As you can tell this week, I'm being wonky. For the past three days I've taken a look at the numbers provided by the Sun-Times Media Group annual report to shareholders. Today, employee counts:

Now, first, I found it interesting that the number of editorial employees in this company is roughly double that of the Chicago Tribune, if reports are true. Last week the Sun-Times group laid off 15 percent of its work force, 140 workers, none of whom were editorial guild members, according to Crain's Chicago Business and the Chicago Reader.

Over at the Chicago Tribune, however, an editorial staff that is reputed to have been about 600 in December 2007 is somewhere in the area of 360 or less today, according to reports. Who is the World's Greatest Newspaper now?

That brings us to our first ever BLEG.

If you were terminated, from any department, from the Chicago Tribune in the most recent layoff, you received a document regarding age discrimination. It lists you by title and age, along with every other employee at the Chicago Tribune. We'd very much like to see that document.

Please e-mail me to discuss how we can obtain a copy: lougrant70 (at) yahoo.

Now the other things that bothered me about that table above is that the second largest cuts came in the critical area of sales and marketing. I must not understand how business works, because I always thought that you put MORE emphasis into sales and marketing when things were going south. Maybe that job loss, however, had something to do with what I cover in my second to last paragraph.

The final thing that struck me was that the number of circulation people is only down 14.75 percent. I had to think about what was wrong with that for a while. Like production, you need a certain number of drivers, support staff and so on to deal with circulation. But here is what the company had to say about its delivery: “the Company has outsourced distribution to the Chicago Tribune Company... “

If the company has outsourced its distribution, why are there still so many people there? Okay, there are a lot of truck drivers, but a savings of just 41 people when editorial took a hit of 166? This is the same department that, according to the company, had circulation practices that “in the past, resulted in the overstatement of the Chicago Sun-Times daily and Sunday circulation.”

Unlike the issues dealing with the manipulation of the company's assets by Conrad Black and David Radler, these efforts were directed by internal people. The issue here isn't just in circulation either. The independent registered public accounting firm noted in the 2007 annual report (last year's) that the company “did not maintain effective internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2007 because of the effects of material weaknesses on the achievement of the objectives of the control criteria... related to advertising revenue recognition and income taxes...”

That's a strong statement to put in a letter from the auditors. Is playing with the number part of the routine in these departments? It could explain that number in the table above.