Showing posts tagged “layoffs”
Joe Schwartz ·
11 Jan 2010, 4:26 PM ·
Comment
The News & Observer announced plans to cut 21 jobs today, citing declines in advertising revenue.
“These reductions affect a number of areas of our operation. Some positions will be eliminated through layoffs, and some departments will have opportunities for employees in certain work groups of two or more to accept a voluntary severance package,” Publisher Orage Quarles III wrote in a company memo, a full copy of which can be found on Poynter.
You can find the N&O’s coverage here, and our previous coverage here.
Raleigh, business, economy, media layoffs, News and Observer, Orage Quarles III
Fiona Morgan ·
22 Apr 2009, 4:50 PM ·
7 Comments
Maybe someone should invite Howard Weaver out for a nice game of golf. The retired McClatchy executive seems to find it hard to keep his hands off the keyboard, and it’s a rather sensitive time for employees — and former employees — of the newspapers he used to oversee.
After launching a defensive back and forth in the comments thread of Romenesko yesterday with News & Observer reporter Joe Neff, Weaver today raised the topic again on his blog, Etaoin Shrdlu, where he has continued to opine about the newspaper business and McClatchy’s role in innovating it — and, perhaps inadvertently, fed the fire of resentment rising in those who see McClatchy’s poor business decisions as the root cause of The N&O’s recent layoffs.
While today’s post demonstrated sympathy toward those who’ve lost their jobs, Weaver repeated an earlier assertion that The N&O was in bad shape long before McClatchy came along:
I don’t apologize for expressing the facts as I know them. It simply isn’t helpful to build mythologies based on anger and blame that don’t reflect reality. [...] For example, those who argue that McClatchy took over a thriving N&O and greedily ran it into the ground are misinformed, and perpetuating that myth hurts the cause of reconstruction.
Frank Daniels, Jr., whose family sold the newspaper to McClatchy in 1995, tells the Indy that Weaver is the one perpetuating a myth, at least in part.
“As far as we were concerned, we were doing extremely well. Financials had nothing to do with our decision to sell,” Daniels says. “So he’s just mistaken.”
Continue reading »
media layoffs, News & Observer, newspapers
Fiona Morgan ·
22 Apr 2009, 1:50 PM ·
Comment
Click the photo to see the full front page.
It’s been a very sad month for those of us who work in journalism, as we watch dedicated people whose work we admire and whose talents we envy lose their jobs. What makes it all the more sad is that they aren’t just victims of an economic downturn that will eventually turn back around. It’s not at all clear that the jobs they’re leaving will ever come back. Even though we understand the root causes — declining ad revenue, the decoupling of classifieds with newsprint, the crushing debt of corporate owners — we can’t help but wonder at a deeper level why the work we value doesn’t have the value it once did.
That, I imagine, is the doubt that hangs over those left in The News & Observer’s newsroom today, following the departure of another 31 staffers due to layoffs and buyouts that were announced last month.
An anonymous staffer’s mock front page (excerpted above; click the photo for the full page) lists the names of all departing staffers. (Hat tip to Jim Romenesko and NewRaleigh.) They include reporters Joe Miller, Sam Spies and Sabine Vollmer; editors Ned Barnett, Van Denton and Rob Waters; photographer Jason Arthurs; as well as several copy editors and production folks, people whose work was often behind the scenes, but nonetheless essential. There’s no dead wood on that list. Continue reading »
media layoffs, News & Observer
Fiona Morgan ·
6 Feb 2009, 1:30 PM ·
1 Comment
Employees at The News & Observer started feeling the pain of the financial downturn early on, with layoffs and buyouts that began last spring and have so far amounted to 233 lost jobs.
Today, the paper announced more layoffs are coming, though it’s unclear how many.
“We had hoped that previous cuts would be sufficient to see us through the sharp revenue declines affecting our industry,” N&O publisher Orage Quarles III said in a statement e-mailed to employees this morning.
“Unfortunately, we have seen an unprecedented loss in advertising revenue with many of our retailers and auto dealers either going out of business or leaving the area, and employment advertising dropping to all time lows,” he said. “Instead, we must continue to respond to the deepening financial crisis that is threatening not only our industry but all kinds of businesses in almost every sector of the economy.”
The N&O also has to respond to the more than $2 billion in debt and tanking stock price of its parent company, McClatchy, which risks being de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange.
In a recent conversation, N&O Executive Editor John Drescher told me he’d freed business reporter Jonathan Cox from his regular news duties to work for two months on a project to find alternate streams of revenue for the newspaper. Cox, who has a business degree, came to Drescher with the idea of selling content the company has already created — its bank of photos, for example — to bring in an additional $100,000 in revenue. That’s not much when you consider The News & Observer Publishing Company is a $100 million a year operation. But as Drescher pointed out, $100K is enough to save a couple newsroom jobs. No word yet on the details of that plan.
Finding new streams of revenue seems to fit with McClatchy CEO and Chairman Gary Pruitt’s thinking.
Pruitt recently told investors the company isn’t just sitting idly by, but plans to push for more revenue from the Web.
That could include experimenting with charging readers for some online features, instead of giving it all away. “Our costs of delivery online is lower, so the distinction between ‘print is pay and online is free’ is wrong,” Pruitt was quoted as saying. “We’ll experiment with paid content online. But most experiments show that you lose more online revenue than you gain per subscriber.”
