The headline says it all, and adds a nasty twist to this week’s purge at The Sun in Baltimore. Here’s part of The Guardian’s report on how the Tribune-owned Sun did the deed:

The group, consisting of three writers and a photographer, were told the news as they reported back from a game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Los Angeles Angels in a move that was documented by a fellow reporter online.

“Tough times in the newspaper biz,” wrote the OC Register’s Bill Plunkett as an aside during his inning-by-inning update from the game. “Two writers for the Baltimore Sun in the press box here got the news - by phone, during the game - that they had been laid off in the latest round of cost-cutting. Stay classy, Baltimore Sun management.”

Plunkett subsequently updated his comments, adding that another reporter and a photographer had also been axed in the same way.

Here’s the original blog post that Plunkett wrote.

Meanwhile, I’ll ask one indelicate question:

I’ve never been a sportwriter (with two or three notably poor exceptions in my 15 years in journalism), but… how many reporters does a newspaper need at a minimum to cover a baseball game? (The Wall Street Journal discovered last month: not as many as we have) It’s the same question I had when I discovered that The Boston Globe — which could learn whether it will live or die by tonight — has five science reporters. I like it when the job market I work in has lots of places for me to do what I do, but… five science reporters?

Is it possible that those reporters might be put to better use hitting the streets and covering the local news that these papers claim they excel in, now that their dreams of being international reporting superstars are dead? I welcome your abuse comments.

PS - I heard from a source at the paper that The Sun has a new social networks editor, at the same time they’re ditching local news editors. Good times!

(Photo: Reuters)

Tribune Co keeps the layoffs coming at its newspapers as the media company moves through the bankruptcy court process.

The Sun: Over in Baltimore, we heard from a source that 21 editors — including most of the metro editing staff and two top editorial editors — were herded into offices and told they had to exit the building immediately. Editor & Publisher confirms this report and says more cuts might be coming as soon as today. Perhaps there’s a strategy in there, but it’s hard to tell what it is when most big-city dailies have abandoned their ambitious overseas reporting goals, saying their real value to the community is their local reporting franchise. UPDATE: Looks like at least 40 more people are getting laid off as we speak, according to two sources I just spoke to at 3pm eastern.

And another UPDATE: A Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild memo says a whopping 27 percent of the Sun’s staff is getting laid off.

Excerpt from the memo:

“Tribune, through careless management practices, has saddled itself under $13 billion in debt and now Baltimore is paying a price,” said Cet Parks, Executive Director of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. “Tribune is siphoning good jobs from Baltimore and sending work that talented editors, reporters, photographers, copy editors and designers have done here to its home base in Chicago. That is not right.”

Tribune plans to lay off the 40 newsroom employees by May 27. Targeted employees, who include four columnists, photographers, critics and copy editors, received hand delivered letters Wednesday afternoon signed by Monty Cook, senior vice president and editor. Also, in the last two weeks The Sun has laid off seven employees in other departments including advertising and customer service.

Chicago Tribune: The paper said last week that it would cut 11 percent of its newsroom staff. Today’s edition of the Gorkana business journalist career moves e-mail shows that, among others, the Tribune is losing Joshua Boak, financial exchanges and energy reporter. We don’t know if it’s because of the layoffs or if he’s just leaving, but either way, it’s a heck of a time to lose the exchanges beat reporter at one of the hometown papers of the world’s largest futures exchanges.

In other recent examples of unusual layoff situations (there are so many that it’s impossible to count them all here), remember

• The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Suburban Journals of St. Louis reporter who lost his job after taking a bullet for the team.
• The two East Valley Tribune (Arizona) reporter who lost his job before he won a Pulitzer Prize.

Any other weird/bizarre/unfortunate circumstances surrounding journalist layoffs that you know about? Tell us about them.

(Photo: Reuters)

Suburban bureau reporters at The Sun in Baltimore, Maryland, are about to learn the true meaning of the word “mobile.” The Tribune Co-owned paper is shutting down the last of its three suburban bureaus and bringing their reporters back to the main newsroom in Baltimore proper, sources told MediaFile on Tuesday.

The paper will outfit them with laptops and Blackberries and will send them back into the field to do their job by car or however else they can get to the story. It is part of wider changes going on at Tribune Co, which is in bankruptcy proceedings because of some $13 billion in debt that it has been unable to deal with because of the increasingly grim advertising sales plaguing newspapers.

