Although specialized outfits such as Bloomberg News in business and TMZ in celebrity news have sprung up profitably at the same time that newspapers have been cutting back, their turf is narrow.
Sam Zell, chief executive of Chicago-based Tribune Co., corporate parent of The Times, KTLA-TV Channel 5, the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers and TV stations across the country, visited The Times' Washington bureau Tuesday to deliver a message about priorities to the news staff there. In a fractious meeting, Zell said The Times had many more newspeople in Washington than in Orange County and that those numbers ought to be reversed. As for foreign news, Zell has said in other forums that journalists tend to like it more than readers do.
If Zell's point is that the real money is in local news, the recent experience of the Daily News, the Orange County Register and the regional dailies ringing the Bay Area -- all more locally oriented than The Times -- has been a discouraging counter example. Their inability to keep ad revenue from falling at double-digit percentages year over year has led to staff reductions that further hobble local news coverage.
The Mercury News is part of the Bay Area News Group, a chain of 23 daily and 12 weekly newspapers owned by Denver-based MediaNews Group, which also owns the Daily News, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, the Torrance-based Daily Breeze and other papers in Southern California. MediaNews claims total paid daily circulation in California of 1.1 million, making it the state's biggest news operation in that category.
At the Bay Area News Group-East Bay, which includes the Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times, all but a handful of the approximately 1,100 employees have been offered a voluntary buyout with a maximum of six months' pay. The group hasn't announced how many staff reductions it wants to achieve, but if it can't reach its target through voluntary buyouts, it will resort to layoffs that come with a maximum of only three months' severance.
The Times' buyout program -- which grants one week's pay per six months of service, up to a maximum of 52 weeks -- also has a stick. The severance is identical for buyouts and layoffs, but Publisher David D. Hiller said that if staff reductions were necessary next year, severance would be half this year's amount. The reductions will bring the newsroom head count to below 850 from about 875 now. At its peak about a decade ago, the newsroom had more than 1,200 employees.
