Adding Up The Newspaper Cutbacks

How severe have the recent cutbacks in newspaper staffing and operations been? Pretty severe. Over the past few days, I've built a database of the cuts over the past year at the nation's 100 largest newspapers (measured by circulation), and here's what I found:

• More than 6,300 employees at the 100 largest newspapers have lost jobs through buyouts or layoffs in the past year.
• More than half of those cutbacks have come since the beginning of June.
• Nearly two-thirds of the top 100 papers have cut staff in the past year, including all but four of the top 34 (the two New York City tabloids, the Indianapolis Star and the Cleveland Plain Dealer are the exceptions–and Plain Dealer management has threatened imminent cuts).
• Even papers that haven't made recent cuts have sliced staff in the past couple of years–in all, three-quarters of the Top 100 have eliminated jobs in the past two years or so. 
• Twenty-eight of the Top 100 have cut more than 100 jobs in the past year. Seven have cut more than 200 jobs–and those numbers go up significantly if you go back more than a year. 
• The largest cuts have come at the biggest papers, not surprisingly, and at chains. (The worst: 350 jobs lost at the Los Angeles Times since February.) Perhaps the safest place to work is at an independently owned paper in a mid-sized market. So far.
• Virtually all cuts are on the print side–few papers, if any, have cut online staffing, fortunately. 
• Until recently, voluntary buyouts were the usual method of cutting employment–but lately, many cuts have been through outright layoffs.
• Job cuts aren't the only thing going on–papers also are freezing hiring and shrinking through reduction of editions and sections, striking partnerships with other papers, closing bureaus and outsourcing some production (even copy-editing!) overseas.
• More than a handful of papers–and their owners–clearly are in fairly dire financial peril, losing money or having trouble making debt payments. And several papers have been put up for sale.

A lot of this we've known through anecdotal evidence, usually from postings on Romenesko, as the drumbeat of cutbacks has mounted in recent months. But putting it all together in one database shows the totality of the newspaper industry's shrinkage. Seeing all the cuts and other moves in one place is revealing–and more than a bit depressing.

If you'd like to see the gory details, a PDF of the spreadsheet I created can be downloaded here. I'd also recommend a look at Erica Smith's superb PaperCuts site, which plots all of the U.S. newspaper employment cuts since 2007 on a map. I conducted my own research to assemble my database, and our results are slightly different, as is the presentation. A tip of the hat also goes to sites such as Gannett Blog and McClatchy Watch, which are tracking the cutbacks at individual chains and were very helpful. (If I've missed anything–or gotten a number or detail wrong–please let me know so I can update the spreadsheet.)

As dramatic as the numbers are, I'm not sure I got all of the cuts–some have happened very quietly, unreported even by the papers themselves. Some reports have been fuzzy–unspecified numbers–or incomplete, listing only newsroom cuts but not business-side staff reductions, for instance. A lot of smaller cuts are never announced. And more cutbacks are in the offing: The full impacts of major chain-wide downsizings recently announced by A.H. Belo and Media General, for instance, still are unclear, and the results of a few recently announced buyout programs have not yet been announced.

The data shows some interesting patterns. Advance, which recently announced significant cuts (and a threatened sale) at its Newark Star-Ledger, has left other papers in the chain untouched, for example. Ditto Gannett, Hearst and MediaNews, which have made cuts at some papers but not others. This would seem to indicate that chains are targeting papers that have specific problems, and sparing others that may be more profitable. At least for now.

More cuts, no doubt, are still to come. Gannett Blog believes a fresh round is coming at that company any day now, and there are rumblings and rumors of cuts at other companies. Many papers that have not made cuts yet this year probably are going to have to do so soon as revenue continues to deteriorate. And with the structural changes rocking the industry and the ongoing effects of the worsening economy, it seems likely that papers will continue to have to cut costs to maintain their financial equilibrium. As Alan Mutter and others have documented, newspaper revenue still is falling much more quickly than costs are being reduced. That's almost a guarantee of more cuts to come. 

As I've said before, in a year we may look back at this summer's wave of cutbacks as, sadly, a sort of golden era. It's going to get worse. But it's already been very bad.

Comments

[edward]

It's not just the missing bylines, but there are other obvious signs of newspaper cost-cutting. The Sunday Washington Post now appears at my local store on Saturday mornings, and I live just 30 blocks from the Washington Post building, as the crow flies. When this early delivery started, the local Giant supermarket put a green canvas blanket over the stacks so people wouldn't buy the Sunday papers on Saturday. If you lifted the blanket and took one anyway, the cashier would say it wasn't yet meant for sale, and refused to ring it up. Since the nearby CVS sells anything to anyone anytime, the Giant eventually gave up and put the green canvas blanket away. So on Saturdays I have the peculiar option of buying today's news today, or tomorrow's news today. I can tell you, tomorrow's news is often staler than today's.
I hazard a guess this early distribution is to get around paying double-time for Sunday work, but it is leading to Sunday newspapers that read more like magazines than newspapers. If you do that, I think you need to establish a system like the British and have a separate staff dedicated to thinking about the Sunday edition and to make it unique. I loved the British Sunday papers when I lived in Europe, especially as they had a different voice from the weekday editions.
I know this idea is not in the cards for newspapers today, but it goes to a problem I am seeing at other newspapers. For example, you can often read the Sunday New York Times magazine online on Thursday, and some newspapers post their Sunday think pieces in advance. The Post resisted posting its 13-part Chandra series all at once, and the Philadelphia Inquirer is trying some plan to withhold stories from the Web until they are published in print.
This all shows to me that newspapers have yet to think through what they are going to be in the future: print or Web. Sundays are incredibly lucrative for newspaper publishers and they are reluctant to give up that franchise and all those ads. But by their actions, they are degrading their product and ruining its vitality.

[Mark Potts]

Actually, Edward, that's the "bulldog" edition of the Sunday Post, and they've been publishing it for several years. It's intended for sale on Saturday, sort of as a weekend paper. Other papers do something similar. Basically, it's the feature sections and a bunch of wire copy, and the paper is totally redone overnight with live copy. Not real sure why Giant would hide them--they're MEANT to be sold on Saturday! Now, why anybody would buy that paper (coupons? An early look at Parade?) is beyond me, but it's not some sort of distribution error. It's a deliberate attempt to sell a few papers 24 hours early.

[edward]

That's hilarious. This scene at the Giant went on for months because I normally shop on Saturday. Initally, I thought they were just dropping off the inserts for the Sunday papers, but you could sometimes see through the blanket that they were full Sunday papers. I only noticed that the CVS was selling themm when I stopped in the drug store after shopping at Giant.

[Laura Lee Dooley]

This is really useful -- what would be even more helpful is if we had the staffing/operations numbers before the cuts as well.

[Mark Potts]

Laura: I agree, but overall staffing size numbers are very, very hard to come by. They're very rarely released.

[Danny Sanchez]

Nice work Mark.

[None]

43, Cincinnati, it's Enquirer with an E.

[Mark Potts]

Thanks for the catch on the Enquirer. It's fixed. Must've been a reflex action from my Philadelphia Inquirer experience.

[David]

Thanks for your good work. Now please consider doing a similar chart for how many jobs have been ADDED on the online side during the same time period. I think that will create an interesting, fuller picture. Not that it would cause one to cease to worry.

D.

[Ismail]

Great blog, Mark. I'm writing a pseudo-article on how newspapers have had to change quite a bit to adapt to new media such as blogs and CraigsList. Is it alright if I quote some of this article?