Tribune outsources local journalism jobs to Chicago

The bankrupt Tribune Co. is outsourcing New England newspaper jobs to the mother ship in Chicago. Both the Hartford Courant, a daily, and the New Haven Advocate, an alt-weekly, have been affected by Tribune’s latest cost-slashing.

Our story begins last Thursday, when Boston Globe sportswriter and Courant alumnus Peter Abraham tweeted, “Two great friends and mentors were let go by the Courant today. If you need top-notch copy editors, I know just the guys for you.”

When I expressed my dismay, Abraham responded, “Seems they are now going to edit the paper out of Chicago or something. Just awful.”

Then, on Friday, the New Haven Independent reported that Joshua Mamis, publisher of the Advocate as well as two satellite operations in Hartford and Fairfield County, had lost his job. I met Mamis at a media-reform conference in San Francisco in 1996, and interviewed him in 2009 for my book-in-progress about the Independent and other community news sites. He is a good guy, and it’s kind of insane to think the Advocate papers can thrive without their own full-time publisher.

The Independent also obtained a memo that gets into a bit more detail about the Chicago connection. Here’s the key paragraph:

Other changes are a result of our on-going participation in Media on Demand (MoD), which provides fully edited and designed non-local news and features content for Tribune newspapers and websites. MoD will expand to take on copy-editing and page design for several newspapers including The Hartford Courant at a center based in the Chicago Tribune newsroom, where the content-sharing hub is located.  This approach, already implemented at the Daily Press, will enable us to improve the efficiency of operations and position us to fulfill our local mission and to meet the challenges of the future.

The Daily Press is located in Newport, Va. And here’s more from the Courant.

This is terrible news. Shipping local journalism jobs to Chicago is malpractice. Rather than pillaging its properties to pay down its $13 billion debt, Tribune ought to get out and let an unencumbered owner operate them.

Here is a column the New York Times’ David Carr wrote earlier this year on Tribune’s implosion. And here is a piece I wrote for the Boston Phoenix in 1999, shortly after the Advocate papers were sold to Times Mirror, which was later acquired by Tribune.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide (III)

The New Haven Advocate, the city’s alt-weekly, has a nasty, brutish and short profile of Chris Hoffman, the spokesman for the New Haven school department who was the reluctant star of a video last week by Melissa Bailey of the New Haven Independent after he barred her from entering a school meeting.

The headline: “The Dark Side: From Journalist to Mouthpiece for Those in Power.” Ouch.

Differing perspectives on a cancer study

Why does it matter for a community to have a variety of journalistic voices? We could all point to any number of examples. But the example I want to discuss here is a story about brain cancer among Pratt & Whitney employees in Greater New Haven.

On June 3, researchers who conducted a $12 million study paid for by Pratt & Whitney reported they had found no conclusive evidence that employees had been diagnosed with brain cancer at rates high enough to be statistically significant in comparison to the general population.

The next day, the New Haven Register published an article by Ann DeMatteo under the headline “No cancer link found at P&W, but slight ‘excess’ seen at North Haven plant.” DeMatteo’s lede:

Researchers say that except for a few cases in the former Pratt & Whitney Aircraft plant in North Haven, the amount of brain cancer among Pratt employees is no different from or lower than the general population.

Later that day, the New Haven Independent, a non-profit news site, posted a story by Carole Bass that took an entirely different angle, as you can tell from the headline: “Despite Hype, Pratt Study Shows Cancer Increase.” Her lede:

Pratt & Whitney Aircraft got its message out today, burying evidence of higher cancer rates at a local factory.

Bass criticizes the Register and the Hartford Courant for essentially adopting P&W’s spin, and lays out an argument that though there is still much to be learned, there may well indeed be a link between workplace exposure — especially at a former jet-engine plant in North Haven — and higher-than-normal rates of brain cancer.

Among other things, we learn from Bass’ story that a “blue haze” of coolant mist hung over the workplace in North Haven. As someone who covered the Woburn leukemia story in the 1980s, I can tell you that links between coolants and cancer have long been suspected, even if there is no definitive proof. (Odd fact: Paul Bass and Jonathan Harr, the author of “A Civil Action,” an award-winning book about the Woburn case, worked together at one time. Harr and I covered the Woburn case together.)

At this point I should tell you that I was Carole and Paul Bass’ dinner guest on June 3, as I was in New Haven for my ongoing research on the Independent and other community news sites. Paul is the Independent’s founder and editor. Carole told me that evening that she’d been covering the P&W story for some years, and was planning to write about the new report.

Both the Register and the Independent published accurate stories. The Register’s story hews strictly to the traditional rules of objectivity. The Independent’s adds analysis, perspective (I was interested to learn of the possible role of something called the “healthy-worker effect,”) and some opinion, along with solid reporting.

(Bass’ story was later published in the New Haven Advocate, an alternative weekly where both Basses have worked in the past.)

Which is more useful? Personally, I’d opt for analysis and perspective over coverage of a meeting. But I think the community was well-served by having both kinds of stories.