Layoffs and buyouts at The Seattle Times

From the story: There will be "fewer layers of editing."

Yeah, that always ends well.

 

Speaking of layers of editing, unless I missed it, the Seattle Times' own story never says what percentage the newsroom is being cut. Sort of a crucial fact, right? Is it 23 positions out of 200? Or 100? I saw a separate story that said it had 178 newsroom employees, which seems high. If so, it's still a 13 percent cut, which is awful.

 

Translation: Shove those stories right up on the Interwebs. No proofread necessary or coming.

 

Yup. Very recently I had a freelance gig with a major metro newspaper helping cover an event that ended after the print deadline. In my haste to get done, I used an incorrect stat in my story. The story went straight to the online guy -- who I later found out is not even based in the same state as the newspaper -- and was posted on the website with no editing. When I read it online I immediately saw the error and contacted the SE, who corrected it, but if I hadn't seen it, the wrong numbers would still be up there.

 

Not good when 2016 was a strong year for the U.S. economy as a whole, but advertising revenue plummeted industrywide. It isn't just newspapers, either. As the layoff story noted, Seattle-area TV stations also have made job cuts.

What happens to the media when the economy takes one of its downturns?

 

I don't know how they'll function with 23 fewer bodies. That's a massive hit, unless they had a mass of non-vital positions. I somehow doubt that is the case.

 

So this is my biggest issue in this volatile business. Ad revenue has been falling for years and thousands have been laid off for the betterment of the bottom line. How are there still more than just a handful of "huge" contracts in 2017? Wouldn't it be more effective to hire 3-4 good reporters, at a time when newsrooms need all the staffers they can get on such limited budgets?

 

Editing must be one of those things that don't make sense.

 

Because hiring three or four more people might hurt performance bonuses. But the real loss may be the gaping hole in institutional knowledge of the city they've been working in all those years.

 

Indeed. Institutional knowledge is vital to any great publication, and the lack of it has certainly hurt ours. I'm just surprised that with every round of layoffs we hear about these huge salaries, and then we hear about them again the next time and still wonder why the layoffs continue.