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Newsday journalists have sent a letter to parent Tribune Co., calling for an end to staff reductions and for more resources devoted to covering news on Long Island and abroad. The letter, signed by 112 employees of the 411 who work in the editorial department, criticized Tribune for cutting the newsroom staff by about one third since buying Newsday in 2000. It also said the ability to provide readers with a comprehensive news report and investigative stories had been undermined by cuts in the workforce and newsprint. “Tribune has damaged Newsday as an instrument of public information and accountability and,...

NEW YORK Several dozen Newsday employees are planning to send a protest letter to Tribune Company Chairman Dennis FitzSimons that blasts the corporate parent for what they see as "throttling Newsday's individuality" through bureau staff cuts, and seeking instead to "inflate the corporate profit margin." A draft of the letter, a copy of which was obtained by E&P, states in part, "In its pursuit of maximum profits, Tribune has cut Newsday's news staff by 33 percent and slashed our Washington bureau. Amid wars and crises abroad, it has ordered our foreign bureaus closed. It has halved our staffs covering national...

A former top CIA official said Thursday that despite the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iraq is likely to be looking for weapons of mass destruction within the next five to 10 years. Paul Pillar, who until last year was in charge of intelligence assessments for the Middle East, said the CIA warned the Bush administration before the Iraq invasion in 2003 that a change of regimes would not necessarily solve any WMD problem. In a speech at the Middle East Institute here, Pillar said Iraqis live in "a dangerous neighborhood," with rival countries pursuing weapons of mass destruction. So the...

Published: August 16, 2006 11:45 AM ET NEW YORK The Audit Bureau of Circulations today released its fourth and final audit on Newsday since the Melville, N.Y. paper has been under censure. For the six-month period ending September 2005, daily circulation at the paper dropped 5.9% to 431,975 copies and Sunday circ slipped 4.8% to 496,392 compared to the September 2004 period. For the past two years, Newsday has been hobbled since it was revealed in June 2004 the paper inflated circulation by hundreds of thousands of copies. The Tribune-owned paper has since tried to regain favor with advertisers --...

Former Newsday publisher Robert Johnson faces up to 30 years in prison after pleading guilty yesterday to collecting kiddie porn on his office computer and then trying to destroy the evidence......60-year-old married father of two grown children, admitted he downloaded at least two child-pornography movie files - including one called "Real Child Rape" - in the headquarters of a Manhattan financial publishing firm where he was CEO..... When ICE began to go after the estimated 200 U.S. clients of a Belarus-based porn-distribution firm, they found one was Johnson.......beginning around April 2002 Johnson used his office computer to access child-porn Web...

Dissident group says will continue efforts for sale or breakup of company... Tribune Co. shares gained ground Tuesday, rising as the media company that's been working to revamp operations amid shareholder unrest announced the results of a Dutch tender auction. Analysts said any gains could prove short lived, however. Chicago-based Tribune Co said that about 45 million, or 15%, of its common shares were tendered and that it expects to buy the shares at a price of $32.50 each. The number of shares tendered came in 8 million short of the maximum that the company had initially authorized in the...

WASHINGTON -- Senate Democrats, their party's last line of defense against GOP hegemony in Washington, are coming off their best week since handing over control of their chamber to Republicans three years ago. Republicans outnumber Democrats in the upper house by a solid 55-to-45 margin, but seldom have those numbers seemed less meaningful than in the recent weeks, when Democrats have frustrated, derailed and detonated key elements of the GOP legislative agenda. "The Democrats are starting to draw blood and cause some pain for the Republicans," said Jennifer Duffy, who monitors the Senate for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "They...

Tribune Co. on Friday said November revenue fell 3.9 percent as advertising sales declined and publishing revenue was hurt by the impact of Hurricane Wilma in Florida. The publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Newsday said total monthly revenue fell to $437 million from $455 million last year. Publishing revenue slid 2.7 percent to $330 million, with Hurricane Wilma contributing about $4 million of the decline. Ad revenue fell 2.4 percent to $263 million from $269 million a year earlier. Tribune said revenue from retail ads declined 3.3 percent and national ad revenue dropped 6 percent, while...

NEW YORK Newsday in Melville, N.Y., yesterday dismissed 72 employees and announced that 40 additional vacant jobs will be eliminated. Meanwhile, another Tribune Co. paper, The Morning-Call in Allentown, Pa., said it will end publication of Chronicle Newspapers, its chain of 11 weekly community papers, as part of cost-cutting measures. The Allentown newspaper will permanently lay off about 5 % percent of its workers, spokeswoman Vicki Mayk said, or almost 50 of The Morning Call's work force of 950. At Newsday, no "news gathering personnel" were affected by yesterday's announcement, according to a memo to employees from publisher Timothy P....

NEW YORK Next to feel the knife in the current round of Tribune Co. job cuts--which in recent days have already hit papers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Orlando and Hartford--will be 'Newsday," in Melville, N.Y. A memo written Friday by Publisher Timothy P. Knight and posted today at the Romenesko site at www.poynter.org, saves the worst for last, revealing that "as we move through the process of re-organizing ourselves to meet our goals, we need to make very difficult decisions about how we allocate resources. This includes making staff reductions in union and non-union areas. We will be finalizing...

