LOS ANGELES, CA (July 3, 2008) – As deep cuts in newspaper staffing roll out across Tribune Co.-owned properties bought last year by real estate mogul Sam Zell, the Los Angeles Times has announced that 250 more jobs will be cut including 150 in the print and online newsrooms.
It's not known how many of those cuts will come from the photography staff.
In just the last week, layoffs, buy-outs, and cutbacks announced by American newspapers including the Tribune Co., Media General Inc.'s Tampa Tribune, and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, account for nearly 1,000 lost jobs.
Nationally, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that 62,000 jobs of all types were lost in June, matching the job loss figure for May, and holding steady at a rate of 5.5 percent for unemployment. So far, they say, 438,000 jobs have been lost by the U.S. economy so far this year. June was the sixth straight month that more jobs were cut than created.
Part of the downsizing at the Los Angeles Times includes cutting 15 percent of their news pages each week, doing away with some sections entirely, and cutting news story length. The Web and print newsrooms will be merged into one department, the Times said, and a re-designed paper will be launched in the fall.
Tribune Co. newspapers, including The Hartford Courant and The Baltimore Sun, this week announced similar cuts with the Sun eliminating 100 jobs and the Courant eliminating 60.
An ongoing slump in advertising sales is being blamed for the cutbacks, along with the fact that the Tribune Co. has $8.2 billion in debt created by the Zell purchase and taking the company private. Last week the Tribune Co., which has been trying to sell their ownership of the Major League Baseball team the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field, also said they are exploring the possible sale of their headquarters building in Chicago and the Los Angeles Times' building in California.
Times editor Russ Stanton said that part of the problem is that the Times has been giving readers too much news each day, and that the number one reason people gave for canceling their subscription was that they didn't have the time to read that much news.
"We're going to be more picky about the stories we choose to write long and a lot more picky about the ones we write shorter," Stanton said. In a memo to the newsroom he said, "These moves will be difficult and painful."
Stanton is the latest Times editor to have to deal with reducing the newspaper's staff. Editors John Carroll, Dean Baquet, and Jim O'Shea quit or were forced out when they resisted Tribune Co. efforts to cut back the Times staff over the last couple of years. When this rounds of cutbacks are finished by the end of summer, the Times' newsroom will be approximately half the size it was within the last decade.
The Associated Press reports that the Times' newsroom will shrink from 876 to around 700 by Labor Day, a 17 percent decrease in the newsroom workforce. Times circulation continues to drop, losing another 5 percent in the last year. In February the Times had cut 100 positions, including 40 in the news department.
In its history the Los Angeles Times has won 38 Pulitzer Prizes, including for photography. Photojournalist Carolyn Cole won in 2004, Don Bartletti in 2003, Clarence Williams in 1998, and John L. Gaunt in 1955. The newspaper's 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for "Altered Oceans" included Times photojournalist Rick Loomis as part of the three-person team who produced the five-part series.
