Baltimore Sun

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 12:11pm on Sunday, November 8th, 2009

What It Really Means When Cities Lose Their Newspapers

Veteran political writer Frank A. DeFilippo opines on Splicetoday.com:

"In Baltimore, the Sun — the last remaining major daily in a town which 25 years ago had three — lost 15 percent of its daily circulation and eight percent of its Sunday deliveries.

The Sun is not alone. The New York Times lost seven percent of its paid daily circulation and The Washington Post lost six percent of its paid readership. At the same time, Newsday has begun charging $5 a week for its online content.

There was a long-ago time, in the Mad Men era of the 1960s, when the Sun was ranked by Time, itself on the endangered list, as one of the top 10 newspapers in America. Today, the Sun, with an immediate metropolitan circulation area constituency of about three million, isn't even listed among the ABC's top 25 newspapers by circulation numbers.

Without newspapers, Oprah will reign and People will set the American agenda. Think of a world of information dominated by Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and a few other screwballs who use their First Amendment rights to contaminate the news pool by conflating opinion with fact."

The full story:
http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/what-it-means-when-a-city-loses-its-paper

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 6:00pm on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

Keith Olbermann thinks David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun is one of the worst people in the world. Zurawik responded on May 28, 2009:

"That is one of the things journalists do, write stories for Page One. But Olbermann, being a cable host who scabs items out of newspapers and off other peoples' Web sites (stories that they reported) and then bloviates about them, wouldn't know about that.

Anyway, Olbermann is upset about something I said on CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday. It is a theme I have sounded many times on this blog and several times on Reliable Sources the past four years.

The headline for most bloggers who wrote about the show is that Lauren Ashburn, managing editor for USA Today Live, and I said that MSNBC and the Fox News channel are bad for America.

I won't speak for Ashburn, but what I said is that the kind of angry, partisan conversation that MSNBC and Fox offer instead of verified information-based journalism is dangerous to the nation. A democracy is only as strong as the quality of information its citizens receive, and while these two operations call themselves news channels, they are in truth opinion channels, venues of highly-charged, partisan ideology. And that is bad for this country.

Olbermann chose to misrepresent my comments as an attack only on him and MSNBC, and suggest that I am a "blind ideologue" of some kind (presumably of the right) who "screams" his same talking points over and over.

For Olbermann to call anyone a blind ideologue who screams his same talking points over and over gives new meaning to the psychological concept of projection."

Eric Kallgren    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 10:31pm on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

These are dark days at Baltimore Sun, according to Michael Calderone at Politico, from an article published on May 17, 2009:

"Even by the sad standard set by newspapers across the country, The Baltimore Sun has had a rough go.

After the latest round of cuts, a newsroom that had more than 420 employees a decade ago now has just 140. At the beginning of the Bush administration, The Sun had 11 staffers in Washington. It has one today. Having previously shuttered bureaus in London, Beijing, and Moscow, the paper in the last few months closed local bureaus, including the one in Annapolis – Maryland's state capital.

In late April, a couple of Sun columnists went to Camden Yards to cover an Orioles game.

By the ninth inning, they'd both been laid off."

The full story:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22587.html

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 3:22pm on Thursday, April 30th, 2009

The Baltimore Sun has cut a third of its newsroom staff, the newspaper reported on April 30, 2009:

"The Baltimore Sun has cut its newsroom staff by nearly a third in a reorganization the company said would help it not just survive but succeed in one of the worst economic downturns in decades.

The news company, whose parent Tribune Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December, laid off 61 newsroom staffers, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

The reductions hit nearly every type of job in the 205-person newsroom, including top editors, news photographers, critics, columnists, sports reporters, copy editors, page designers and graphic artists, according to The Newspaper Guild, which was notified of the union-represented layoffs. One news reporter was laid off as well, after leaving voluntarily. Most employees were notified Wednesday, with others laid off late Tuesday.

The moves were made as the company is restructuring The Baltimore Sun's newsroom, said Renee Mutchnik, a spokeswoman for the Baltimore Sun Media Group.

"We're going to become a 24-hour, local news-gathering media company so we can more effectively gather content and distribute it among our different platforms: print, online and mobile," Mutchnik said. "As everyone knows, more and more readers are moving online, and advertisers are following them. This is our plan for success, not just survival."