At the San Jose Mercury News, reporters have been instructed to wait at home on the morning of March 7. If they don't get a phone call by 10 a.m. telling them that they've lost their jobs, they should head to work.
Long the oracle of Silicon Valley technology and the go-to spot for government and community news in Santa Clara County, the Mercury News has pared back coverage on several fronts as its news staff has shrunk to about 200 from twice that number in 1999.
What's happening in San Jose is being repeated to a greater or lesser degree across California. Buyouts and layoffs are being imposed at newspapers all over the country, of course, but California is especially vulnerable because of the severity of its real estate downturn. Along with real estate, advertising in related categories such as home furnishings, hardware and even big-box electronics retailing has been slowing, newspaper executives say.
Today, the Los Angeles Daily News will say goodbye to 22 more editors and reporters, paring its newsroom to 100 people from nearly twice that many a few years ago. Editor Ron Kaye gave the news in a tearful address to his staff Wednesday.
Employees at The Times have until 3 p.m. Monday to respond to a voluntary buyout offer aimed at eliminating 100 to 150 jobs, 40 to 50 of them in the newsroom. If not enough people volunteer, layoffs will make up the balance.
Experts say the American appetite for news is as strong as ever. Even big-city papers such as The Times that have suffered sharp declines in print circulation in recent years have seen their total audiences grow, when viewers of their Internet sites are included. Political candidates, corporations, even churches find that they can lure more traffic to their websites by slapping on a news "ticker" or a digest of wire-service stories.
The problem is that few news organizations have yet found a way to make the kind of money online that they had generated from print.
"Citizen journalists" -- unpaid volunteers, mainly -- have stepped into the breach here and there, but research by the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that most of what they are producing is commentary rather than eyewitness accounts of news events or meat-and-potatoes coverage of school board meetings and the like.
"If a newspaper reduces staff by 20%, some portion of that community is going to be operating in the shadows in a way it was not before," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of Project for Excellence.
