The Tribune Co., already in bankruptcy, continued its bloody purges to reduce cost. After trimming 300 jobs at the Los Angeles Times earlier this year, the axe now fell on the Baltimore Sun. On Wednesday, 61 newsroom employees were dismissed, including 21 senior editors and managers who were immediately ushered out of the newsroom by security guards.

Though the management personnel eliminated were not members of the newspaper guild, the union voiced strong reaction to the mass layoffs.

"Tribune, through careless management practices, has saddled itself under $13 billion in debt and now Baltimore is paying a price," said Cet Parks, Executive Director of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. "Tribune is siphoning good jobs from Baltimore and sending work that talented editors, reporters, photographers, copy editors and designers have done here to its home base in Chicago. That is not right."

In January, the Sun entered into a cooperative arrangement with the Washington Post to cover the Beltway area. At the time, both papers insisted that there would be no newsroom reduction as a result. It took the Tribune Co. exactly four months to renege on that pledge. (The article on the "no reduction" pledge also conveniently disappeared off the Sun's web site.)

But leave it to the Tribune Co. to spin its latest move as a "plan for success, not just survival."

(Cross-posted at RCP's Media Watch.)