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The Sun-Times wants to eliminate more than 30 Chicago Newspaper Guild jobs, and when guild leaders and union officials met Monday to begin discussions of how this should be done or might even be avoided, emotions ran high. They peaked on the subject of two employees whose jobs are safe. That's because James Smith, a page designer, and Garry Steckles, an editor -- both recent hires -- were just promoted to exempt positions by editor in chief Michael Cooke, thus getting them out from under language in the guild contract that protects members according to seniority. Cooke "was at the meeting. His basic position was 'I can promote whoever I want,' and he was pretty arrogant about it," says Gerald Minkkinen, executive director of the CNG. "The subject of exempting his buddies and making others vulnerable was a matter of considerable discussion. We were pretty angry about it."
Minkkinen concedes that Smith is, by reputation, a superior designer who distinguished himself at the Sun-Times Media Group's daily in Joliet before coming to the Sun-Times. But Steckles was a mystery to him. Not to me, however. A couple years ago I had a couple of long phone conversations with Steckles, who described himself to me as a restaurant owner in Saint Kitts who served Cooke as the Ed McMahon to his Johnny Carson. "I help out wherever he needs me," said Steckles, and whenever Cooke doesn't, Steckles lays low. "I don't miss it when I'm lying on a beach in the Caribbean," he said about the newspaper biz, "But I always enjoy doing it when I get the chance."
To Cooke, Steckles is a friend so old he's comfort food. "Michael's from Lancashire -- " Steckles told me, "[from] a little village outside Lancaster. He grew up on back lanes with outside toilets. I did as well. It was cold and rough. Michael started work at 16." They both entered journalism, went to Canada, and worked on papers together in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. When the New York Daily News hired Cooke away from the Sun-Times three years ago to be its editor, Steckles thought he would become the Daily News's Sunday editor. But Cooke didn't stay in New York long enough for that to happen. By the end of 2005 he was back in Chicago as the Sun-Times group's vice president of editorial operations. When Cooke decided to turn Waukegan's News-Sun into a prototypical tabloid, he summoned Steckles from Saint Kitts and James Smith from Joliet to help him do it.
"Michael realized James is a major talent," Steckles told me back in 2006. "He has all the flair of a terrific graphics designer but also a great sensitivity for newspapers." In another conversation, Steckles called Smith "absolutely brilliant," and said that by the time he got to Waukegan Smith had pretty much wrapped up the design work, leaving it to Steckles "to pull together editorial." Pretty clearly, Steckles thought of himself and Cooke and Smith as a wonderful team, and apparently Cooke thinks the same. Gerald Minkkinen says Cooke kept Steckles "under the radar" as a Sun-Times "consultant," and when the guild pointed out that the guild contract didn't provide for consultants, he put Steckles on staff last fall in a guild job. I caught up with Steckles briefly Tuesday and he allowed that "I haven't really had a title" other than consultant. But for the time being I could call him a "copy editor for the Showcase" if I wished, though that will change "under the new scheme of things" to something he can't yet disclose.
The guild is entitled to two weeks of talks before the Sun-Times can lop heads. On Monday night the Sun-Times's guild members met to "brainstorm" -- Minkkinen's word -- possible alternatives to the layoffs. Buyouts -- which the paper hadn't mentioned -- were one, and Minkkinen said he'd like to keep the others under his hat. By the time I got to work Tuesday morning an anonymous guild member had left me a steaming voice mail message. He told me about the two employees Cooke was protecting and he said the staff was “incensed and flabbergasted at such a shameless injustice."
The goal of the Sun-Times Media Group is to cut costs by $50 million and thereby turn a profit and stay in business. At another of its properties, Pioneer Press, publisher Larry Green wrote a staff memo Monday that began: "Today we notified the Chicago Newspaper Guild that we would be eliminating 4 positions in the Pioneer Press editorial department before the end of January." In addition to these four guild positions are two that were held by guild members who recently quit and won't be replaced and four non-guild positions held by editors who'll be let go. "An additional five positions will be eliminated at the Lake County News-Sun [the paper Steckles and Smith overhauled in 2006]. An additional 16 full and part-time positions are being eliminated in the circulation department."
Green said Pioneer Press was closing three northwest-side city papers "where subscriptions and advertising have been weak." But the "suburban titles remain strong," he told his staff, and vowed that he's "committed to maintaining our unique strength as suburban Chicago's premiere sources of local news."
