Tribune Co says to cut 900 jobs by year end

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) - Tribune Co. on Wednesday said it expects to have cut 900 jobs by year end to trim costs, and will take fourth quarter charges linked to the move.

The job cuts will be mostly in publishing, and will generate severance charges of $40 million to $45 million. In addition, the closing of a Los Angeles Times production facility will result in a non-cash charge of $50 million to $60 million.

The newspaper industry has been grappling with circulation declines, a weak advertising environment, high newsprint costs, and competition from Internet media.

Other newspaper publishers have also been struggling. The New York Times Company said in September it would cut about 4 percent of its work force, or 500 jobs, while Knight Ridder Inc. said it would cut 100 jobs combined at its Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News newspapers.

Tribuen Chief Financial Officer Don Grenesko, speaking at the UBS and CSFB media conferences in New York, said annual expense savings of $55 million to $60 million starting in 2006 will provide a nine-month payback of the cash expenses associated with the restructuring.

Tribune's capital expenditures in 2006 will be about $220 million, Grenesko said, unchanged from 2005. Debt should also be flat.

Chicago-based Tribune also said it wasn't actively involved in bidding for newspaper publisher Knight Ridder .

Knight Ridder, publisher of newspapers including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, put itself on the block in November, under pressure from top shareholders, and speculation has swirled over its fate.

Tribune, which publishes the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and Newsday in New York said instead it plans to focus on organic growth, and working to boost its footprint in its top 30 markets.

Tribune shares closed up 61 cents, or 2 percent, at $31.01, on the New York Stock Exchange.

Newsroom layoffs stifle US journalism-lobbying group
Wed Dec 7, 2005 05:43 PM ET
By Dan Wilchins

NEW YORK, Dec 7 (Reuters) - Political lobbying group MoveOn, best known for efforts to unseat U.S. President George W. Bush in the 2004 election, protested job cuts in American newsrooms on Wednesday, saying it would stifle good journalism.

At a media conference in New York, the group delivered a petition with 45,000 signatures to executives of newspaper publisher Tribune Co.(TRB.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , objecting to the company's layoffs of more than 800 newspaper workers, which will likely include reporters.

Tribune Co.'s papers include the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.

"We're concerned about the ability of newspapers to report news. Good watchdog journalism costs money, but it's what communities rely on newspapers for," Noah Winer, media action director at MoveOn, told Reuters.

U.S. newspaper circulation has been in decline since 1984, according to the Newspaper Association of America, hurt by competition with the Internet and cable TV news and rising distrust of a media dogged by reporting scandals in recent years.

Tribune Co. is just one of a raft of companies to announce newsroom layoffs. In September, The New York Times said it was laying off about 80 reporters, while Knight Ridder's two Philadelphia newspapers, the Inquirer and Daily News, said they would cut 16 percent of their newsroom staff through buyouts or layoffs.

Newspaper employment has broadly been declining since 1990. Since 2001, the number of newspaper reporter jobs has fallen 4 percent to 54,134, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Josh Douglass, a lifelong reader of Tribune Co.'s Newsday, said layoffs at the Long Island, New York-based newspaper could prevent political scandals from coming to light.

"If there are no reporters there to get friendly with people and find out what might be going on behind closed doors, that's a real problem," Douglass said.

Most major U.S. newspapers are owned by publicly traded companies that produce profits for shareholders. Newspaper publishers' shares have fallen this year and increasing use of the Internet as a source of information raises uncertainty about newspapers' future earnings, said John Morton, president of Morton Research Inc. in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Tribune Co. reported a 19 percent rise in operating profits for the first nine months of the year, but that has not been enough to boost its share price.

Weak share prices pressured Knight Ridder, the second largest newspaper publisher in the United States, to say last month it was considering selling itself.

Another lonely mastodon wanders off into the tar pits...

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/print_story.asp?print=1&guid={C8FBEDDD-ECE7-403C-8550-F0D8394D9FDA}&siteid=mktw

Anything but a cheap education
Chicago and journalism lose a storied franchise
By Padraic Cassidy, MarketWatch
Last Update: 3:32 PM ET Dec. 7, 2005

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- The most alert time of the shift was 5:30 a.m., heading back to Chicago police headquarters with a list of the newly dead, the recent arrivals at the medical examiner's office. You're a million times more alert than those sleepy commuters on Eisenhower Expressway.

