LA Times cutting jobs
In case you haven’t already read it on The Big Lead, the LA Times is cutting a pretty substantial part of its editorial staff and newspaper size.
The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday announced plans to cut 250 positions across the company, including 150 positions in editorial, in a new effort to bring expenses into line with declining revenue. In a further cost-cutting step, the newspaper will reduce the number of pages it publishes each week by 15%.
The changes also include combining their print and Web departments. That’s good news to reporters like me, who do well in both mediums. My hunch is papers will love to have one writer who can do both.
The story, which is curiously written by the LA Times (not sure if conflict of interest is a big deal here or not), also has a very good synopsis of what has happened to the newspaper industry to get us here.
The cuts reflect conditions across the newspaper industry, which is confronting sharply deteriorating print advertising revenues. Although online ad revenues are rising, they have not made up for the losses.
Times execs expect papers to keep losing money through the end of this year. Makes me glad I was able to secure some type of steady paycheck outside of community journalism early on.
Otherwise, I might have been waiting for six more months.
