Adding Up The Newspaper Cutbacks

Leading newspapers have cut approximately 6,300 staffers in the last year.

2008 total: 12,314+ jobs cut from print news industry

August 10, 2008, Posted by Mark Potts at 11:34 PM

How severe have the recent cutbacks in newspaper staffing and operations been? Pretty severe. More than 6,300 employees at the 100 largest newspapers have lost jobs through buyouts or layoffs in the past year.

More than half of those cutbacks have come since the beginning of June.

Nearly two-thirds of the top 100 papers have cut staff in the past year, including all but four of the top 34 (the two New York City tabloids, the Indianapolis Star and the Cleveland Plain Dealer are the exceptions–and Plain Dealer management has threatened imminent cuts).

Even papers that haven't made recent cuts have sliced staff in the past couple of years–in all, three-quarters of the Top 100 have eliminated jobs in the past two years or so. 

Twenty-eight of the Top 100 have cut more than 100 jobs in the past year. Seven have cut more than 200 jobs–and those numbers go up significantly if you go back more than a year. 

The largest cuts have come at the biggest papers, not surprisingly, and at chains. (The worst: 350 jobs lost at the Los Angeles Times since February.) Perhaps the safest place to work is at an independently owned paper in a mid-sized market. So far.

Virtually all cuts are on the print side – few papers, if any, have cut online staffing, fortunately. 

Until recently, voluntary buyouts were the usual method of cutting employment–but lately, many cuts have been through outright layoffs. Job cuts aren't the only thing going on – papers also are freezing hiring and shrinking through reduction of editions and sections, striking partnerships with other papers, closing bureaus and outsourcing some production (even copy-editing!) overseas.

More than a handful of papers – and their owners – clearly are in fairly dire financial peril, losing money or having trouble making debt payments. And several papers have been put up for sale.

More cuts, no doubt, are still to come. Many papers that have not made cuts yet this year probably are going to have to do so soon as revenue continues to deteriorate. And with the structural changes rocking the industry and the ongoing effects of the worsening economy, it seems likely that papers will continue to have to cut costs to maintain their financial equilibrium. Newspaper revenue still is falling much more quickly than costs are being reduced. That's almost a guarantee of more cuts to come.

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