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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
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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."
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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
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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."
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Heather Sickels
Boulder, CO | Posted at 11:34am on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 | In December of 2008, Monty Cook was named editor and senior vice president of The Baltimore Sun, Maryland's largest news organization. He joined The Baltimore Sun as Deputy Managing Editor in 2004, supervising more than 100 staff members of the news desk, copy desk, design, graphics and photography departments.
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Heather Sickels
Boulder, CO | Posted at 11:31am on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 | The Baltimore Sun was founded by Arunah Shepherdson Abell, a journeyman printer from Rhode Island who believed in the concept of a people's paper devoted to the news that most directly affected the lives of its readers, The Sun first appeared on Wednesday, May 17, 1837. That issue consisted of four tabloid-size pages, sold for a penny, and was in marked contrast to the six-cent "literary" dailies then in fashion all along the East Coast.
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Mondo Times editors
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 10:14pm on Monday, December 29th, 2008 | On December 22, 2008, The Baltimore Sun announced that Tim Franklin will step down as editor of the newspaper:
Timothy A. Franklin, who has led The Baltimore Sun through five award-winning and tumultuous years, announced yesterday that he would step down as editor to take a job in academia. He will be succeeded by J. Montgomery Cook, who for the past year has been director of content development for The Baltimore Sun Media Group. Cook will begin Jan. 1.
Franklin, 48, will start a sports journalism center at Indiana University, his alma mater, and hold an endowed chair. As editor, he said he was proud of the investigative and watchdog journalism the newspaper has produced and its moves to bolster its online presence. He also took on Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. when the governor banned his staff from talking to Sun journalists.
But Franklin also was editor during a turbulent period for the newspaper industry, which has seen its business model erode and advertisers dwindle. Franklin said it was "gut-wrenching" to preside over the reduction of the newsroom staff, from 384 when he started in January 2004 to about 225 today.
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 2:52pm on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 | On December 9, 2008, the Sun editorial board wrote a comment about the bankruptcy filing by the owner of the newspaper, the Tribune Company:
"Our view: As Tribune Co. reorganizes its debt, this newspaper soldiers on
December 9, 2008
The news from Chicago sent a jolt through 501 N. Calvert St., the home of this newspaper, its suburban offices and the communities across Maryland that it has served with distinction for 171 years. The owner of the Baltimore Sun Media Group and other Tribune Co. newspapers filed yesterday for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to reorganize the company's heavy debt. Perhaps not since the days of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 has this newspaper felt so at risk from events outside the building.
Like other notable businesses that have been a mainstay of this state, our parent company is not immune from the economic turmoil roiling through its industry and the nation.
And yet within an hour of this unsettling news, the men and women who work at The Sun were at their desks, on the phones and back on the street doing what they do every day with commitment and conviction - putting out this newspaper, updating the news of the day on our Web site, baltimoresun.com, and reporting on the people and communities of Maryland. Just yesterday, the Sun Media Group rolled out a new Internet feature that will give readers a comprehensive roundup of the most up-to-the-minute breaking news.
We're moving forward because regardless of the financial circumstances at play in Chicago, governments were open for business yesterday, police patrolled the streets, students from Hagerstown to Ocean City attended classes, hospitals cared for patients, ships called at the Port of Baltimore and businesses went about their business. We are Maryland's newspaper.
In 1904, fire consumed the Sun Iron Building at Baltimore and South streets, but the newspaper kept on publishing with the help of its competitors in Washington. That's our tradition - and our responsibility to the people of Maryland."
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