Crain's Chicago Business:
(Crain's) -- The Chicago Tribune plans to cut another 20% of its newsroom staff in yet another bid to reduce expenses amid continuing advertising declines.
Staffers were told of the impending layoffs last week, according to three people who attended a meeting on the topic. The cuts will take place over the next several weeks, the sources said.
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Next time it'll be 50% staff cuts.
Slick Sammy strikes again....
Cut expenses by 50% and the newsroom for 20%...How'
They have a newsroom? Now that's news.
so they cut 20% of what they are supposed to be selling. 20% of their public value.
I saw they cleared out that stupid "Freedom Museum" and are now trying to rent out the bottom floor again.
That was probably their last hurrah at trying to make Bush into a hero.
Instead of newsroom personnel, why not the sales staff? They make more money that editorial folks, and if this about saving money, and not about, oh, say, investigative reporting embarrassing advertisers it makes more sense to lay off sales people.
That would force them to cut back on their drinking tabs around town, win win..
Zell has treated the newspapers under his stewardship like widgets. He's destroyed the LA TImes, and is on the way, apparently, to wrecking the Tribune's flagship paper, too.
It's obvious print media is on the way out. The problem is people still have to get paid to produce the fact-based and fact-checking reporting required by our democracy. We cannot make it on puff pieces, press releases, gossip columns and advertorials.
You kidding?
Zell was just the sucker who bought the ship while it was going down.
He's been doing nothing but bailing water since he got in.
And no matter what he does, it will be too late.
Slick Sam raised the debt by billions with no way to pay it off. He over bought and is ruining a large segment of the newspaper business.
Will the Trib fold before the LA Times or Chicagoland's other blute folds? No, I don't mean the CHICAGO DEFENDER; that's a paper with a loyal reader base & the Defender has always served the community well. The Defender is very good at what it does.
But Sam Zell isn't a publisher. He's into real estate. Now, the SUN-TIMES-parole Conrad Black & sentence to 7 years of community service turning the SUN-TIMES into a newspaper.
What happens to the Tribs other papers? Most of them are in 1 paper towns. If they fold, the town doesn't have a blute. The commercial real estate bubble is going to break soon. Sam's leveraged loans won't be repaid, ever. There are going to be a lot more derelect buildings in 1 paper towns. The sites of the derelect building will become parking lots after being crack houses & squats. If people stop using cars-the sites will become informal, illegal dumps.
Hope John Kass is the 1st to go, thinks he's Royko, but not even fit to shine Royko's boots.
Funny watching him standing outside and smoking all the time.
The Trib's just 'right-sizing' itself to fit its new intellectual depth: the Twitterbune. Lifestyle news that 140 character deep.
The end is near.... bye bye print media...
http://pit
And nothing of value was lost.
The mastodon is stuck in the tarpit and is going down...
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Crain's Chicago Business | Ann Saphir | 04/13/09