Late last month, New York Times Co. announced it would cut 500 employees, including 45 in the New York Times newsroom and 35 in the editorial operation at the Boston Globe.
Bill Keller, the Times' executive editor, said that an earlier round of cuts already had left him without "a lot of slack."
"Like the rest of you, I found the recent spate of retirement parties more saddening than celebratory," Keller said in a memo to his staff, which numbers about 1,200, "both for the obvious personal reasons and because they represented a sapping of our collective wisdom and experience."
New York Times Co. stock has dropped 28% for the year and reached its lowest levels since 1999. It closed Friday at $28.92, up 12 cents.
Reporter Richard Perez-Pena said a mood of uncertainty hung over the paper.
"None of us really knows whether people are going to be buying newspapers in 20 years," said Perez-Pena, who writes about healthcare, science and news in the New York area.
"And nobody knows whether the industry is going to find a way to pay for itself on the Internet."
Another of the newspaper's reporters recalls a conversation with colleagues also in their 30s in which they realized, with "serious consternation," that "few people who are from our generation are subscribing to this paper."
The bad news at the New York Times came the same day that Knight-Ridder announced the cuts at the Inquirer and the elimination of 25 jobs at the Philadelphia Daily News, a sister publication.
Days later, Knight-Ridder said that 52 editorial positions at the San Jose Mercury News would also have to go. That would bring the paper's news staff to 280, a 30% reduction from its peak four years ago at the height of the tech boom.
At the San Francisco Chronicle, a recent buyout offer was designed to trim 120 jobs, including some outside the editorial staff. That's about a 14% reduction in the paper's white-collar workforce, according to union representatives.
The Chronicle's parent, privately held Hearst Corp., simply wants to get the paper back into the black. The Chronicle has been consistently losing money since Hearst agreed to buy it in 1999. Last year, losses totaled more than $60 million.
The ubiquitous buyout offers sometimes come as welcome news to veteran newspeople, who often can get as much as two years' salary to move up retirement dates that are already fast approaching.
But the cutbacks have meant anxious times for mid-career journalists like Mario Cattabiani, 40, who worked for years to land his prestigious job covering politics and the Pennsylvania statehouse for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
His relative lack of seniority has left Cattabiani a possible target of the impending staff cuts, leaving him sleepless some nights and his wife occasionally in tears.
"It's hard just not knowing," said Cattabiani, adding that the thought of leaving a career he loves "has made me sick to my stomach."
