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.
Denver Public Relations Blog 
thanks for this info. it’s just crazy to think about how many jobs were eliminated in this past week alone! wow.
I have heard for the past 3 years that the media will not cover men’s rights issues because “women control 80% of the purchases of goods and services”. I have been told by journalists that the IMBRA law is of no interest to anyone even though it forces men to be background checked just to say hello to women.
But, apparently, the women who control the purchasing power of the USA aren’t saving you folks at the papers now are they?
So let’s at least all forget the nonsense that news reporting has to be done so as to not hurt the feelings of those who control the supposed purchasing power of the nation.
If you want to know why the newspaper business is dying, please give a call to Dmitri Vasillaros of the Pittsburgh Tribune at (412) 380-5637.
Ask him why his editors pulled a story he had written on IMBRA in May 2007, telling him that it was too politically explosive to print (a story about how a law got passed that forces men to be background checked just to meet foreign women online).
He will deny this ever happened of course.
He told me when I guessed the truth: “You know I could never admit something like that”.
Those of you aspiring journalists who are so sad right now should call Dmitri yourselves.
Find out why the attitude behind “You know I could never admit that my publishers are censoring me (and thus you)” has destroyed the US media…and rightfully so.
I cannot wait until Dmitri is liberated by financial conditions so he can reveal the full rabbit hole of censorship that he had to live with in order to get his bi-weekly paycheck.
People will pay for good investigative reporting, not ideologically motivated spin or spin that is obviously geared toward “security moms who make most of the purchases”.
I just paid for $40 per month of Stratfor.com because it goes behind the headlines and the editor has a brain.