So is McClatchy about to drop the hammer?

MileHigh · Jun 16, 2008

Frank_Ridgeway said:

Good luck to all. This blog appears to have the paper-by-paper breakdown with individual links to each paper's story:

http://cancelthebee.blogspot.com/2008/06/breakdown-of-mcclatchy-job-cuts.html
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Heard the 250 figure earlier about Miami. Photo taking a big hit there.

MileHigh · Jun 16, 2008

Diabeetus said:

I know the cuts are horrible everywhere, but how do you adjust to losing 250, 17 percent of your entire operation, like Miami is going to have to?
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Agreed. Remember, these aren't all newsroom cuts. But still, this is cutting to the bone.

Dwayne T. Robinson · Jun 16, 2008

Best of luck to those caught in this ridiculous, totally self-destructive and heartless move by these fat cats.
And I love the standard severance offer: Two weeks pay for every year of service. Not bad if you've been somewhere 10-15 years, but not much help if you've only been somewhere a year or two. Like me.

FreddiePatek · Jun 16, 2008

MileHigh said:

Diabeetus said:

I know the cuts are horrible everywhere, but how do you adjust to losing 250, 17 percent of your entire operation, like Miami is going to have to?
Click to expand...

Agreed. Remember, these aren't all newsroom cuts. But still, this is cutting to the bone.
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Well, I know in our shop, we geared ourselves up for this by allowing attrition to run rampant over the past 18 months. I'm wondering if Miami ever bothered to take that approach. Seeing such a high number intimates to me that they never used attrition.

SockPuppet · Jun 16, 2008

This has been an absolute nightmare of a day.
If I was still a drinker, I'd drink myself into a stupor.
Instead, I think I'll cry myself to sleep.
90 percent of the people in journalism, particularly in sports, aren't in it for the money or the bylines. They're in it because they have a passion for it. This isn't like people being let go by airlines or other businesses. We're in it becuase we love it. Too bad we've decided to spend decades loving a profession that is telling us to go fuck ourselves.
I fucking hate the suits, I fucking hate Wall Street, I fucking hate 25 to 30 percent profit margins, I fucking hate seeing dedicated, talented journalists sent packing because their salary profiles fit the bottom line.

Joe Williams · Jun 16, 2008

Miami's top editor is that actor Jake's uncle, Anders Gyllenhall. He bolted from the Minneapolis Star Tribune one step ahead of the grim reaper, leaving them to deal with scumbag private-equity owners, the Par Ridder as publisher fiasco and inept newsroom brass. Jumped to his tropical paradise at the Herald.

Guess he didn't jump far enough, the pencil-neck. Feel the pain, A.G.

deskslave · Jun 16, 2008

Joe Williams said:

Miami's top editor is that actor Jake's uncle, Anders Gyllenhall. He bolted from the Minneapolis Star Tribune one step ahead of the grim reaper, leaving them to deal with scumbag private-equity owners, the Par Ridder as publisher fiasco and inept newsroom brass. Jumped to his tropical paradise at the Herald.

Guess he didn't jump far enough, the pencil-neck. Feel the pain, A.G.
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The fuck pain is he feeling? He get let go? He have his pay cut?

Oh wait, I forgot.

Now we face the painful reality of severing employment ties with valued friends and colleagues, many of whom have served the company well for many years. We are sorry to do so and will do everything possible to make their transition as smooth as possible.
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Moderator1 · Jun 16, 2008

From Biloxi:

10 jobs lost, five in the newsroom, one in sports (copy editor)

spaceman · Jun 16, 2008

oh man. i am just stunned at the magnitude of this.

Moderator1 · Jun 16, 2008

Some baseball guy (not a National) said recently: Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you've found out you haven't and it gets worse."

Unfortunately, I don't think this is rock bottom. MANY companies are watching this.

deskslave · Jun 16, 2008

Unfortunately, they'll watch circulation continue to decline at these McClatchy papers, thereby making more such moves necessary. And then they'll follow, like the spineless lemmings they are.

Maybe if a company would invest in the product, it would give these idiots something else to look at.

Write-brained · Jun 16, 2008

Moderator1 said:

Some baseball guy (not a National) said recently: Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you've found out you haven't and it gets worse."

Unfortunately, I don't think this is rock bottom. MANY companies are watching this.
Click to expand...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/business/media/06tribune.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin.&oref=slogin

It's probably been posted here somewhere, but it bears repeating:

Tribune Company newspapers like The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune will quickly cut costs — by printing fewer papers and employing fewer journalists — top company executives said on Thursday.

Samuel Zell, the chairman and chief executive of Tribune, and Randy Michaels, the company’s chief operating officer, revealed the cuts during a conference call with Wall Street analysts.

They also said the struggling company has looked at the column inches of news produced by each reporter, and by each paper’s news staff. Finding wide variation, they said, they have concluded that it could do without a large number of news employees and not lose much content.

Mr. Michaels said of the changes, “This is going to happen quickly.”

Mr. Zell said, “I promise you he’s underestimating the level of aggressiveness with which we are attacking this whole challenge.”

They said the company would aim for a 50-50 split between ads and news across all the news pages (excluding classified ads and advertising supplements). Mr. Michaels said this would mean eliminating 500 pages of news a week across all of the company’s 12 papers.

“If we take, for instance, The Los Angeles Times to a 50-50 ratio, we will be eliminating about 82 pages a week,” Mr. Michaels said, leaving the smallest papers of the week at 56 news pages.

Since being taken over in an $8.2 billion deal that took the company private in December, Tribune has downsized newspapers that had already been trimmed under the previous regime. During the call and in a note from Mr. Zell to Tribune employees, the executives signaled that bigger cuts are coming.

Mr. Michaels said that, after measuring journalists’ output, “when you get into the individuals, you find out that you can eliminate a fair number of people while eliminating not very much content.” He added that he understood that some reporting jobs naturally produce less output than others.
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