The Baltimore Sun's abrupt firing of 61 editors, reporters, columnists, and other "content providers" on April 28 and 29 appears to be linked to a restructuring of the newsroom that had been set in motion by the Chicago-based Tribune Co., which owns The Sun, many months ago. The effort appears to be part of Tribune's plan to reduce editing and homogenize national and international news at The Sun and other news outlets owned by the company.
On Monday, May 11, a note to readers on The Sun's front page said the paper's "type styles" had been changed "to improve readability." They were also changed to match the type fonts coming from Tribune's headquarters.
Sun reporters say management has not informed them of these changes, and last week many were focusing their anger on the abrupt and "shoddy" way their colleagues were terminated. On May 7, many of the 148 or so remaining Baltimore Sun editorial staff members, and many of their former colleagues, spilled onto the sidewalk in front of the Standard, a downtown apartment building, sipping drinks and wondering what will become of the newspaper.
"Last week was like shock and denial," said one Sun reporter, who asked that his name not be revealed. "This week it's like fury at the way people were treated last week."
Despite a meeting with publisher Timothy E. Ryan that morning, several Sun reporters said they did not know what the bankrupt Tribune Co.'s plan was. Several said they were left in the dark about cuts to the editing staff which will likely degrade their published work, and few seemed to know much about a major change in the way the Tribune chain handles news. "We'll know more about the modules in the coming weeks," said Angie Kuhl, the Sun unit chair for the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild.
"The modules" is Tribune-speak for a system of centralized news editing and layout that makes the jobs of many of the people fired last week redundant. The software package undergirding it is called "CCI NewsGate."
Charles Apple, a "news artist and designer" writing at the visualeditors.com blog, broke the NewsGate story on April 30 under a post he headlined, "Tribune considers design, copy editing functions to be 'manufacturing.'" Apple wrote that one of his sources, which were all unnamed, told him that "up to 75 percent of the paper in places like Fort Lauderdale, Baltimore, Hartford, etc., is to be produced in Chicago." Current and former staffers at several Tribune papers, while not going as far as Apple's sources, confirmed the gist of Apple's piece for City Paper.
"Editing is being treated as an expensive luxury," says John E. McIntyre, head of The Sun's copy desk for 14 years. The new regime seems to allow for "one read, instead of the three or four that used to be standard." He takes pains to note that this kind of thing is happening all over the newspaper world: "People who are writing for America's newspapers are working without a net. It's not just at The Sun."
But it appears that Tribune is taking this trend farther than other companies, and has been doing so for a long time.
Night editors used to edit wire copy from the Associated Press and other sources--usually stories about national and international events. Tribune managers have long sought to cut back on the redundancy of this national coverage, first gutting and consolidating their papers' Washington bureaus and closing those overseas. The new phase of the plan, which has quietly been in motion for many months, is to provide each of the chain's newspapers with a standard package of stories edited the same way. "I think the module plan--shared content--was in the works for quite a while," says a former editor at the Hartford Courant. "Tribune sent some people out to watch the workflow at the various papers last fall, which I think was when they began nailing down the specifics."
By February, the modules began to be shipped electronically to six papers--The Sun, the Courant, the Orlando Sentinel, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Allentown's The Morning Call, and the Newport News Daily Press.
"There's consultation to make sure other papers are happy with the story choices," says one former Tribune editor. "They edit the stories down to eight or 10 inches, or to be [news] briefs, and choose photos and graphics to go with them. The final package is decent, if you want short versions of the top world and national stories of the day."
But the system takes away the local editors' flexibility. One former Sun editor says the stories he would choose often appeared in different modules, but you can't mix and match. Since The Sun usually has room for only one module, the paper must forego a story it would have run in favor of one it may not have otherwise selected.
"Downsides are, if a paper uses a module, it can't edit it," says a former Courant editor. "So you can't change it to highlight anything significant to your local audience. Any mistakes have to be flagged for Chicago and corrected by someone there."
Baltimore Sun spokeswoman Renee Mutchnik says the practice of using material not produced in-house is not unusual.
"Every day we incorporate news and features from many sources as we have done for decades," she says in an e-mail. "For The Baltimore Sun, these include the Associated Press, other Tribune newspapers and content from our partners such as The Washington Post and WJZ-TV."
Gary Weitman, Tribune's senior vice president of corporate relations, confirms the modules' purpose. "For a long time we have been treating certain national and world news stories in a way to allow [Tribune papers] to share them more easily and realize certain efficiencies in the way they are laid out and edited," he says. "But we are focused very much on letting the local newspapers in the local markets decide what [local news] is important."
Weitman declines to confirm even the name of the new system, saying it is proprietary information despite an official statement Tribune released, which Editor & Publisher quoted in a March 10 story: "We have decided to consolidate editorial processes, including extensive content sharing across multiple titles and properties," Tribune Business Applications Vice President Paul Mitnick said in a statement. "With its built-in data center and collaboration capabilities, CCI NewsGate is the optimal technological platform to implement this decision. And we expect to come out of this change in editorial strategy with significant savings."
Some of those savings were implemented on Mark Fleming, a slot editor with 23 years experience. He arrived at work at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 29. He saw a reporter, talking to a designer. "I could see on their faces that something was up," he says.
"I went over to the copy desk. Mike Kane came in ahead of me. Peggy Cunningham was there. She has 20 years experience. Beth Hughes." Fleming watched as Kane tried to sign on. His log-in and password had been revoked, according to the prompt that appeared on the screen. Fleming noticed Cunningham had got out a plastic grocery bag and was placing items from her desk inside it.
Fleming knew his friends had been terminated. But he didn't know if he had.
"So I tried to sign on and got the exact same thing," Fleming recounts. Password revoked. "About that time, Phil Klinedinst, he's head of the copy desk, came out [of his office] and [said] it wasn't supposed to be like this."