"More with less" I suppose.
Will they stay or will they go? isn't the hard question. What will happen next? is. Not just to the Sun-Times but to the future of journalism. Where will all these out of work writers and designers and ad sales reps go?
You can only strip down so far... bones get brittle and break. I am not that concerned about the overt favortism. Eventually everyone in the industry will lose their jobs, the question should be when and not if.
Viva la newsprint. Sign me off bummed. I grew up reading the Pioneer Press in the burbs, and then the Reader in the city... and now, well now I encourage you to check out the myspace blog for the Creative Loafing "street team"
and one of its member's New Year's adventure. Below is an excerpt. This is the future of storytelling.
"As we waited for our ride in near freezing temperature, we watched strings of girls in tiny black dresses jogging past, desperately clutching each other to keep from falling or being picked off by stray dudes. An inordinate number of partied-out people were crouched in closed entrances or on curbs while their companions desperately tried to flag down cabs. One guy even tried to wave down an ambulance for his date, who was sprawled on the sidewalk.
Life's a series of tradeoffs, I thought as I watched our minivan approach. Sure my New Years escapades were limited to a few contagious kisses and some frisky dancing, but to me this was preferable to waiting for a cab in the cold with a girl too drunk to keep from peeing on the curb, or staying in a fancy downtown hotel with a bunch of equally unlucky guy friends. "
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=us...
Hi- I did not mean to single out one example... Basically just saddened but not surprised by this latest news of more cuts. The long term implications of cuts after cuts have yet to be seen.
The street team, and versions of it at other papers including Red Eye, Time Out, etc. is more a sign of the times. Look at reality-TV. I guess it's the same thing. Let's hope there will be an incentive for all of these out of work writers to freelance, or find jobs at Starbucks and Wal-mart to supplement their incomes as they write the hard-hitting news stories that some of us still like to read....
I wish the Sun-Times Media Group luck in cutting their costs by, um, $50 million. Wow.
What's almost as disgusting as Cooke kicking hard-working people to the curb in favor of his pals is that the paper's publisher seems to be allowing that to happen.
When major shifts like this happen everyone thinks they see the future as some radical new thing, but we are basically talking about cutting back on 8-Tracks or records or something of the like here in favor of the new CD (online newspapers), we are not talking about getting rid of the music all together. Music, like news, has been around since the dawn of man in one way or another. Back in Egypt there was some guy hammering away a record of things going on. (things that mattered -- wars, leaders, etc). News will always be the same, the medium is just shifting. And there will always be papers too, just like TV didn't totally replace radio or newspapers in the 1950s. So, no "Koji-san", the future of news is not rants about your nights out. News will stay the same. A new medium is just entering the fray and radically shaking things up. When everything falls back down, it will still be the same things that went up, just laid out in a different order.
Thank you- this is an encouraging response.
They passed out lists of those getting laid off but gave no time limit, and are failing to consider those NOT on the list who are already interviewing elsewhere, likely assuming everything here is going down the toilet anyway.
Also, it turns out knowing that you are getting fired makes you less productive. Who knew?
This is a sad time for Chicago journalism. The Sun-Times is losing some really amazing reporters who haven't had a chance to do much reporting here recently anyway...
What's depressing is that while the Sun-Times's ship sinks, Michael Cooke's concern is making sure his cronies are protected. If they were gone, who would be left to go pub crawling with?
Cooke's legacy in Chicago will be that he was the man who during his two tours of duty at the Sun-Times dragged the paper further and further into the muck. His response to falling circulation was front pages full of celebrities, phony patriotism and sensationalized crime news. If he had devoted more resources to better local coverage and more investigations, where would the paper be today? When Hired Trucks was breaking every day, people were talking about the paper, they had to read it. Hell, it was just a couple weeks ago that everyone was talking about Daley's son sweetheart investment deals - another story broken in the Sun-Times.
The paper never cared about its Internet site, yet now wonders why has lost millions as revenue that migrated to the Web. It treats its newsroom workers like dirt, then wonders why they dig in their heels when its time to negotiate a new contract.
