Newspaper Newsroom Investment

Among the most noteworthy staff cuts of 2005:

*The Philadelphia Inquirer eliminated 75 jobs and its smaller sister paper, the Daily News, 25, largely through buyouts of veteran reporters and editors. At the same time, its parent, Knight Ridder, ordered a reduction of 52 newsroom positions at the San Jose Mercury News. The Inquirer’s editor, Amanda Bennett, was widely quoted as saying the directive had made her literally sick to her stomach. But it was an occasion, she said, to reinvent the paper, jettisoning boring, dutiful meeting stories, trying to keep the best of investigative work and producing a “vibrant” daily report.2

*Nearly all Tribune papers trimmed their newsroom staffs. The Los Angeles Times cut 85 from a staff of roughly 1,000 (along the way precipitating the resignation of its esteemed editor, John Carroll). Newsday, still recovering from a nearly 20% overstatement of circulation, decimated its New York City staff, eliminating 45 news positions. Those were not the first cuts at either paper.3

The Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Allentown Morning Call and Newport News Press all announced smaller cuts near the end of the year.4

*The New York Times announced it was eliminating 45 newsroom jobs, after shedding 12 earlier in the year, a relatively modest hit on a staff of roughly 1,200 that had grown in 2004. The company’s Boston Globe took a proportionately bigger cut, losing 35 editorial positions out of 400.5

*The Dallas Morning News, like Newsday caught in a major circulation-padding scandal, trimmed more than 65 newsroom positions, just over 10%, at the end of 2004 and early in 2005.6

*The San Francisco Chronicle has shrunk its news staff from 575 to 440 since 2000. More cuts may well be on the way because the paper is one of a handful of dailies actually losing money.7

*The St. Louis Post Dispatch, under new management by Lee, eliminated 41 jobs through buyouts. Editor Ellen Soeteber resigned in protest.8

And that by no means exhausts the list.9

If in scope the cuts are worrisome but less than apocalyptic, what do they imply about the future? If there are patterns to the reductions, they are a pretty tight fit to companies and markets under the gun financially. Tribune and Knight Ridder papers are heavily represented (and the New York Times Co., less conspicuously, has been turning in disappointing revenue and earnings results, too).

Another message seems to be that times are especially tough in the biggest metro markets. Some, like Philadelphia , Chicago and Washington have heightened competition from an assortment of free dailies. The L.A. Times’s persistent circulation and advertising woes are a little more mysterious — perhaps a product of the area’s sprawl and unusual ethnic diversity.10 The Times also hurt itself, insiders tell us, with deep cuts to circulation promotion and by actually pulling out of distant suburbs.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors releases staffing data at its annual April convention, compiled as of the end of the year. That will be the test of whether the wave of cutting spread to mid-sized and smaller papers where reductions are measured in single digits and typically not announced. Business results have been better at mid-sized and small papers; Media General and Lee, whose properties are typically in that category, had the best results among public companies in 2005, suggesting that cuts in the sector would be more modest.

The 30 papers with circulation of 250,000 and above, where announced cuts in 2005 were focused, account for about a quarter of the full-time news professionals in the industry.11 Our guess is that unannounced cuts from smaller papers will roughly equal the 600 to 700 that were announced.

But we do know the cutting is not done, since 2006 will mark the completion of some of the staff reduction programs announced in 2005.

The pattern the industry has followed in recent years is that newsroom cutbacks during hard times are not followed by reinvesting during better times .