Gannett’s newspaper division President Bob Dickey announced Tuesday that the company’s newspaper outlets will lay off 700 employees.
“While we have sought many ways to reduce costs, I regret to tell you that we will not be able to avoid layoffs. Accordingly, approximately 700 employees … or about 2% of our company’s overall workforce, will be let go. Publishers will notify people today and we will make every effort to reach everyone by the end of day,” Dickey wrote Tuesday, according to a memo obtained by Gannett Blog, which noted it is the largest mass layoff by the company since July 2009 and the fourth such layoff in three years.
Among the newspaper employees reportedly targeted for such layoffs: About a dozen of the Cincinnati Enquirer’s employees, 62 employees at the Indianapolis Star and 50 from the Louisville Courier-Journal. Gannett Blog is also tallying the layoffs by property in an online spreadsheet, which as of 7 p.m. ET showed the Star as the hardest-hit paper.
The Star’s newsroom is just one example of the newspaper industry’s bleeding of jobs: It now has 136 editorial employees, down from 230 in 2007, according to the Indianapolis Business Journal.
Gannett’s stock price rose about 3 percent on the news, closing at just over $14 per share. The publicly traded company still earns a profit -- about $90 million in the first quarter of 2011, though those numbers are down from 2010. Gannett, which employs more than 32,000 people, also owns TV stations (including D.C.’s WUSA), USA Today and CareerBuilder.com. The layoffs did not affect USA Today.
Source: http://feeds.politico.com/click.phdo?i=a61cf6b7b8ba2a448c1913450e8f1093
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