It's all sad, really. The Sun-Times hasn't been a consistently great newspaper in more that a generation. But there are still mornings when that day's paper is something great. Where it tells you something you didn't know, makes the mayor squirm a little or runs a great column by a Mark Brown or Rick Telander that you want to cut out and save.
The Tribune is a fine newspaper. Somedays it is great. But it will never be the NY Times. And without the Sun-Times, the Trib will be fatter and slower. It's what happens when you're the only game in town.
I truly believe that if he had vision and leadership, Michael Cooke could be remembered as one this city's great editors. Instead he's a bully playing with people's futures.
If he was a great editor, he would call up Newspaper Guild leaders and work with them to find a solution. Develop a buyout package that would enable some veteran reporters to retire and keep around some of the new blood that will inevitably be let go in the upcoming layoffs. Talk to labor - perhaps if they forgo raises and volunarily give up portions of their vacation it would help save a few more jobs. Have a vision for what the paper should be and follow through. Don't waste resources on another weekly feature profiling every neighborhood or ward. Take the reporters doing this work and set them loose digging up news and doing investigations. Become what you've always claimed to be: the paper you MUST read to know what's really happening in Chicago. Stop cowering in an office finding ways to protect your buddies. Get out there and make this the paper that really does afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
In the end the paper might still not make it. But at least you went down swinging.
They merely tried to follow the Trib's lead and tried to keep up instead of doing something innovative. The Red Streak is a great example of that. They had a somewhat decent product at first, staffed by people from sister papers. As soon as the Guild made a ruckus to pay those staffers union wages, the S-T let those people go back to their former papers. And as soon as the Red Eye went free, they shut the Streak down. Now because the Trib invested in the Red Eye and took some initial lumps, it's eating into the S-T's single copy sales - especially with young commuters. I know I read the Red Eye now and hardly ever dig out the 50 cents for the Sun-Times.
The company rarely makes good decisions or puts people in the right positions. The internet is another great example. They've refused to bring in the right people or listen to people who have a decent opinion/experience with the internet. All I experienced was 40- and 50-year-olds who all wanted to regurgitate the news on a template instead of coming up with fresh content. They basically sat in their office collecting a paycheck waiting for 4:45 p.m. to roll around so they could hit the road. Nevermind that news breaks all the time. That was someone else's problem. The company never invested enough money and people into its websites to make it something great. In the YEARS, I was with the company, there was one attempt to make the websites better then nothing. Meanwhile, the websites for other companies - like the Tribune and the Northwest Herald - were getting better and better. Again, they kept investing, took some initial lumps but are now seeing benefits.
The problem with people like Cooke is they honestly don't care when it comes down to it. It's a different kind of Conrad Black. "I'm going to get mine, and well, good luck to the rest of you bums. Get what you can."
No wonder morale was - and probably still is - lower than a lizard's gizzard.
Not everyone - including myself - agreed with some of his ideas, but looking back now many of us realize that he was trying to protect us and the papers from just this sort of corporate recklessness and short-sighted behavior. I've been here since the 1980s, and while we've always seen layoffs and bad times in cycles, it has never been as bad as during this decade. Some of these layoffs are due to true economic reasons, but many also are due to greed, incompetent management and short-sighted corporate level maneuvering. Many cuts in recent years have not even been economically necessary, but rather were done to make certain executives look better to corporate brass. Or at least that's why that aforementioned former editor said he quit.
The owners and managers then tried to fool us and our readers and advertisers with a so-called recommitment to local coverage (even though coverage still had remained pretty local during the previous editor's tenure despite tremendous staff reductions), but now their true colors emerge again. You cannot maintain business as usual with half the staff you had 15-20 years ago, at least not without abusing workers or lessening quality. And to suggest otherwise is a tremendously dishonest disservice to staff, readers and the overall industry.
It's a damn shame that even in the journalism business we have to put up with this kind of official lying, bullshitting and misdirection. Let's hope for new owners and new management here, and fast.
The company has been on life support as long as I worked for them. Always thought it couldn't get worse ... but it always did.
indeed. true of many companies, independent alternative newspapers not excluded.
Until the News-Sun was remade into a tabloid, it did a decent job of covering the city of Waukegan, although it gave the police department and mayor a pass. But now it's worse than ever. Everyone I know who once subscribed to it has lost confidence in it. The remake is full of garbage and real news is hard to come by.
It just shows how incompetent the Sun-Times Media Group is.