Gannett to cut staff at 3 N.J. papers by nearly half

Published: Tuesday, January 11, 2011, 4:46 PM     Updated: Tuesday, January 11, 2011, 5:33 PM

By The Associated Press

Gannett Co. will lay off nearly half its editorial staff at three New Jersey community newspapers by next month and will restructure the remaining positions, according to several staffers.

The affected newspapers are the Courier News of Bridgewater, Daily Record of Parsippany and Home News Tribune of East Brunswick, where a combined 99 staff members will have to apply for 53 remaining positions. Those not kept will be cut loose by Feb. 4.

The company offered to pay staff the difference between their salary and unemployment insurance, a week for every year of service up to 26 weeks, but no less than four, according to a staff member.

The staff members spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the layoffs. They said reporters at the community papers will be assigned to teams to focus on particular topics and more content may be used from the Asbury Park Press.

A memo by Thomas M. Donovan, president and publisher of New Jersey Press Media Solutions — a consortium of Gannett’s four northern New Jersey newspapers — was made available to staff Monday explaining the process.

In an e-mailed statement to the Associated Press on Tuesday, Donovan said the changes would help the company “better focus” its resources on local and breaking news coverage.

“We are very committed to serving our customers here and by leveraging the regional reporting capabilities of our New Jersey operations, we will create greater efficiencies to provide the best possible journalism, zeroing in on the topics our readers care most about on the platforms they prefer,” Donovan wrote.

Gannett has been looking to rebound from a prolonged slump that has triggered a succession of layoffs in recent years.

Since December 2008, Gannett eliminated more than 300 full-time and about 20 part-time positions at its six New Jersey newspapers. It consolidated copy editing and page production operations for four New Jersey newspapers to The Asbury Park Press offices in Neptune in April 2009.

McLean, Va.-based Gannett is the country’s biggest newspaper publisher, with more than 80 community newspapers nationwide.

Last week Gannett told workers they will have to take a week off without pay to avoid more layoffs as revenue continues to fall in the first quarter.

Gannett’s third-quarter net income climbed to $101.4 million, or 42 cents per share, in the three months ended Sept. 26. That’s up from $73.8 million, or 31 cents per share, a year earlier.

Wall Street Journal    SEPTEMBER 9, 2010

As Ratings Slump, CNN Shifts Focus to New Faces

By SHIRA OVIDE And SAM SCHECHNER

 CNN, rebooting in a bid to revive its slumping ratings, officially tapped a former British tabloid editor to take over its flagship prime-time show.

Piers Morgan, who in recent years has reinvented himself as a TV interviewer and judge on reality shows like “America’s Got Talent,” will inherit the cable-news network’s nightly interview program from Larry King in January. The changing of the guard in one of the most visible jobs in television news comes as rapidly changing viewing habits and escalating financial pressures are raising questions about the future of the business.

The audience for the type of national evening news broadcasts once anchored by industry icons like Walter Cronkite is aging and shrinking, and a growing number of Americans prefer to get their news from the Web or via Twitter, rather than TV.

Broadcast-news operations have responded by slashing their work forces. And David Westin, the longtime head of Walt Disney Co.’s ABC News, announced his departure just this week, leaving a new hand to chart the news operation’s course.

Meanwhile, cable-news outlets, such as Fox News and MSNBC, have packed their evening lineups with opinionated hosts who chew over the news. Fox News is a unit of News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

“When CNN started, you could put any person—attractive, not attractive, interesting, not interesting—on the air because he was telling you something new,” said Richard C. Wald, a former top news executive at ABC and General Electric Co.’s NBC. “Now the game has changed, and they have to change with the game.”

In an effort to address the challenges facing cable and broadcast news, CNN has had on-and-off talks about combining with the news operations of CBS Corp. or ABC. Those discussions aren’t active right now, however, according to people familiar with the matter.

CNN, a unit of Time Warner Inc., has been struggling to turn around its ratings. This year, 38% fewer people watched CNN during the key hours of 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time than they did a year earlier, according to Nielsen Co. data through Aug. 15. Rival cable-news channels Fox News, MSNBC and HLN, CNN’s sister network, also are posting lower prime-time ratings, but their declines have been less dramatic.

CNN has responded to the falloff in its audience by replacing the hosts of three of its four hours of evening shows, adding uncharacteristic dashes of celebrity such as Mr. Morgan and former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

The network’s signature product, however, remains straight journalism, its executives say.

