Palm Beach Post

Ho. Lee. Shit.

50 percent?

Damn. Damn. Damn.

 

I think the memo says that of the 130, some of those are already accounted for through attrition/vacancies left unfilled, but man, that's still a huge number.

 

That's got to the biggest percentage of a newsroom cut in one of these, right? That's insane.

 

Yep, that's it. On both counts.

 

Hellloooo? You're not going to remain the No. 1 option for your advertisers if you chop your newsroom by nearly 50 percent. Sheesh.

 

Palm Beach has always been the little paper that could and has done remarkably well in that market despite having very limited resources compared to the Sun-Sentinel and the Herald.

Maybe three papers can't survive in that market anymore. Maybe they need to regionalize their coverage and stop covering the major sports as extensively as they have.

This really sucks. Another paper I've always really liked.

 

This is what amazes me about media companies. Instead of finding ways to make the product better for the readers, they cut staffing to the bone and tell readers that the remaining people will work harder to bring them the best coverage....

 

Yeah, you can bet that our remaining employees will be working 24-7 to make up for our lack of resources...

My subscription would be canceled immediately.

 

Yeah, that's the ticket to keeping readers: less coverage of things they're interested in.

 

I completely agree with you, but you would have to think those are the cuts they're going to make.

 

Pervading sentiment among corporate newspaper honcho idiots seems to be that readers clearly don't care about the product anyway -- they're not reading it anymore after all, right? -- so why put a good product out there? Let's just slap some bullshit eye candy on there and you're good to go.

The people who should be looking for new jobs are the decision makers who made piss poor decisions over the years and put the paper in this position in the first place. Yes the economy is bad -- we're all feeling it here in lovely South Florida -- but the Post leadership has done too little, too late and now their employees and readers are paying the price.