A handful of calls later, working your way backward, looking for the violent or noteworthy deaths, you've rolled back the tape on someone's last few hours in Chicago, relayed in short paragraphs to the rewrite desk.

A good thing, too, because the sun is now up, the morning rush has started, and the odds are good that a school bus, somewhere, is headed toward an accident. That, too, would require phone calls -- names, ages and addresses of victims, please, with hospitals transported to and conditions -- and a rundown to rewrite.

That was a regular part of my City News Bureau shift, for more than a year, anyway. The esteemed training ground for reporters announced last week it would close its doors for good in January, "a victim of Tribune Co. belt tightening," as the rival Chicago Sun-Times put it. It actually was shut down in 1999, but a version of it was reincarnated as City News Service, wholly owned by the Tribune after the Sun-Times, published by Hollinger International Inc., pulled out of the long-running joint venture.

What began in 1890 as a cooperative news-gathering organization and a feeder system for Chicago's papers is the latest to suffer "reorganization," a code word in the news business for fewer reporters.

In its time, the system produced well-known alumni, including the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, novelist Kurt Vonnegut and the famed columnist Mike Royko.

Without romanticizing the place, it's fair to say anything like it probably won't come around again anytime soon.

All told, I put in 2 1/2 years there, walking in green and walking out of its old headquarters at 35 E. Wacker Dr. hardened and hardier.

Night shift

The overnight shift started at about midnight and finished up at 9 a.m. Every night you'd hope to make quick work of the medical examiner's list, tossing aside, or "cheaping," the suicides, naturals and overdoses -- the cases that didn't merit a story.

The shift also began, literally, with a trudge across the Chicago River on the Michigan Avenue Bridge, rain or shine, or snow, for about five copies each of the early editions of the Sun-Times and the Trib, stacked by the security-guard station in the Tribune Tower lobby --papers filled, no doubt, with more stories to chase, midnight hours be damned.

Later in the morning, the stories would be clipped by the managing editor and glued to the dreaded "Scoop Record" slip, in a point-by-point rundown for the day-shift beat reporters, with details underlined to highlight what the newspapers had printed but that you had neglected.

Somewhere after dropping off the newspapers back at the office and the trip to the medical examiner's were four or five hours at police headquarters spent closing out the afternoon shift's unfinished list of M.E. cases, waiting for extra-alarm fires and monitoring the "dep sheet," the typewritten log of major crime investigations. It was compiled one floor below and menacingly parceled out by police officers who wondered what they'd done wrong to now find themselves across a desk from a nettlesome young reporter at 4 a.m.

On busy nights, you could spend hours driving from story to story, gathering details, then finding a working pay phone on which to call them in.

On slow nights, I perfected my napping position in the press room: feet on the long-empty Tribune desk behind me, chair angled back, head propped up by a dictionary, eyes covered by an opened Fraternal Order of Police handbook, right ear inches away from the scanner.

'Check it out'

What did I learn from all that?

Getting the story was paramount, no matter what the weather or time of day. Saying you'd tried to get it was a worse excuse than no excuse at all. Covering a retirement party for a firefighter by phone, for example, was just another assignment, one on an impossibly long list of daily events to cover, with instructions to file stories on all of them.

When I was moved up to rewrite, did I enjoy riding herd on reporters on the street? Let's be honest: Yes. Because, on the food chain of City News, there was still the managing editor to answer to.

But in the office you missed the things you'd seen while on the street: the jewelry courier who cried when telling the cops how his bag was stolen; the guy who used his belt to undo his handcuffs and climb up in the ceiling, only to be knocked down, piñata-style with a broom handle by the less-than-amused detectives; the cops who got in a fistfight and the one who walked up to me right afterward, with a finger in my face, and yelled, "You didn't see anything!"

The preferred method of crime solving was often to round up the usual suspects and lock them in separate rooms for a few hours. The guilty ones always sleep, the cops said.

There are hundreds of other details, all etched into memory: "Stable" is not a condition -- it's "critical," "poor," "fair" or "good." That's it. Addresses on the North Side street Broadway don't take "St." or "Ave." or "Blvd." or any other suffix, it's just Broadway. Don't ever answer an editor's question with, "I assumed." And you're not getting a new reporter's notebook until you show me your old one, with all the pages used up.