Most major newspapers did away with paid online subscriptions following the lead of the The New York Times which in 2007 abandoned the TimesSelect service that put its columnists and archives behind a pay wall. In a Q&A with readers this week, NYT Editor Bill Keller defended the basic idea behind paid content, saying it was one concept the paper is looking into along with micro-payments (an iTunes for news, as NYT media columnist David Carr recently imagined) and selling content to reading devices like the Kindle. There’s also been a lot of talk lately of creating endowments for newspapers, which would allow them to operate on a nonprofit model.
I doubt anybody’s going to crack the big question of how to pay for journalism between now and the next MNI earnings report. So meanwhile, what does it all mean for the worried and demoralized employees on South McDowell Street?
Continue reading »
media layoffs, News & Observer, newspap
Fiona Morgan ·
4 Dec 2008, 1:24 PM ·
Comment
The rarely discussed problem with the newspaper industry is that many newspapers are still profitable, just not profitable enough — their owners and investors aren’t willing to accept a decline in profit margins as a tradeoff for long-term viability.
For evidence of this, consider Gannett, the uber-chain that owns USA Today. Its stock price falling as the economic downturn gets worse, Gannett plans to lay off about 3,000 employees. Thing is, the company’s still making profits that would be considered healthy in most other industries.
Former Gannett editor Jim Hopkins, who’s been blogging the carnage at his independent Gannett Blog, got hold of 2007 financial documents that list the sales and profit margins of each individual Gannett paper, information the company doesn’t like to reveal. While the numbers are a year old, they do tell us something about the financial bassakwardness of the media industry. One paper more than 42 percent profit.
The Asheville Citizen-Times, Gannett’s only North Carolina paper, made $20.6 million in ad sales and had a 23.49 percent profit margin in the first three quarters of 2007, according to Hopkins’ information. The Citizen-Times recently announced it will lay off 60 people.
Meanwhile, financial ratings firm Fitch Ratings warns newspaper companies are likely to default on their debt and go out of business next year, which will leave “several cities” with no daily newspaper. The McClatchy Company, which owns The N&O, is one of two companies whose debt Fitch rated as “junk,” according to Editor & Publisher.
media financial crisis, layoffs, McClatchy, newspapers
Lisa Sorg ·
9 Oct 2008, 8:13 AM ·
Comment
Two dozen of the 100 workers at Lulu.com are being laid off, including its president, according to The News & Observer.
The employees are the latest economic casualties in the Triangle, particularly in publishing. Lulu.com plans to move from Morrisville to Raleigh, to cut office space costs.
rep
Wake County, business layoffs, Lulu.com
Fiona Morgan ·
18 Sep 2008, 10:47 AM ·
Comment
It’s sad to see the remnants of Nando Times, once the most innovative online operation in the daily newspaper business, being cut down at a time when newspapers need to focus on their online operations more than ever.
The N&O reports today that its parent company, McClatchy, cut 16 jobs, or 11 percent of the workforce, from McClatchy Interactive. About 10 of these people are newsroom employees; others wrote code and worked on business development, the story said. It was unclear from the story how many of these people work in Raleigh.
Yesterday was the deadline to accept buyout offers that were extended earlier this month to every single employee in The N&O’s newsroom. We’ll see the announcement of more departures and, likely, layoffs on Monday.
media layoffs, McClatchy, News & Observer
Fiona Morgan ·
17 Sep 2008, 9:57 AM ·
Comment
News & Observer Publisher Orage Quarles III sent out this memo to employees yesterday:
From: Orage Quarles III
Subject: Workforce Reductions and Reorganization
Date: September 16, 2008
Company-wide workforce reductions and changes were just announced today throughout McClatchy. A press release detailing those actions - amounting to about 1,150 jobs, or 10% of the company’s workforce - is available at www.mcclatchy.com. Many of these position eliminations are being managed through voluntary separation programs such as ours and attrition. Reductions vary by newspaper. The release also addresses other changes in our business model and operations.
As you know, we currently are in the process of accepting voluntary separation applications; the deadline for these applications is Wednesday, September 17 a t 10:00 am. We are hopeful that this voluntary program will help us meet much of our reduction goal of approximately 60-70 employees. However, once we have determined how many employees will separate under the voluntary program and how work will be redistributed, then we will assess if and where any additional involuntary job eliminations may be needed. We anticipate notifying employees affected by involuntary reductions by Monday, September 22.
We also are announcing that we are undertaking an initiative to outsource some financial functions that can be performed effectively offsite. These functions are primarily transactional and repetitive in nature. They can be improved through the use of additional automation and involve little if any customer contact. The vendor we are using, Infosys, specializes in supporting finance functions and is currently performing this work for The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe and New York Times. We are still reviewing roles to determine how many jobs will be affected but believe it will be approximately five. Although we are making this announcement today, the changes in staff will not become effective until the beginning of 2009.
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media layoffs, News & Observer
Lisa Sorg ·
16 Sep 2008, 6:51 PM ·
Comment
McClatchy, which owns about 80 newspapers, including The News & Observer and the Charlotte Observer, announced another round of layoffs today: 10 percent of the workforce or 1,150 full-time equivalent positions. The press release , in a mind-boggling use of corporate-speak, termed it “additional cost restructuring.”
Here’s an excerpt: “Gary Pruitt, McClatchy’s Chairman and CEO said, ‘Our board reviewed our dividend policy today and determined it was prudent to reduce the dividend, providing more free cash flow to reduce debt. We believe this action is in the best interest of our equity and debt investors.’
Well, we wouldn’t want to upset the investors.
North Carolina, media layoffs, McClatchy, News & Observer
