While we have all been distracted locally by the Rocky Mountain News’ situation, here’s what has been going on outside of Denver during the past week:
- McClatchy has quietly put The Miami Herald up for sale as it struggles with debt and advertising losses
- Tribune Co. has retained bankruptcy advisers as it prepares for a potential bankruptcy filing
- Gannett confirmed its latest round of newspaper layoffs will affect 2,000 positions across all of the company’s 85 daily papers (including seven at the Fort Collins Coloradoan)
- The Minneapolis Star-Tribune announced it will eliminate 25 newsroom positions
- The Bakersfield Californian will lay off 25 as it tries “to balance its budget amid shrinking advertising revenue”
- Seattle Times cartoonist Eric Devericks is among 150 staffers being let go in the paper’s third-round of layoffs this year
- The Pensacola News Journal let 21 full-time and seven part-time employees go
- The Cleveland Plain Dealer has “laid off 27 newsroom employees because of the struggling economy”
- The Arizona Republic laid off 68 employees
- New York’s Newsday announced plans to cut 100 jobs, or about 5 percent of its workforce
- The Burlington Free Press laid off nine employees and eliminated five open positions
Again, that was the past week. In total, Ad Age estimates that the media industries “have shed more than 30,000 jobs in 2008. … That’s about 3.5% of the total media work force of 858,000. Since the bubble-inflated high-water mark in 2000, media has lost more than 200,000 jobs.” For those of us with journalism degrees and newspaper reporting/editing jobs on our resumes, the profound sadness we feel for the newspaper industry is almost indescribable.
Before Dean Singleton engages in too much scheudenfraude about the Rocky’s plight, he might want to read this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, which notes that MediaNews Group is among several publishers that “are carrying heavy loads of debt given their fast-shrinking revenues.” The WSJ’s solution for MediaNews: a merger with fellow troubled publishers Freedom Communications and Lee Enterprises.
