Now up (again): The Hartford Courant

Content Manager Jeff Levine writes: "We are constantly assessing our operation, looking for efficiencies that will least impact our readers and journalism. While today’s cuts cause us personal and professional pain, the reductions better position our organization to meet our evolving production, news gathering and budgetary needs."

http://www.courantalumni.org/

 

Fixed.

 

"It's never going to end, is it?"

 

On one hand, it says small layoff.

The key word is "small". Like the blog says, if you're a part of the layoff it's not small. Also, compared with what came before this? The whole frickin dam broke before and now there may be a few drips of water coming through the cracks.

 

Five cut -- a photo editor, designer and copy editors.

http://www.courantalumni.org/2010/04/24/five-cut-in-the-small-lay-off/

 

One interesting note -- the aggregator, Aviv Blasbalg, was at the center of the Courant's plagiarism scandal last year. Detailed in the link below, the aggregators rewrote stories from competing newspapers for the Courant's website while attributing the work to those publications. But the attribution was dropped when the stories were later published in the Courant's print edition. The scandal prompted one competitor to file a lawsuit in federal court.

The Courant last year apologized and confessed to what it called editing errors when transferring stories from its website to the print edition.

From everything I've heard, Blasbalg was doing just what he was told to do. I hope the plagiarism episode wasn't a factor in his dismissal.

http://bristolnews.blogspot.com/2009/07/courants-slipping-standards-made-clear.html

http://www.courantalumni.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/JI-federal-suit.pdf

 

The fact that Tribune Co. keeps axing copy editors shows up big-time in the papers I see. Makes sense to tighten up, but they have gone way too far.

 

this somehow deserves more than a place here, but on the other hand, since it's really a simple mistake and applies exactly to the copy editor deficiency, this is probably a good fit. My local Tribune paper today had a two-item golf roundup, and the second item was on David Toms thinking he needed shoulder surgery. I thought it looked familiar, and indeed it did -- it was from March, and made two references to the "upcoming Masters."

I haven't been around newspaper production in so long I'm not sure how that would happen. It certainly wasn't cold type sitting in a composing room somewhere, but it got recycled out of the bowels of the computer system and wound up in today's paper.

 

Tribune is doing all it can to dump money. Right now, the copy desks are being targeted.

The desks at all of its papers will shrink. Save maybe the Chicago Tribune itself, which will probably grow as more Trib papers use more and more "shared content."

 

Not very well so let's just enjoy the moment while it lasts.