Jonathan Klein, president of CNN/U.S., said CNN could draw a bigger and broader audience by spotlighting little-known subjects, and by more aggressively covering big events like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the Haiti earthquake. Mr. Klein disputed some critics’ concerns that CNN can’t compete with opinion-oriented shows on other cable-news channels.

“In a nation of 300 million, you can’t draw that conclusion because two million people tune into one particular type of programming,” he said. “I think you ought to ask, ‘Where are the other 298 million?’ ”

Though his ratings have recently sagged, Mr. King’s nightly show remains one of the most-watched on the network. This year through June, the program generated $30.8 million in advertising sales, up about 8% from a year earlier but less than its $53.4 million in ad sales in 2008, according to Kantar Media, a WPP PLC unit that tracks ad spending. Mr. King averaged about 661,000 viewers from the beginning of the year through Aug. 15, according to Nielsen, down from an average of about 1.1 million viewers in 2007.

With the 45-year-old Mr. Morgan, CNN is getting a fresh face but sticking with the familiar question-and-answer format Mr. King, 76, has used for 25 years. In his native Britain, Mr. Morgan’s popular interview programs, including “Piers Morgan’s Life Stories,” have helped vault him to celebrity status.

That has opened a second career for Mr. Morgan, who edited Britain’s Daily Mirror for a decade until he was fired in 2004 for unwittingly running what the newspaper later acknowledged were fake photographs of alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners by British military forces.

As an editor, he was known for his sometimes invasive news-gathering tactics, telling The Wall Street Journal in 1999 that he had “no problem” using entrapment to get stories “if it is overtly in the public interest.”

Mr. Morgan said Wednesday that he had been battle-hardened by the fiercely competitive British newspaper market, and he expected to be a success in his new post. “I’ve only ever been No. 1 on American TV and everything I’ve done. Why should it change now?” he said in an interview.

CNN’s hiring of Mr. Morgan, along with its choice of Mr. Spitzer to co-host a political show with columnist Kathleen Parker that starts in October, has led some critics to question whether the network is opting for buzz over credible news and analysis.

However, Mr. Klein said CNN is “complementing” its regular news reporting with “fearless journalists like Piers Morgan and Kathleen Parker and aggressive, assertive no-prisoners questioners like Eliot Spitzer.”

Some of CNN’s previous programming overhauls haven’t been successful. Veteran political journalist John King has averaged about 442,000 viewers since he took over a 7 p.m. Eastern time show in March, according to Nielsen data through Aug. 15. In the same period last year, predecessor Lou Dobbs drew 726,000 viewers on average.

Amid the hand-wringing about CNN, Time Warner has begun giving the public a peek at the network’s finances. CNN, HLN, CNN.com and the company’s other world-wide news operations generated roughly $500 million last year in adjusted operating income, with a compound annual growth rate of 23% from 2003 to 2009. Overall, Time Warner’s cable-TV networks, including CNN and entertainment networks TNT, TBS and HBO, generated $4 billion in 2009 adjusted operating income, about two-thirds of the company’s total.

CNN executives have said repeatedly that the network’s financial health is best served by providing what they say is the only real journalism in cable news. “We’re the only credible, non-partisan voice left,” CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton said at an advertiser presentation this spring.

Newsday hiring to boost coverage

by Claude Solnik
Published: August 11, 2010
After laying off dozens of employees during the past several years to cut costs, Newsday is planning on hiring 37 employees in a move to boost local print and online coverage.

The Melville-based publication, in an internal memo issued today and obtained by LIBN, stated it plans to hire 34 journalists as part of the print and online expansion. It also plans to hire three staffers to work with its editorial board.

The company expects to add 2,600 more pages of news and opinion annually and to ramp up its local online content.

The memo, issued by Editor in Chief and Executive Vice President in charge of Digital Media Debby Krenek, marks a major turnaround for the publication, which had been cutting back for years.

Cablevision has cut 85 jobs or about 4 percent of Newsday’s staff since acquiring the publication from Tribune Co. in 2008.

But Krenek said in the two-page memo the firm is making a “significant investment in people and pages to provide more and stronger coverage for Long Islanders.”

Newsday plans to hire town reporters as it doubles the number of Long Island news pages in the publication.

It also plans to bring on board community journalists who Krenek said will “hit Long Island’s streets in search of local features and personalities” as the publicationlaunches “hundreds of hyper-local pages” later this month.

http://libn.com/blog/2010/08/11/newsday-hiring-to-boost-coverage/