Those last few came from CNB editor Paul Zimbrakos, "Zimbo," already in charge for decades by the time I got there in 1991. Back then he was a strict drill sergeant, unwavering in his convictions on how to get the story and, from my point of view, often cruel. It was Zimbo's tireless hounding of young reporters that inspired what I thought was a better motto than the famous "If your mother says she loves you, check it out" line: City News was a great place to be from, as the longtime Chicago Daily News reporter and City News alum Ed Rooney said. Actually having to work there was another matter.

Rooney had another piece of advice I never forgot: Call yourself a reporter, not a journalist. A journalist, he said, is just a name for an unemployed reporter.

But credit City News with this: Since leaving, I've never felt intimidated by any editor or big-ego reporter, or anyone on the other end of a question, because once you've been through the City News experience, you're tough and resourceful. And you've asked the hardest questions in the most awkward places in the most difficult circumstances.

"Anyone who can't write up a seven-car crash shouldn't be in this business," Jack Germond, the columnist for the Baltimore Sun, told me, before I moved to Chicago.

I wanted that, and I got it, along with some highly pragmatic skills: what questions to ask; how to get a subject to answer your question; and, probably most useful of all, how to go back again and again to get the right answer. "You must be from City News," was a common refrain when I phoned the detectives, again.

My time at City News wasn't anything close to glamorous, but it produced a lifetime of good things: I met my wife, who also put in her time there, and many, many good friends. There was even a short-lived band formed from some CNB-ers, named The Cheap M.E.'s.

May they rest in peace.

Padraic Cassidy is a reporter for MarketWatch in New York.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/12/06/news/fortune500/pluggedin_fortune/index.htm

Investors unsubscribing to old media
Newspaper execs protest that they 'get it.' But the numbers show a business in decline.
December 6, 2005: 6:23 PM EST
By Adam Lashinsky, FORTUNE senior writer

Discounted Advertising in U.S Newspapers
Place your classified or display ad in hundreds or thousands of newspapers at...
www.usnewspapers.com

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - Expect a somber mood Wednesday at the UBS Global Media Conference in New York City: It is newspaper day.

At a confab sprinkled with presentations from executives at cable networks (like Time Warner Cable), advertising agencies (example: Universal McCann), satellite concerns (BSkyB and XM Satellite Radio) and technology hardware providers that make all this media possible (Motorola, for one), Wednesday will be dominated by the biggest newspaper companies in the land.

The chief executives of Tribune, Dow Jones, Gannett, Washington Post, New York Times and McClatchy each will gamely shuffle up to the podium at the Grand Hyatt Hotel and tell investors why newspapers aren't dying. They'll explain how they are embracing the Internet and why the speedy growth in online advertising makes their companies good investments. They'll shout to the rafters that they "get it."

So far, investors aren't buying what they're selling. Share prices of the six aforementioned companies are down an average of 24 percent (not including dividends) this year. Looking at the numbers, it's a wonder the stocks were as high as they were at the end of last year. The story wasn't much better then. (On an up day for the market Tuesday, all these companies except the Washington Post was down.)

Investors, of course, simply are following readers out the door. According to the Newspaper Association of America, daily circulation of U.S. newspapers peaked in 1984 at 63.3 million. Last year, U.S. newspapers sold just 54.6 million copies per day. It's the industry that was in decline before the arrival of the Internet, which has only made things worse.

What must be frustrating for newspapers is that their advertising revenue boomed during the first Internet craze, when technology image advertising and employment classifieds were all the rage. The Internet is booming again, but incremental ad buys are going online, not into dead-tree editions.

The newspaper rallying cry is how online advertising will save them. And there are encouraging signs. E.W. Scripps, whose shares are down only a bit on the year, bought comparison-shopping site Shopzilla. It forecasts that Shopzilla will generate more than $50 million in profits in 2006, or nearly 15 percent of the company's total. The Washington Post company has demonstrated that it understands the power of user-generated content by giving prominent placement to reader comments on its blogs. (A penetrating article from tech-savvy blog Slashdot illuminates this point.)

Nearly every other publisher has made major online purchases to bolster their share of Web advertising. The Dow Jones purchase of Marketwatch and the New York Times acquisition of About.com are two good examples.

But for every example of a newspaper company that's trying to come up with a new Internet application, there's another example of newspapers that continue to charge top dollar for classified listings, even when Craigslist offers an online equivalent for absolutely nothing. (It's tough to compete against a company that doesn't try very hard to make money.)

Yes, Internet advertising is growing, but is it growing fast enough to replace the giant revenues these massive newspaper companies are losing?

Sadly, it's not.

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