Tension-Filled Changing of the Guard : Economy: Employees heard one by one whether they will have jobs when the Union and Tribune merge next month.

After four months of waiting, editorial employees at the San Diego Union and Tribune learned one by one Friday whether they will have jobs when the two newspapers merge next month.

One reporter termed it “a hellish day of tension” as managers at the two papers met with reporters, photographers, librarians and other editorial workers, either to offer them continued employment or to tell them they will be laid off.

“It’s been absolute hell--a totally wrenching experience,” said reporter Sharon Jones, who learned that she will keep her job. “I feel like I’ve been tossed around in the washer and dryer I had installed the day (in September) the merger was announced.”

Friday represented the final stage in Copley Newspapers executives’ protracted efforts to pare the two newspapers’ combined 429-person editorial, photography and library staffs by about 30%, a reduction that Copley officials said will save about $6 million annually in base salaries.

Editorial employees, having once feared that their chances of dismissal might be as high as one in three, went into Friday’s meetings knowing their odds had improved because about 120 colleagues had already accepted an early-retirement package, offered by the company to entice voluntary departures.

Overall, 40 to 50 newsroom, library and photo department workers received two-week notices Friday, according to Herb Klein, Copley Newspapers editor in chief. The majority of the layoffs appear to have involved Tribune employees, because, as Tribune reporter Fernando Romero noted matter-of-factly, “The Tribune is disappearing and not the Union.”

The two newspapers’ distinct editorial voices and highly competitive news staffs belied the fact of common ownership for more than six decades.

Though both newspapers’ names will appear on the new product, which will have morning and afternoon editions, the Feb. 2 merger stems largely from declining circulation in the afternoon Tribune, a 96-year-old publication that itself had merged with two other papers over the past half a century.

The finality and magnitude--indeed, the life-changing potential--of Friday’s decisions at the newspapers’ Mission Valley plant produced a tense, tearful day for staff members, as they watched co-workers head off for their momentous meetings while nervously awaiting their own.

Beginning at 7 a.m. and continuing until early Friday evening, employees, a dozen at a time, met in individual 15-minute sessions with managers to learn whether they will have jobs next month and, if so, whether their assignments will change.

Greeting Friday’s events with the combination of grim uneasiness and gallows humor that has typified their four-month wait, reporters quickly assigned irreverent monikers to the 12 first-floor meeting rooms where the climactic face-to-face interviews occurred, nicknaming them after Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and other mass murderers.

The meetings were conducted in alphabetical order, “so the time would have nothing to do with your chances,” Klein said. That factor, however, also made for a long, nerve-racking day for people with last names toward the end of the alphabet.

“It’s been impossible for me to do any work today,” Tribune reporter Romero said as he waited for his late-afternoon appointment. “I just couldn’t concentrate on anything, especially after I heard that a couple of reporters whom I thought were good reporters were laid off.” Late Friday, Romero learned that his job was secure.

Even among the survivors, personal relief was tempered--in many cases, overwhelmed--by the distress of witnessing the tearful departures of close friends and colleagues. Many of the fired employees immediately left the premises, though some remained to finish their shifts.

“My stomach is in knots,” said Ed Jahn, president of the Newspaper Guild and a Union reporter who kept his job but will be reassigned to a new beat. “You’re happy maybe that you got spared, but then you see somebody that got devastated.”

“It’s an atmosphere of paranoia in there,” said Tribune reporter Susan Shroder, who also will have a different job. “People are very morose, very sullen. Those who kept their jobs are happy, but there’s not a lot of celebrating going on--not when you know of friends and co-workers who were let go.”

One of those who received bad news Friday was John Lamb, a 32-year-old Tribune reporter who had worked at the paper for seven years, most recently as a general assignment reporter.

“In my mind, I’m still trying to determine how they went about deciding who was going and who was staying,” said Lamb, who will receive about $11,000 in severance pay--several thousand dollars less than he would have received had he accepted the voluntary buyout package. “I was told that it was basically a numbers crunch, but that my firing was also based on my evaluation. But I haven’t seen my evaluation, so I can’t tell you what it says.”

One of the major complaints voiced by retained and laid-off workers alike was the long gap between the Sept. 11 announcement of the merger and Friday’s staffing decisions, likened by one reporter to “being told by your doctor you’re going to have to wait four months to get the results of your X-rays.”

“The way this was handled was really inhumane,” said one librarian who requested anonymity. “This is management by neurosis.”

Editor in Chief Klein contended that Copley executives, “for both corporate and compassionate reasons,” also would have preferred a quicker resolution to the unsavory task of deciding which employees would stay and which would be laid off.

But, he said, administrators “had to start at scratch because there was no precedent” for the employee evaluation process, which he said was based on “skills, knowledge and the needs” of the new paper.

Workers at both papers, though, felt that, because seniority did not guide those selections, editors’ subjective judgments and personal feelings about their staffs also inevitably entered into their decision-making.

The 45-day timetable in which employees could consider whether to accept the voluntary buyout package, followed by a one-week period in which they could change their minds, also lengthened the process, Klein said.

“We would have liked to have done this earlier, because this hasn’t been pleasant for anyone,” he said.

That sentiment succinctly captured the mood in the Union and Tribune newsrooms Friday, as workers struggled to adjust to the new realities that will surround them in two weeks.

“It’s just a very sad day,” concluded Tribune reporter Jones. “I’m happy that I at least have a job, but not today. It’s just been too emotional. . . . Besides, I’ve got a story I have to do.”