Entries associated with the tag "Don Hayner":

The hammer has come down at the Sun-Times, where more layoffs were just announced. (Read here about earlier layoffs.) Names you'll recognize are about to disappear, and the strange thing is the palpable degree of relief, even satisfaction, among the staff -- it could have been a lot worse.

Editorial columnist Steve Huntley asked for and received a buyout, though he'll continue his column as a freelancer. TV critic Doug Elfman has been laid off. Special Barack Obama correspondent Jennifer Hunter, wife of former publisher John Cruickshank, took a buyout. Columnist Esther Cepeda was laid off, though there's a possibility she'll continue to freelance her column. Religion reporter Susan Hogan/Albach (known as "Slash" around the office) was laid off. Reporter Kara Spak, who's married to star investigative reporter Steve Warmbir, was laid off, a loss people seem to be mourning in particular. Editor in chief Michael Cooke's old pal Garry Steckles -- Cooke summoned him from Saint Kitts to help out and then gave him management status to protect his job -- was returned to Newspaper Guild status when the guild protested and then lost his job. Deputy metro editor Phyllis Gilchrist resigned because she knew that eliminating her management salary might save a couple of guild jobs. Assistant city editors Nancy Moffett and Robert Herguth took buyouts, as did veteran writer Jim Ritter and business copy editors Chris Whitehead and Bob Mutter. Business editor Dan Miller had resigned earlier.

In all, 14 full-time and 3 part-time guild employees were laid off (on the basis of seniority) and 12 others took buyouts, says Gerald Minkkinen, executive director of the Chicago Newspaper Guild. "In the long run," he says, "the company worked with us and did as much as they could to lessen the pain. I really have to give them credit." So does Elfman, with a cat to feed and a new job to find. "It's not a situation where they're laying off people unjustly," he says, well aware of the fact the company's bleeding money, "and I'm in favor of seniority in theory. It just happened to bite me in the ass." I've caught Elfman on his way out of the office to get a drink. "The Sun-Times has really been great about the way they've handled a lot of this," he says. "But there's a but. I was recruited here, I was asked to come here," he muses. "I guess my message to the newspaper editors of America is if you recruit someone don’t lay them off."

That's the temperate end of the spectrum of reactions to getting canned. So it was a little surprising to be told that Bob Mazzoni, the sports copy editor who's cochair of the Sun-Times's guild unit, seemed to be in a "a pretty good mood" Wednesday night, which is when calls were made to the staffers losing their jobs. It's all relative of course, but Mazzoni allows that in a sense he was. "To get down from [management's] original request of 35 jobs to 17 who are leaving involuntarily made us feel like we had really accomplished something," he told me, explaining that when the guild proposed buyouts management agreed to them at once and -- as was not true with a round of buyouts a couple of years ago -- accepted everybody who applied.

Managing editor Don Hayner is being hailed as a hero around the office. Mazzoni said, "We were told that whenever they had a meeting of any kind with stockholders or the board, Don would be there to plead the newsroom's case. Had it not been for his efforts the original number of 35 would have been higher and therefore the ensuing number of layoffs greater. He looks at the newsroom as his baby and he really felt an obligation to save as many of these jobs as he could, especially a lot of the less tenured people he was instrumental in bringing in."

Layoffs usually poison the atmosphere between management and labor. Not this time, said Mazzoni -- "I actually think this process as we went through it strengthened the trust both sides feel with each other."

Friday is the last day for Nancy Moffett, a buddy from my own Sun-Times days, a happy warrior who joined the paper in 1970 and has been there through Marshall Field, through Rupert Murdoch, through Conrad Black. Moffett told me she feels like a "basket case" knowing it's all about to end, even though she's leaving on her own terms. "It's a circus," she said. "It's a lot of smart people being funny all the time." Working at a newspaper, she's discovered, is something she can only explain to people who already know. It's addictive. "It's like being on crack."

On August 15, Marc Allan, associate director of public relations for Butler University, dropped a note to Mike Sneed about her Sun-Times column that day. The column said:

"Chicago connection: The parents of Butler University student Sheridan ‘Danny’ Dahlquist, a sophomore who was killed after four other students accidentally started a fire during a botched fireworks prank in Dahlquist’s bedroom, grew up in the Chicago area. To wit: Dahlquist’s father, Craig, was raised in Arlington Heights, and his mother, Patricia (nee Carew), is from Wilmette. Both of Dahlquist’s parents work at Butler University and live not far from where the accident occurred.”

Allan told Sneed, “You had the wrong university. It’s Bradley, not Butler.” Sneed wrote back, “Thanks for the e-mail. We regret the error. A correction will be made.”

The correction ran the next day on page two of the Sun-Times. Allan didn't know this. He reads the Sun-Times online, and the electronic version of Sneed’s column remained unchanged. On August 17 Allan e-mailed editor Michael Cooke. “The student was from Bradley University,” Allan wrote. “I don’t know where his parents work, but I know it’s not Butler. . . . So far, there’s been no correction--at least none that I can find online--and your website still has the incorrect information. I was hoping you’d make sure the record is corrected. Thanks much.” On August 21 he wrote Cooke again: “Don’t know if a correction ever ran in the paper, but the information is still wrong on the web site. Thanks.” On August 24 Allen e-mailed Sneed again: “Where is the correction you promised?”

By now Allen had roped me in. “Our office at Butler . . . received several calls from concerned alumni,” he wrote me. “What bothers me more than anything is, if they won't correct a simple error like this, what else don't they correct?”

