As Stalin supposedly said, one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic. Reports of layoffs at Sun-Times Media have been coming fast and furious, yet I haven’t received a single anguished missive about the company’s recent decision to shut down the entire chain of 11 Sun weeklies in the western suburbs. The one mention of it was a passing detail in an e-mail to me about suburban sports coverage.
As for how many people the Sun papers employed, Halbreich couldn’t say. A lot of the sales staff also sold ads for other Sun-Times Media papers, and “even on the reporter side, a lot of what appeared in those publications was generated for other publications anyway.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Stewart Cewe is the driver. Assigned to the mail room of Pioneer’s Glenview headquarters, Cewe missed four weeks of work after an August 2 operation to remove several feet of intestine. After that, he boasts, “I’ve been taking chemo since September and I didn’t call in sick the whole time. I punched in at 7:30 every day.”
Cewe is 71. He was already drawing social security. He was already on Medicare, and had a supplemental Blue Cross Blue Shield policy. So far, these two plans together have covered the costs of his illness.
Halbreich says he understands the value of human decency. “Obviously, it’s something that no one looks forward to,” he said about letting someone go. “No one wants to have to do it, irrespective of the reason—economic or disciplinary or what-have-you. You want to bring as much sensitivity and compassion to it as possible, realizing the person hearing the message is in a state of shock. It’s not fun or easy.”
In journalism especially, Mollica adds, “people see themselves as professionals, they see themselves as honorable, as people who have a code. To their employers, they’re content creators. They’re fungible. From the human resources point of view, the best way to terminate someone is with no explanation at all. Maybe a letter—but even that I’m seeing less and less of.”
Halbreich assured me that his papers would continue to play to their “traditional strengths in investigative journalism, sports (including prep sports), [and] local-local-local (including prep sports).” He didn’t say how. Firing the staff sportswriters is a blunt way of promising fewer stories, more stringers. Chris Ledbetter, the varsity baseball coach at Oak Park River Forest, tells me prep coverage was a “traditional strength,” but it looks to him like Oak Leaves has surrendered it. A fourth-generation graduate of the high school, Ledbetter has known Stablein since 1984, when Stablein was his Little League coach. He says, “If you want to know something about sports in these communities—not just Oak Park River Forest but Proviso East and Proviso West—you don’t go to Google, you go to Tim Stablein. He went to the football games. He went to the basketball games. He went to the cross-country meets. He wasn’t calling and saying ‘How’d you do tonight?’ He was at the games.”
