Remember the Baltimore Sun’s first website: “Sunspot?” That “cutesy” name was just one of the indignities the site’s early staffers had to suffer, recalls a bitter Kevin Naff, Sunspot’s content manager when it was launched in 1996.
Naff (now the editor of The Washington Blade) describes in a recent Huffington Post essay what he felt was a vicious print/web culture clash at the Sun in the late 1990s.
(The clash is worth exploring, he argues, because it “hastened the industry’s undoing.” With The Baltimore Sun among the nation’s most dramatically ‘undone’ newspapers, Baltimoreans may find Naff’s reminiscence, clearly from the webby side of the clash, of historical interest.)
Newsroom types at the Sun regarded him as “either the enemy to be destroyed or a dilettante to be ignored,” he complains. They “didn’t respect my work ethic, dedication or journalism experience,” he writes. Naff, meanwhile, also had a low opinion of his own digital-side underlings. The poorly-funded SunSpot was, in his view, “a dumping ground for underperformers from print.”
He recalls how he had to teach one person how to use a mouse and another how to use “shift” to make capital letters. He explained to still another the meaning of the web ad acronym CPM (“cost per thousand”) and the man “seemed perplexed and asked if I was sure it wasn’t Cost Per Million. I assured him it was from the Latin “Mille.”
When he wasn’t schooling print dinosaurs in Web 101, he was duking it out with the Newspaper Guild, which “licked its greedy chops at the prospect of absorbing us.”
Newsroom staffers would “avoid me during the workday, then send angry, profane e-mails at night,” he claimed. “I deduced that they were drunk when sending these messages,” he wrote. “Alcohol was not an insignificant force at the Sun.”
