Dorothy Andries described her final day at Pioneer Press:
“They did walk me out the door. They have to walk me out the door.”
“On Friday the list of people leaked out and Friday morning there were people all over the newsroom crying and the layoffs hadn’t even begun yet. Someone said, ‘You’re on the list.’ I said, ‘It’ll be OK. It’ll be OK.’ I went to the human resources department and said ‘I know I’m on the list—let’s get this done.’ It was a nice day Friday so I wanted to spend some time outside.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Dozens of employees, some in editorial and many who weren’t, were fired last week from the 100 or so titles of the Sun-Times Media Group, which is in bankruptcy and last year lost more than $350 million. The news is terrible everywhere—a Tribune reporter talking to Robaugh said to him, next week it’s our turn. But at the STMG, the vestiges of the once-grandiose Hollinger International, there is conduct that was literally criminal to point to—the former CEO, Conrad Black, is in prison, and his number two, who ran the Chicago operation, David Radler, is now out of prison only because he testified against Black. As I recently wrote on my blog, the measures the group is taking now bring to mind a desperate animal chewing off its paw to escape a trap.
Robaugh went back to his office for a few personal items and wound up spending about an hour there. People kept coming in to cry a little and hug him. “I left on my own,” he said. “There was a security guard wandering the newsroom watching people, but he was a kid kind of built like a licorice stick so if anything were to happen I don’t think he could have done anything about it. I’m a pretty big guy. I think I messed up their timetable because in the afternoon they had a 350-pound Chicago cop. He was there for me—that’s what the joking was. I don’t know why you’d have a very large, armed Chicago cop in the building for something like that. Admittedly, there are a lot of emotions, people who are sad, people who are angry. But…“
“That’s really painful, really painful,” Andries told me. “Even if they only gave one week a year, I’d get 27 weeks. That would give me some breathing room. Very few people work if they don’t have to. People work because they have to work financially, even if they enjoy it.”
Sara Burrows told me that four years ago, when she joined Pioneer Press, it had four features editors. Now there’s one. Bong said that over the past few years he’s seen business coverage diminish from a separate section to a single page. But he also wrote a couple of columns that he thought were popular, one of them on what local businesses are up to and another on video rentals. He felt he’d earned his keep.
