The maximum severance for Daily News workers is six weeks' pay.
The Daily News and the independently-owned Orange County Register have tried to address their staffing problems creatively with informal coverage-sharing initiatives worked out editor-to-editor rather than at the corporate level.
"We're taking their Angels stories, and they're taking our Dodgers stories," said Brent Hopkins, a veteran reporter and steward of the newspaper's union.
Still, he noted that the Daily News has been forced to cut back its business section to a single page and drastically reduce its coverage of areas outside the core San Fernando Valley.
Consolidation among papers in the Los Angeles area not only has thinned out the press box at baseball games but has affected coverage of government.
Where six or eight reporters once routinely covered the Board of Supervisors and county agencies, now there are only two or three on the county beat, said Joel Bellman, a longtime spokesman for Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.
"I think people are losing any understanding of what local government does and how it figures in people's lives," Bellman said. "There is the paper there, but there is no substantive understanding of the government beat anymore. We simply fade away like the Cheshire Cat."
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thomas.mulligan@latimes.com
james.rainey@latimes.com
