Sports Editor -- South Florida Sun Sentinel

It's an in-house "boomerang" hire -- she's been there since the late '90s and had a previous stint as sports editor right around the time the Zell group took over the company formerly known as Tribune.

 

Will they fill her old job now?

 

Will they fill her old job? Almost all of us would guess, "Not a chance." The previous sports editor went to a newly created position, so maybe they never intended to hire a sports editor from the outside.

 

Just saw a friend who's still with the Sun Sentinel and asked him whether the job will be filled. To describe his response as "laughter" wouldn't be doing it justice -- it was more like a 120-decibel guffaw. Anyway, I took that to be a "No."

 

Some seven newsroom employees laid off at the Sun-Sentinel, I hear. Don't know any names, but that should answer the "will they fill her old job?" question.

 

I believe it was a researcher who sometimes wrote stories and a number of news reporters. Which shows how tight staffing is. Apparently no copy editors or designers or sports writers left to lay off.

 

The specific breakdown is a researcher, a senior metro reporter who'd been there many years and had won a number of awards, two Palm Beach metro reporters, one staffer on the weekly Spanish-language publication and one business reporter. The business layoff is particularly crazy because the department now consists of an editor and two reporters.

I've also been told that those who were laid off were intercepted in the lobby, brought to the HR office for the bad news, and then frog-walked out of the building by security. No opportunity to collect their belongings at their desks or bid farewell to co-workers. The only one who bypassed that procedure was the business reporter, who was told her fate by phone while on assignment and declined to go back to the office.