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Clueless print colleagues scorned him, sent angry profane emails, former Baltimore Sun web manager recalls

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SUNSPOT. Noun. An area of intense magnetic activity on the surface of the sun.  Also, the name of the Baltimore Sun's old website.

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.”

  • Usha Nellore

    When the old makes way for the new, the old has to be dragged out, kicking and screaming. It is obvious, there were not too many visionaries,who foresaw the WEB tsunami that would sweep them under the rug, in the Sun’s old newsroom. As for alcohol not being an insignificant force at the Sun, it is not an insignificant force anywhere else in the world either. Addictions are the route humans take to drown out their sorrows and the newspaper business is sorrowful to the extreme today. Alcohol also feeds the swagger and the braggadocio that drive the egos of a whole lot of writers. For many journalists “I am doing something REALLY IMPORTANT. Without me the world could fall apart!” is the shout but “You are dispensable,” is the nagging whisper. The former thrives on alcohol and the latter needs alcohol to be silenced.
    U Nellore

  • Editor

    Kevin Naff’s commentary, not surprisingly, rubbed some folks at the Sun the wrong way. Here’s a response from a current newsroom staffer who asked for anonymity:

    “There were big problems with online-print coordination in the Sunspot era, but I think it’s safe to lay almost all of them at the feet of management, which went out of its way to maintain physical and virtual separation in order to thwart the Guild’s effort to absorb the workforce there. Sunspot was housed at Cross Keys, and you had to have a security clearance practically to get a telephone number to call someone there. Perhaps it was a dumping ground for tired old print guys – I wouldn’t really know. But again, that was management’s doing, not that of the reporters and editors in the allegedly online-unfriendly newsroom. Rather, I remember many folks here complaining we could not coordinate coverage better, to get stories up online more quickly and to update them as needed. Photographers could not get any of their work online originally.

    In truth, many of us, even old farts like me, have hungered to get more online savvy, but have been thwarted until recently. Now, finally, the old wall is crumbling. But believe me, Naff’s barbs are misdirected, and I resent it.”

  • Michael Hill

    Mr. Naff makes some very good points about the odd and stumbling way that the Sun ventured into the world of the Web. But he scatters his blame like a drunk firing off a six-shooter outside a bar. I will defend one of his targets, The Newspaper Guild. Though I was never a 40-year veteran in a union protected job, I did make it to 35 and ended my time there as Unit Chair of the Guild. The fact is that the Guild saw the potential in the Web and wanted it integrated into the newsroom from day one so that we would all be on the same page, going for the same goals, selling the same ads, and learning from each other as we went along. Instead, union-hating management decided to try to make the web a totally separate unit. Thus the Sunspot name and the daily soap operas, the separate offices, the no-contact rule, etc etc, all an attempt to say that this is not the daily paper in another, electronic, format. That did not work with the NLRB — speaking of which, Mr. Naff, the statement about the 60-year-old blind hearing officer was offensive on various levels — but it did work with the equally anti-union 4th Circuit. Moreover, when Mr. Naff describes problems with these union-protected dinosaurs, he talks of editors who are not in the Guild. I heard of no problems with Guild member reporters. That’s because though we may have definitely had a bias for the print that we fell in love with, that sustained us, we wanted to learn about this new medium. And we don’t apologize for also wanting those who worked in the Web unit of the Sun to get paid a fair and decent wage, like the rest of us. That’s all the Guild was trying to do.

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