Newspaper Newsroom Investment

A firm total for 2005 was expected by April 2006. But with between 600 and 700 newsroom job cuts announced, mostly at large papers, our estimate is that the industry’s total loss will be roughly twice that, somewhere between 1,250 and 1,500. As noted, that is roughly the same percentages as the year-to-year circulation losses through September 2005 — 2.5% to 3.1%.

While the job losses are large, it is probably overly dramatic to suggest the industry is somehow now crippled. Newspapers remain far and away the largest news organizations in their communities.

The week in September when 300 of those cuts were announced, one highly respected retired publisher commented, “Well, I don’t think the sky is falling in.” The industry would still field more than 52,000 full-time professionals gathering, writing and editing the news in 2006.

Hard-hit papers like the Dallas Morning News and Philadelphia Inquirer retained news staffs of 400-plus. Yet readers of those papers may well feel they can clearly see the difference in the product. As the editor of one Knight Ridder paper put it in a private conversation, “I think we have reached the bone.” Said another, about a different paper in the chain, “I think we hit it several years ago.”

Whatever one thinks of the cuts, the news-investment trend in 2005 and looking out to 2006, like so many trends in the industry, was downward. Some reduction programs spilled over into the new year, and fresh cuts were likely.

What’s more, they come after job losses in earlier years. After a “rally” of 300 new hires in 2002, the industry lost 500 jobs in 2003 and another 100 in 2004, according to data from ASNE. If our estimates are right, newspapers were heading into 2006 down 3,500 to 3,800 newsroom professionals from 2000, when the industry hit its near-historic peak in employment of 56,400.¹