Folks, It’s Getting Real Serious Out There – Gannett To Fire Another 10%; LA Times Cuts Newsroom by Another 10%, Christian Science Monitor To Go Weekly, And NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller Flies Economy Class!

Philip M. Stone October 29, 2008

With many newspaper companies having seen their share prices fall to single digits before Tuesday’s big rise on Wall Street, with the ratings agencies pushing newspaper debt further and further into junk, America’s major newspaper companies are getting serious, real serious, about downsizing even more than they have.

Thus Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper publisher, announced Tuesday that another 3,000 or so employees are going to be cut  -- it was just in August that Gannett  announced that 1,000 jobs were going, 600 of them on layoffs, and then a month later it said 100 management jobs were being cut. The stock market likes news like that and pushed Gannett’s shares up 11.94% on Tuesday and for the first time after four days of closing in single digits, Tuesday’s gain saw the shares close at all of $10.22.

Meanwhile at the Los Angeles Times it seems they finally have an editor who doesn’t quit when told to fire more of his newsroom so when the new publisher told him to get rid of 75 staffers that’s what he did – his last three predecessors quit rather than cut so deeply. The 75 editorial cuts mean, for instance, that the newspaper now has just one film critic – imagine that,  Hollywood’s home town daily newspaper  now has just one film critic. The 75 newsroom cuts follow 75 business-side cuts made last week.

The Times’ newsroom now has about half the number of journalists it had seven years ago. The newsroom went down by 135 in July and it lost 40 staff in February, and with these latest cuts it will be down to about 660. Compare that to the New York Times that has around 1,100 in its newsroom.

And talking of the New York Times, Executive Editor Bill Keller seemed to knock down a report on the Gawker web site on Monday that his newsroom was going to undergo a 20% cull. But Keller told his staff in meetings Monday, “No, I do not see another  round of newsroom staff reductions on the horizon.” On the other hand staff could not take that statement to the bank. “There are no guarantees…but as of now, even with the growing misery of the global economy, our aim is to move forward without another wave of newsroom buyouts or layoffs.”

He made clear, however, that the search for savings is ongoing” and there will be no luxuries and little comfort.” And to show how he himself is giving up comfort and luxury he let it be known that on a recent flight from California to New York he flew economy class!

The financial people are still giving the Times grief – after the company’s dismal 3rd quarter results  Standard & Poors Ratings Service  cut the company’s debt to junk, and Moodys Investors said it was of a mind to do the same.

But perhaps the most telling news Tuesday came from the Christian Science Monitor that announced that starting in April it becomes a weekly while increasing its emphasis on its Web site.. The newspaper, 100 years old this year, is funded by the Christian Science Church that says the newspaper will lose some $19 million this year.

The Monitor’s journalism is among the finest America has to offer. Back in 1970 the newspaper had a daily circulation of 223,000 but today  it’s a mere 56,000. By switching to weekly the newspaper hopes within five years to cut its annual loss to around $11 million, and, yes, the change to weekly probably means a cull among the paper’s 130 staffers, although the newspaper hopes to sustain its18 foreign bureaus.

Newsroom losses come at an editorial price, as Gary Graham, editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, told a National Press Club Centennial Forum recently. "We're going to have to make some decisions on things we are no longer going to cover any more because we simply don't have the staff. But the foundation of all that is still a journalistic mission where local news is our franchise. We will continue to do what we call watchdog journalism, investigative reporting, analysis and context. But the idea that more can be done with less just isn't true. You have to do it differently." said Graham, who has just seen a 20% cull of his newsroom.

And as a further sign of the times Brown Publishing in Ohio has announced that six of its small circulation newspapers will no longer publish on Mondays. They aren’t the first to do this, and given how the economy is going, they probably won’t be the last. It’s a sign of the times.