• Chandler West/Sun-Times Media
  • Layoffs strike again at both the Trib and the Sun-Times.

After years of pain and misery, the dark art of telling employees to clean out their lockers may have located its wiser, kinder side at Chicago newspapers. Photographer Chuck Berman was one of ten editorial employees laid off by the Tribune last week, and instead of keying the first delivery truck he saw, he wrote a statement that wound up on Romenesko. “I had a great 37 years at the Tribune,” said Berman. “I have been blessed to work with and be friends with an amazing pack of photographers, reporters, editors and lab techs (and others I’m sure I left out). I even married one of them, for which I am eternally thankful. Now, my life will be filled with more birds, more lost golf balls, more history books and more stories to hear. Lucky me, for everything.”

Personal-finance blogger Louis Carlozo was banished in a massive Tribune layoff in 2009. He commented on another site, “I wanted to post a final blog Wednesday to readers explaining that I had lost my job, a victim of the very recession I covered. I posted this without management’s approval. I then informed management. Management took it down.”

But Daughtridge didn’t play games with him on the phone. She was straight, and when they met “she was really gracious,” Berman says. Human Resources was decent too. And when he was done there, he hung out in the newsroom for as long as he wanted to and said his good-byes. “It’s almost like going to your own wake,” says Brotman. “It might have been different years ago, when things started getting bad,” she says. “But our kids are out of college, and we’re not going to lose our house. . . . It pushed him to do something he wanted to do, and that’s what it feels like. It feels like retirement. It has a celebratory feeling to it. We’re going to have a party at the Billy Goat. I’m glad I’m still there. He’s on my insurance, and I love the work. But I don’t feel angry at anyone, and he doesn’t feel angry at anyone. It’s strangely OK.”

“I sort of knew it was coming,” Lansu told me Sunday. “I’d had the feeling for a while, seeing how the Sun-Times had been cutting costs so much.” Not that Homicide Watch has been such a big expense, “but at this point they’re down to such bare bones, everything’s expensive for them.”