Chicago Tribune to cut 80

We've had threads here about how much notice to give when quitting or taking a new job. So this line from Lipinski's memo Monday to staffers sets a new standard for us, perhaps. If it's good enough for the EEs, it's good enough for us grunts:

"I will be here through Thursday and will look forward to talking with many of you directly. ..."

 

This is almost exactly the image that has been in my mind, for over a year now, whenever I think of what has been going on here.

It really is everyone for themselves, at every level, and in every department. Your editors and fellow staff members? In these circumstances, sadly, it's like they're your enemies, not your allies.

This system, and this environment, is destroying the very fabric of what, and who, we are, because, much as it is said, and oft-repeated, that newspapers/journalism is a business, the fact is, it is not just a business.

It is a trust. And, right now, there is none.

Not between papers and readers, not between sources and reporters, not between owners and employees; not between editors and their reports; and not between fellow staff members who are all just trying to survive.

 

It truly is the Titanic. People are fighting each other over a small place on an overturned lifeboat.

 

My last shreds of naivete haven't vanished, I guess; I haven't seen too much cannibalizing of colleagues through all this newsroom turmoil. I can see where that might be the result of Zell's no-salary policy on the ad side in Chicago, but fortunately, I haven't seen too much cutthroat behavior within newsrooms.

Yet.

My fear is that it is right around the corner, with people striving mightily to look less expendable than the next guy -- and not always doing it simply by producing the best work. You can fill in the blanks with your imaginations.

 

I haven't either. And I really hope it doesn't get there.
At my place, I feel like we're all -- front-line reporters, my assignment editors, the designers and copy desk folks, even the editors most of the way up the chain -- paddling mightily to keep this ship afloat. Is there a little dead weight in the newsroom that I could live with seeing tossed overboard? Sure. But there's no dog-eat-dog with the people in the trenches. And if it gets to that point, I'll bail myself. Sometimes it feels like we're about all we have left in this business.

 

Margaret Holt was a short-lived disaster as sports editor. She got shuffled off long ago to a closet in Tribune Tower.

Lipinski helped to make Bayless leave in a huff.

 

Thanks, MMatt60. Knew just enough to be confused on what should have been pretty clear.

So Holt still has a job there? Maybe if failures had been shown the door at the time of their fail, there would be fewer than 80 bodies thrown out now.

 

Here's a Chicago media blog, with reference to Skippy Bayless episode there:

http://www.beachwoodreporter.com/column/the_tuesday_papers_114.php

(these are words of Steve Rhodes, the blogger, not of Bayless)

My other favorite Ann Marie anecdote happened during a phone interview when I asked her about former Trib sportswriter Skip Bayless's claim that she had ordered the sports editors to stop starting columns on the sports front and jumping them to inside the section. Columns, she decreed, should start and stop on the left hand side of a page only, instead of sometimes starting in the middle, top or bottom of a page and continuing elsewhere.

"A column," she instructed me, "means one column of type."

In other words, a newspaper column is actually named after a column of newsprint, and therefore shouldn't stray.

What a tight ass, I thought.

 

Any word on exits from the Tribune today?