Tribune’s chief executive, real estate magnate Sam Zell, was unhappy with the amount of empty space that The Sun has in downtown Baltimore, especially when considering all the space that the paper was renting in the suburbs, one of our sources says. The three bureaus that The Sun will shut down are in Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Howard counties. The Sun’s bureaus in Carroll and Harford counties already closed in the past year. It’s not clear if the two are related, but the three bureaus shutting down now are traditional turf war zones with The Washington Post, which recently said it will begin cooperating with The Sun on some coverage in the counties.

Shutting down bureaus must feel a little like a retreat. On the other hand, it must be nice to not be chained to a desk all day long, as we suspect more mobile journalists — or “MoJos” — are discovering..

The news was delivered in an off-record employee meeting, which also included the news that more buyouts and layoffs are on the way, likely sooner rather than later.

Speaking of personnel issues, Tribune Co Chief Administration Officer Gerald (Gerry) Spector had some bad news for employees: Salary freeze for non-union employees are coming this year. And if you’re in the union? Management will work it out in collective bargaining agreements. This is similar to what News Corp did at Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. It also comes on top of mandatory furloughs at Gannett and other publishers, not to mention a variety of other ways to stay afloat in increasingly stormy seas.

Here’s Spector’s memo, released Monday and obtained through a source:

As you know, this year is off to a difficult start-not only for us, but for our peers in the media industry and for much of the business world as well. The advertising environment is very difficult. The economy is, at best, challenging. Across the country, businesses are cutting jobs, furloughing employees and freezing pay. Some of our major advertising clients, like General Motors, have laid off thousands of employees; others, like Circuit City, have been forced to liquidate assets and go out of business. Obviously, developments like these put significant downward pressure on our revenue.

As a company, we’re fighting back like never before-developing new products, operating extremely efficiently, and re-examining everything we do with an eye toward maximizing our cash flow. However, given current trends and the likelihood that it will take some time for the economy to recover, we have to do even more. For that reason, we’ve decided to implement a salary freeze for non-union employees in 2009. For those employees represented by a union, the issue will be addressed in collective bargaining.

I know this is difficult and I appreciate your understanding. Compensation is our largest expense and a salary freeze enables us to share the sacrifice. Hopefully, freezing salaries now will allow us to avert more drastic action in the future.

Thank you again for all your efforts.
Gerry

(Photo: Reuters)

The Washington Post and The Sun in nearby Baltimore will share some of their journalism, at least the stuff that they don’t try to kill each other to get first as they compete across the hedgerows and parkways of suburban Maryland. Here are some details from the release, sent out on Tuesday:

The Post and The Sun have agreed to share the newspapers’ day-to-day coverage of certain Maryland news and sports. In addition, The Post and The Sun may draw on each other’s national, international and feature stories that are distributed by the LAT-WP News Service, to which both contribute. The exchanges will allow each paper to take advantage of the other’s strengths and expertise in specific subjects around the region and the world.

As part of this accord, exclusive stories will not usually be shared, nor will coverage of such competitive subjects as Maryland state government and University of Maryland athletics.

I couldn’t find a piece in The Sun, which is owned by Tribune Co (which recently filed for bankruptcy), but figure it will be reasonably similar to the Post story, which includes this paragraph:

The deal comes as both newspapers, like the rest of the industry, struggle to retain readers and cut costs as the economics of the business shift.

Robert McCartney, the Post’s Metro editor, said that the move can help the paper save money, but declined to get into how that will happen. He did say that sharing some stories could help each paper assign reporters to areas in their home turf where they need more coverage, something that in theory could cut costs. He declined to offer other specifics on savings.

One way would be cutting the size of the local news and sports teams as a result of abandoning coverage areas — not that that would make anyone happy, though it is something that more people in our business have come to expect as a reality. Tribune has been doing this at its papers, while the Post earlier this year offered buyouts.

McCartney said the paper is always looking at staffing levels, but again, didn’t offer specifics.

Sun Editor Tim Franklin, who is retiring from the paper, wrote this in an e-mail: “We are not planning staff reductions as a result of this partnership. For The Sun, there will be cost savings in travel expenses, freelance and potentially other news syndicate fees.”

(Imagine the Washington Redskins and Baltimore Ravens cooperating in football and you get an idea of how momentous this Washington Post/Baltimore Sun partnership is. Photo: Reuters)