care for, and the instability wears on the soul.
This latest buyout generated so much concern, within the newsroom at least, that people who feared they were on the cusp of being laid off went out on job interviews. But they survived the layoffs. Yet new, better job offers came in.
So they left.
Over the past month, we lost another handful of smart reporters in the prime of their careers this way. So, the newsroom may have lost 55 people during the official buyout period, but since then, the resignation letters have kept coming.
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