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.
Numbers for more than 700 daily newspapers were released this morning and show decline in daily circulation in all but four of the top 25 newspapers. Editor and Publisher reports that the Boston Globe was hit hard as daily circulation numbers fell 6.6 percent and Sunday numbers dropped 6.5 percent. The New York Times showed a huge decrease in Sunday circulation numbers, however, the decrease is partially due to the Times’ recent subscription price increase.
As expected, circulation — at least paid circulation — continues to decline sharply. For the past several years, publishers, particularly those at major metros, have been whittling back on circulation considered to be less useful by advertisers. Those papers fall into the category of other paid, which includes hotel, Newspapers in Education, employee, and third party copies.
[...]For the first time, ABC also released comprehensive “audience” data — print readership, online readership, unduplicated reach, and monthly unique users — for roughly 200 papers. The industry is moving toward numbers that take into consideration all their products, including newspaper Web sites, not just paid circulation.
View the ‘top 25’ list: FAS-FAX: Top 25 Daily and Sunday U.S. Newspapers
The Spokane Spokesman-Review announced it will lay off 30 employees, and offer up early retirement incentives to those that hold 10 other positions. The paper’s editorial department is expected to lose about 15 employees.
Editor Steven Smith said he’s been asked to trim more than $1 million from his annual $9 million budget. The newspaper employs 550 people and about 137 of them work in the editorial department.
Tuesday, only hours after the announcement made by the Spokesman-Review, the Houston Chronicle said it expects to lay off nearly 5 percent of its current employees.
The Chronicle will lose about 70 of its 1,400 positions, Publisher Jack Sweeney said, confirming an article on the paper’s Web site and a memo he wrote to employees that was posted on the Romenesko journalism blog.
Falling advertising revenue and subscription rates have been contributing to the mass-layoffs seen in previous months within the newspaper industry. In addition, many publications are working toward online solutions for revenue, however, in past months advertising on the web has declined as well.
Sam Zell, well-known billionaire investor, recently spoke to a group of newspaper executives and compared the industry to the fall of Rome.
“I think the newspaper industry has stood there and watched while other media enterprises have taken our bacon and run with it,” he told the annual meeting of the Inland Press Association, a newspaper trade group representing about 1,200 papers in all 50 states. “It’s too much complacency.”
[…] The industry as a whole, Zell said, has been “standing there and letting this happen while Rome is burning.”
Zell also spoke about the rise of the internet and the lack of attention the industry has given the medium, blaming the lack of cross-media utilization as the catalyst for the current state of the industry.
