Any newspaper that has a Race and Demographics Team deserves to be the nation's fastest-shrinking daily newspaper -- which is what the Sun-Sentinel is.

You're right, Peter. Newspapers by now should know that only white suburbanites matter. In Weston, children are arriving to school late, in alarming numbers. Just think of what this will do to the future of the community!

UNREAL!! UNREAL!!
I cant wait to read the comments on this one. Slowly but surely they are getting rid of all the desks...probably be outsourced to India.

I worked for this newspaper back in the '60s when it was an upcoming newspaper. Now it looks like it is going. Sad. Very sad.
jcr

Loved this sentence.

The department's handful of editors and single reporter, Tim Collie, are all being dispersed elsewhere within the newspaper to help it "emphasize local, useful, and helpful content across the newsroom."

Perhaps if that ratio of editors to reporters was reversed, the national news could have been made a tad more locally relevent.

"emphasize local, useful, and helpful content across the newsroom."

Now where have I heard phrases like that before?

Oh, that's right -- from design dolts who don't even read the paper! In their warped world, useful = something that leads to a giant cutout.

Oh well, here in uppercrust Somerset County, NJ, the local Gannett paper decided to drop its national *and* local coverage.

Unless you count their innovative "blogspot" volunteer local news reporters, that is.

With AP for meat and muni ads for bones, all is well here in the richest county in the US...

I think?

Make room for more shopping guides, holiday hints sections and worthless celebrity news.

And newspapers wonder why their revenues are dropping.

If it ain't worth buying, most people won't.

from the outside, the personnel cited in the memo are just a bunch of names, but i can tell you from the inside, the changes are going to create even more turmoil and dissatisfaction. and that means more listless journalism. the people who these good folks are reporting to are the ones who should be reassigned -- to another planet.

As ex ss-er says...

Its true. I know these people and I already heard most arent happy with the transformative changes...:)

Good luck to them as the last line reads on the posting! Time to polish the ol' resume.

This is very rich: at the same time that idiot Maucker is taking over a prestigious group of inter-american journalists, they decide they're going to kill any national or foreign coverage. Because Broward and South Florida is just such a backwater they can't take the sophistication! And then he has the nerve to say that he doesn't want to head the hometown paper of Caracas! He doesn't head the hometown paper of Broward. That's increasingly the Herald. None of these people-Maucker, Rosenhause, Greenberg--are journalists. They're corporate ass clowns who jet off to roundtables and conferences every few weeks. I know many of the reporters who tried their damndest to bring some award winning class to this paper. All that Rosenhause & Co. is doing is spitting all over that work and frustrating everyone.

I see they're closing down more foreign bureaus. Why don't all these media companies just get it over with and put 1 guy in the white house, and then he can send his feed to all the papers.

That reminds me of something I thought of when I heard about there being a "huge demand" for more local reporting. I think it's bogus. I think that statistic was played up because it's the easiest next step for newspapers to take. The Baltimore Sun has a local section. If there was more news locally, I would expect it to be placed there.

What I think people want is more of a local take on foreign affairs (MORE FOREIGN BUREAUS(!!)). People don't want to read 5 AP stories and then a locally-written story about Cal Ripken's favorite ice cream.

Sigh.

Let's keep things in perspective here. The foreign coverage of Sun-Sentinel's Foreign Desk never consisted of more than a few wire editors for the daily, a reporter who made two annual trips (Israel and Haiti) and an editor to oversee them.
As for the other changes, I wouldn't knock Rosenhause at all. She can only make the best of what comes down from corporate, filtered through a brain cell-deprived publisher and an editor whose main desire is to keep up the payments on his Jag and his waterfront home.

Sure explains why they have been covering almost nothing on national news & foreign news. It's more like a local paper....good for the cat litter box.

Glad to hear the Sun-Sentinel's leadership hopes to "emphasize local, useful, helpful content across the newsroom."
Now, if they could just do the same with their newspaper.

The parent company - the Trib - says it all. Take a look at the wonderful relationship between the Trib HQ in Chicago and the LA Times to see what is going on in TribLand. Cost-cutting rules, at the expense of news. It's like burning the village down to save it - nonsensical. One of the ironies for a former Chicagoan is that the Trib's Chicago competitor, the Sun-Times, was leading the Trib in the hyper-local news push. Newspapers are going the way of the dinosaur - and they are doing so of their own volition, as this move by the Trib/S-T exemplifies.

The sentinel had international bureaus?!

Who knew?

Fred Portojohn is funny.

As long as they remain helpful AND useful. Not one or the other but both.

Huh?

As a former S-S employee, it's easy to see that the memo itself points out the problem: All these deputy managing editors for an increasingly small news staff. At the S-S, the joke is that "DME" is short for "Do Minimal Editing."

And what's a "Day Slot?" Don't they allegedly have a "Day Assignment Editor" in the Borward office?

Some of the editors they mention -- and I'll be nice and not mention names -- have been shuffled around the Sun-Sentinel and put up to all sorts of tasks -- most notably hiring a string of underpaid and inexperienced reporters to keep up with the chronic turnover.

Did you hear that one S-S reporter left ... to go BACK to one of those local business journals? Ugh. What does THAT say about, ah, "South Florida's Leading Information Provider?"

I left the place more than two years ago because it had no direction, no vision from senior management -- and no journalistic soul. The place is a shell of itself, and both the Herald and Post CRUSH it with their investigative reporting.

Although, the S-S has become exactly what senior management wanted: a shallow, weak publication populated with pedantic middle managemment and a mostly sychophantic group of reporters who are willing to trade on their ethnicity or their sexuality in order to work at a "big" newspaper. Face it, folks, the Sun-Sentinel always will be a second tier paper and, when circulation keeps plummeting, it won't even be a big newspaper anymore.

Uh oh, Sinking Ship, you've done it now. You're going to get a tongue-lashing from that perpetual "yes man" from the Palm Beach County office who lurks on this blog.

TOO MANY DME'S MAKING 6 FIG SALARY AND KEEPING A LOW PROFILE UNTIL THEY CAN GET OUT OR RETIRE.

While I claim to be the last South Florida Film critic standing, I am amazed had the total lack of content in the Sun Sentinel, especially the Sunday Edition.

Every Sunday, I take the time to absorb a newspaper, I've performed this ritual since I learned to read may, many years ago.

Remember Sunshine magazine?
There used to be some great literary articles. I could spend over an hour reading the Sunday newspaper. Now it takes barely 20 minutes to read the Sunday paper. There is no content.

The Tribune should stop trying to turn their newspaper into a form of web page and focus on news stories and articles with depth and objective anaysis.

Accuracy over expedicy should be the mantra of newspapers.

No one will ever forget the Sun-Sentinel's handling of the 2000 election recount. The biggest story in the WORLD in their own back yard, anbd they get trounced by the Palm Beach Post, the Miami Herald and the AP. And yet most of the editors who handled that are still around. Earl must have a short memory.