Hail Fellowship Well Met

The Washington-Baltimore Guild was approached with the offer of a substantial grant to help the 44 Baltimore Sun workers who got surprise layoff notices in April 2009. It has been nearly impossible to keep score of how often Tribune Co. management had been committing hara-kiri both at the Sun and at headquarters in Chicago, but the last round of layoffs left a particularly nasty taste in everyone’s mouth.

Once the grant offer was made to the Guild, we searched for ways to put the money to the best use. For instance, why pay what could easily have been a double-digit percentage of the grant in an administrative fee? A no-brainer, that one. Then the brains really got to thinking and the concept evolved to tailor the grant to provide an outlet for what our laid-off members have done best for most of their professional lives.

With the help of the Writers Guild of America East, the evolution became a reality. A fellowship project was conceived in which the let-go Newspaper Guild members at the Sun could choose what it is they wanted to do – reporting or graphics, maybe Web work. Maybe, though, someone would want to step out of what they had been doing and try something different. There was enough room in the project for that as well.

In the end, 28 of the 44 laid-off Sun workers participated in the project. Each “fellow” gets a $2,000 stipend. A Web site, developed by one of the fellowship participants, will host all the work – watch this space.

On Nov. 14, at a church basement near downtown Baltimore, the fellowship sponsored a workshop. There to greet and work with Sun participants were three Writers Guild members: David Simon, a WBNG member himself before leaving the Sun to branch out into such projects as “The Wire,” “The Corner” and “Generation Kill”; Tom Fontana, a TV writer-producer best known for his work on “Oz,” “St. Elsewhere,” “The Jury” and Simon’s network-TV offering "Homicide: Life on the Street”; and Barry Levinson, creative force behind such movies as “Diner,” “Tootsie,” “Tin Men,” “And Justice for All,” and “Avalon.” All have brilliant Baltimore bonafides and were a tonic to our troops.