On August 28 I called managing editor Don Hayner and left him a message. A day later we spoke. A couple days after that I checked Sneed’s archived column and it now said Bradley University. "Interesting that they didn't point out that it had been incorrect,” Allan wrote me. “If I'm not mistaken, if you go to a story on The NY Times site and it has been corrected, it will acknowledge the correction that appeared in print. Whatever. I'm just glad they finally fixed it. “

Shouldn’t a newspaper correction acknowledge that it’s correcting something? Otherwise, is it an Orwellian exercise in pretending that what is now so was always so?

Just asking. 

"I'm no prude," began a reader's first email, "but I was surprised to see this in the Sunday Sun-Times."

The mayor of Prospect Heights, Rodney Pace,  was commenting on $100,000 in flood-control funds earmarked for his town that Governor Blagojevich had lopped from the state budget. "You can thank the governor because we're out on River Road, sandbagging, where that frickin' levee is supposed to go that that money would help fund," said Pace -- according to the Sun-Times, that is. The reader doubted this was quite what Pace really said.

The story ran in the early Sunday edition, the bulldog. It disappeared from later editions. The reader suspected a squeamish editor's heavy hand. "You gotta admit it's a good quote. And as close as I've ever seen to the 'f-word' in a family newspaper," he argued in a later email. "More to the point, if the politicians are using that kind of language for quote, it just shows how screwy the political situation is in Springfield."

I was also giving the matter some thought. I imagined two scenarios that could explain the story's disappearance. In the first, a mayor accurately quoted called to complain that his constituents assumed he'd cussed. In the second, a mayor glad to be portrayed as a John Henry kind of guy, a broad-backed sacker of sand quick with the manly invective, called to complain that his constituents assumed he hadn't. 

Don't be so certain "frickin'" is a euphemism, I wrote my reader.

Debra Pickett resigned from the Sun-Times Monday afternoon, minutes after being asked to do a story she thought was preposterous.

“I laughed,” says Pickett, recalling her response when features editor Christine Ledbetter called with the assignment to breast-feed her infant son in public places and write about it. "I have to say I didn't take it terribly seriously." She'd seen other Sun-Times stories begin with an "outrageous premise" then get negotiated into something not beneath the dignity of adults. Some other day, she and Ledbetter might have begun negotiating. But not this time. Pickett, who was due to return from maternity leave February 26, tells me, “I said, ‘Well, there’s probably a conversation I need to have with Don Hayner before I can talk to you further about this assignment.'” Hayner’s the managing editor. Pickett had been trying to reach him all day. "I felt the ground had shifted a little bit under my feet while I was gone," she says, and she wanted Hayner to tell her where she stood. Her resignation was already a possibility, perhaps even a likelihood. The breast-feeding assignment shifted the ground a little more. She called her husband, an Amtrak executive who was on a train between Washington and Philadelphia, and they talked. Then she reached Hayner. She didn't ask where she stood. She quit.

The idea for the breast-feeding story came from editor-in-chief Michael Cooke, who says it was simply an idea -- a paper could no more assign such a story than it could assign a reporter to pose nude for an art class. And just as it wasn't the story, per se, that drove her off, Pickett insists, it also wasn't a desire “to stay home and be a full-time mom to my baby.” It was simply this: “When it’s time to grow up and move on it’s time to grow up and move on.” In journalism, she observes, “people’s stars rise and fall.” Hers had gone up -- she “trembles on the cusp of stardom,” I wrote in 2002, when she'd been at the Sun-Times two years, her profiles of interesting people she met for lunch were making the Sunday paper worth reading, and her column had begun appearing Friday’s on page two. And then it started to head down. While Pickett was on leave the column, which she continued to write once a week, was moved back to the Lifestyles pages. "It's not where I wanted to be professionally," she says.

"She was a young, single Chicagoan," says Ledbetter. "That was the mantra for the column. She morphed into what she morphed into. If she chose to write about her boyfriend and her baby, those are Lifestyles topics." 

Pickett doesn't disagree. “As a columnist you get locked into a persona," she says. "There were a lot of serious things I was interested in that I wanted to write about which weren’t in line with the mission of the paper and my role at the paper. I’ve developed a strong interest in Africa and the AIDS crisis there. The dilemma was that for every column about that there were three columns about the boyfriend. That’s what people expected.”

She says the paper encouraged her boyfriend columns, which led to husband columns and baby columns -- three of her last four columns mentioned her son (whom, by the way, she does nurse in public places). “That’s what my unique signature was,” she says. “That’s what people came to expect and associate me with. That was fine, a lot of fun, but it’s not necessarily who you want to be your entire adult life.” By the measure of what it covers and with whom, the Sun-Times is a small paper. There’s not much opportunity for personal reinvention. “The Sun-Times has a great staff writing about politics,” Pickett remarks, perhaps wistfully; an assignment to go forth and breast-feed is a pretty blunt way of being told your services won't be required for that coverage. She says she wants to finish a novel she’s working on and supposes she’ll freelance. “I’ll certainly make some calls and have some lunches and conversations. This is very much a happy thing for me.”

"Sometimes she drew laughter. Sometimes she drew blood," says Cooke, recalling the lunching stories. "An editor can't ask for more than that."

UPDATE: Eric Zorn does a good job of thinking about Debra Pickett on his Tribune blog. Link here.

UPDATE: Wow! Blogger Tom Roeser has more to say about Pickett than you'd think any one person could, no matter how keen a cultural observer. "Bravo Pickett," he writes. "For the first time I find her interesting, not as a narcissistic marketing sell but for herself." Link here.