After the Sun-Times Media Group released its third-quarter results, over 30 staff members were told that their jobs were being cut. Sun-Times Media plans to combine the Daily Southtown and biweekly Star publications in order to save about $3 million a year.
“The newspaper advertising market in Chicago continued to be very tough,” Chief Executive Cyrus Freidheim told the analysts. “We are simply not where we wanted to be in the third quarter.”
Journal Communications Inc., owner of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, announced that it will lose about 6% of its employees, which have chosen a ‘voluntary separation’ with the company.
The [voluntary] separation program includes a cash severance component and a health care benefit component. It will result in a fourth-quarter 2007 buyout charge of approximately $3 million to $3.3 million and is expected to yield annual savings of about $3.9 million to $4.3 million beginning in 2008.
The company announced the program in October of this year, hoping to cut staff in order to allow for change within the newspaper industry and the Sentinel’s place within. Though, as stated in the above article clip, the company hopes to eventually eliminate a total of 100 staff members.
As the newspaper industry continues to show decline in subscriptions and advertising revenue, buyouts, lay-offs and staff-cuts will continue to effect the journalism community as well as the publishing industry as a whole. However, with web traffic rising, publications have the opportunity to re-align with current trends and the online community.