The two Ecuadorean day laborers were standing outside the East Hampton train station yesterday at 7:15 a.m. hoping for a daily job in construction, landscaping, painting or anything. But thanks to an aggressive campaign by the East Hampton Village Police Department aimed at cracking down on undocumented workers and the people who hire them, they were out of luck.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) finally released today Newsday's six-month audit ending March 30, 2005. Total daily circulation for the paper is 439,708, down 8.8% from the same period last year. Sunday circulation is 506,177, down 6.6%. The paper is still undergoing censure from ABC for misstating circulation numbers in the recent past. Under that provision, Newsday is not included in the FAS-FAX report for one year; additionally the paper must undergo audits twice a year for two years. The March 2005 numbers show a dip from ABC's recent audit of the March 2004 numbers. Timothy Knight, publisher of...

This is a review of the performance of George W. Bush in tight times in this nation. It might explain the single solitary most catastrophic collapse of American government in all of our times. Mark ye well. This was the week when we turned a major American city into Haiti, and racism put its hand out and started to choke a nation, and it may not let go. With the water coming from the sky and the bottom of the sea, driving with such ferocity that a major American city, New Orleans, followed its face into the water, George W....

Newsday will shrink the staff of its New York City edition by more than half in the face of weak circulation as it cuts 45 newsroom jobs at the Long Island-based newspaper overall, it announced yesterday. Top editors said a scandal over inflated circulation that has been plaguing Newsday made it difficult for them to argue against drastically scaling back the New York edition, especially as large newspaper chains such as Newsday parent Tribune Co. struggle to improve profits. A city desk staff of 45 will be cut to 20 or fewer, including perhaps 12 reporters, Newsday top editor John...

Bush tackles historical sagas on vacation CRAWFORD, Texas — Gas prices are climbing, motorists are fuming, President Bush is vacationing with a book about the history of salt. There may be a connection. Bush is reading "Salt: A World History" by Kurlansky, chronicling the rise and fall of the world's [formerly] most strategic commodity. The other books are "Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar" by Radzinsky and "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History" by Barry. The analogies between salt and oil are striking. For most of history, salt was synonymous with wealth. It established...

KINK STINK: Child-porn suspect and ex-Board of Regents member Robert Johnson...... Photo: Paul Martinka Robert Johnson was once the respected former publisher of Newsday and a member of the state Board of Regents — but his suave exterior belied his penchant for child pornography........ Johnson — a married father of two ......was yesterday slapped with federal child-porn charges that could get him up to 50 years in prison. The indictment alleges the 59-year-old prowled the Web from his office computer under the names "jobobo55" and "robjob714" — and downloaded sickening kiddie-porn films with names such as "real child rape."...

Federal agents made the first arrests Wednesday in Newsday's yearlong circulation scandal, charging that three former officials at Newsday and its sister publication Hoy were involved in schemes to inflate the publications' circulations, costing advertisers millions of dollars. Investigators detailed some of the methods used to inflate the number of copies reported sold, including dumping papers, arranging for phony sales by street hawkers to fool auditors and coaching distribution agents to lie to auditors.

Today, June 14, 2005, the date of Marie Cocco's article on "the Kerry smear," is the 38th anniversary of the day my husband, Kevin McManus, of Babylon, Long Island, was shot down over Hanoi and then imprisoned for six years. During those six years, then-Lt. John Kerry, USN, served his near-four-month combat tour in South Vietnam with other Swiftees, nearly all of whom served for at least a year (many for longer than that); and returned to the United States where in early 1970 still-Lt. Kerry (now USNR), having run unsuccessfully for Congress in the Massachusetts Fourth District, decided he'd...

NEW YORK Federal agents arrested three former Newsday circulation managers Wednesday. Edward Smith and Robert Garcia were apprehended in New York, and Richard Czark was arrested in South Carolina. All three were charged with criminal fraud in connection to the circulation scandals at Newsday and Hoy. Smith was circulation manager at Newsday until 2002, when he retired. From 2002 to 2004 he served as a consultant to both Newsday and Hoy as an Audit Bureau of Circulations liaison. Garcia and Czark were fired from Newsday in September 2004. Garcia was the circulation manager for New York City and distribution manager...

May 3, 2005 — Shareholders have filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Tribune Co. and some of its officers, alleging circulation fraud that affected the Chicago-based media company's financial results, attorneys announced Tuesday. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago, contends Tribune violated the Securities and Exchange Act by intentionally overstating circulation at "numerous" newspapers, including Newsday and Tribune's Spanish-language newspaper Hoy, which meant the papers could charge more for advertising. Also named as defendants were Tribune chairman Dennis J. FitzSimons, senior vice president for finance Donald C. Grenesko and retired president of Tribune Publishing Jack Fuller, according...