Sun Cuts Newsroom Staff Again; Local Group Tries To Buy Paper BALTIMORE, MD (wypr) - Employees of the Sun are waiting today to learn what the Tribune Company will offer them to quit their jobs. The company announced Wednesday that 100 jobs would be cut from the Baltimore Sun Media Group. WYPR's Art Buist has been following this story and files this report.

It has become a depressingly familiar story. The Baltimore Sun's parent company, the Tribune Company, says it needs to make enhancements to the newspaper to improve customer satisfaction and increase financial stability. - So it cuts it's staff.

The Sun is not unique in it's problems. Newspapers have had a tough time all-over according to Paul Gillin, an author and media consultant based in Boston. He runs a blog and website chronicling problems in the newspaper industry called: newspaper death watch -dot- com.

There are newspaper layoffs happening all over the country and in fact all over the world; but the worst concentration of them is in the US and it has hit almost every newspaper in the country.

The layoffs by the Tribune company come on the heals of the McClatchy newspaper chain, which includes the Miami Herald, cutting 14-hundred jobs or about 10 percent of its total work force. On the same day the cuts at the Sun were announced, the Tribune-owned Hartford Courant announced cuts of 60 jobs which would reduce its newsroom staff from 232 to about 175. At the Sun, reporters were told that 55 to 60 of the jobs eliminated would be in the newsroom, leaving about 200. Lynn Anderson co-chair of the Newspaper Guild's Sun Unit told WYPR, reporters at the Sun are very upset.


People are completely disheartened. People are depressed. People are anxious, they are nervous a lot of people think they could very well lose their jobs, jobs that they love, jobs that they feel privileged to do, you know, in a matter of weeks.

From 1931 through 2003 the Sun won thirteen Pulitzer Prizes, in categories including editorials, investigative reporting, feature reporting and national and international reporting. Since 2003, under the ownership of the Tribune Company the Sun's Guild-represented workforce has shrunk by 34 percent.

Guild co-chair Tanika White said there is reason to worry about the Sun.

Lynn Anderson and I are both really concerned. First about the people here, but then also about the paper. We both believe in it, we love it we came because we believe in journalism and also in the Sun as a great American institution, a great Maryland institution.

Anderson and White have both been reporters at the Sun for about 9 years. Media consultant Gillin told WYPR most of the national newspaper cutbacks have included some news gathering personnel, but...


These deep cuts in newsroom staffs are unique to the Tribune Company. Which has stated three weeks ago that its journalists would increasingly be measured by the quantity of their output and that the Tribune planned to make major cuts to the total news pages.

The announcement of staff cuts at the Tribune-owned Hartford Courant included cutting the size of the newspaper pages by 25 percent. A memo from Tribune owner Sam Zell three weeks ago included references to changing the size of the paper; and the memo announcing cuts to Sun employees from Sun publisher Tim Ryan included an announcement of a redesign of the Sun to give readers (quote) more of what they want. Media consultant Gillin is not impressed.


The more of what they want' argument is predicated on the argument is predicated on the idea that people want more quick hit short bursty stuff, and they don't really want depth they don't really want perspective, they just want lots of entry points and then if they're interested presumably they can go to a website and find out more.


Gillin said when USA Today came out 26 years ago it marked a departure in applying new technology and display ideas to the newspaper medium. But it doesn't follow that making an established general-interest newspaper look like USA today would lead to success. The Tribune-owned Orlando Sentinel implemented its redesign this week. The same changes will be coming to the Sun in August, and Gillin told WYPR it's not likely to make much difference.


The Sentinel has already published the results of reader feedback on that design and almost nobody seems to care. They have gotten 118 negative comments and 16 positive comments and 8 people cancelled their subscription. Well, big deal the paper has a circulation north of 200-thousand.


The prospect of a Baltimore Sun that looks like USA Today is not going down well in the Sun newsroom, according to reporter Lynn Anderson.


We're calling these future stories charticles' - charts and articles smashed together - someone writes a 20-inch story, which is a fairly large story. They'll say well, a month from now, this story will be smashed into a charticle.


Recently the Sun has done in-depth reporting on issues such as ground rent, which resulted in legislative changes. Reporting on practices by then City Council President, Sheila Dixon, in 2003 and 2004 led to the current investigation of Mayor Dixon. The Sun recently won a public service award from the Associated Press for an on-going series on crime.

A local business group which includes Bob Embry and Ted Venetoulis, has been trying to buy the Sun; but so far with no success. Venetoulis who acts as spokesman for the group told WYPR that if they can buy the Sun, they would have a different perspective from the current owners.


We're local people. We're buying it for partially for civic reasons; we do expect a return, but we don't need the return that conglomerates need. They used to get 20- 25 per cent. We'd be perfectly happy with 10 or 12 percent, so that's a big difference and in effect allows you to put more into the company.

Venetoulis said his group would like to get the best journalists available, and put more emphasis on news-gathering. Of course they're not even to the point of discussing money, the Sun isn't for sale at this point. But Venetoulis gets some encouragement from the fact that Sam Zell and the Tribune Company recently sold Newsday on Long Island. There was a debt of about 13-billion dollars associated with the purchase of Tribune by Zell. Venetoulis believes Newsday was sold so that Tribune could make a payment on the debt.

I think there were a couple reasons, first the debt pressure because of the changing economy and the changing newspaper industry which has had some precipitous declines in advertising, and the new internet, the whole new digital environment. I think wisely he decided he needed to bring in some cash to alleviate his debt burden. Newsday I think was a good choice for him because he had three very strong bidders.

Those bidders included media mogul Rupert Murdoch, real estate developer Mort Zukerman, and James Dolan, whose family owns Cablevision, the Long Island cable company. Cablevision won-out for $650-million dollars.

If what media consultant Paul Gillin hears is correct, it is possible that the Tribune company may be in a mood to sell-off some properties very soon, which might include the Sun.

The Tribune company has a unique set of problems, they have an 8.2 billion dollar debt and it looks like they are going to default on it by the end of this year if they don't do something drastic.


WYPR news repeatedly asked the Baltimore Sun management to provide someone to be interviewed for this report. They declined.

I'm Art Buist, reporting in Baltimore for 88-1 WYPR.
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