It was a Black Friday for the Sun Times Media West

Though I don’t know the full extent of the layoffs (a kinder word for termination) yet, and I’m not terribly happy with my prescience here, the swift and sharp Sun-Times corporate axe fell hard on Friday. As a commenter on the previous blog post noted, John Russell, the De facto managing editor of the Beacon News, was one of the more notable casualties. 
And he wasn’t nearly the only one. Applying their collective third grade mentality, the folks at Wraports LLC thought they could avoid using the “L” word by making the suburban staffers lives so miserable they’d simply quit.
Of course, if they quit, you don’t have to pay any unemployment claims do you!
Forcing them all to make the three hour commute to the building on the river was just the latest ploy in their underhanded arsenal. The shit the STMW people had to take from nitwits who can’t even spell the word “journalism” was fricken’ beyond belief.
For example, the Beacon ran out of free-lance money last summer because no one at the main office told them what that budget was. But what those corporate nitwits failed to realize is a long Metra ride wasn’t nearly enough to keep those desperate folks from clinging to their jobs so they had to lay them off anyway.
As for the people who survived the guillotine and will make the downtown trek, they’re going to cram them into a two foot working space. The joke going around the Beacon newsroom is if you have to sit next to someone who gets sick all the time, you’ll unwillingly partake in all their varieties of the plague!
There’s a lesson here for all of us. Going down with a sinking ship is not a noble act and no job is worth sacrificing your self-respect. I’d rather be broke (and often have been) and be able to stare directly into that bathroom mirror than to become some sort of slave.
What’s the point of trying to stave off the inevitable? If those employees had applied those endless hours and all that bunker mentality energy towards another endeavor, they’d be well ahead of the game. If you don’t have faith in yourself then no one else will have faith in you either.
When the Sun-Times corporate goons made it clear they weren’t going to give former STMW head Andrew Herrmann any support, he walked away with his head held high. There’s always another path worth pursuing.
The irony is, like the last episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show where WJM fired everyone but Ted Baxter, I’m convinced Denise Crosby, who’s presided over every mismanaged second of that newspaper’s demise, has survived the cut.
Go figure!