The publisher of three of the San Francisco Bay area’s largest daily newspapers is offering employees buyouts and bracing them for layoffs in another blow to the struggling newspaper industry.
The Bay Area News Group publishes the San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times and other daily and weekly newspapers in the region.
The Mercury News is offering nearly 200 non-union employees buyouts but will also need to lay off an unspecified number of union workers, its publisher and editor told the staff in a newsroom meeting on Tuesday.
”The next 18 months are going to be kind of rocky,” said Mac Tully, who became publisher less than two weeks ago.
The Mercury News has about 900 employees.
Meanwhile, the Bay Area News Group-East Bay, which includes the Tribune, the Times and 14 other newspapers, offered all 1 100 of its employees the chance to apply for buyouts. They will have about two weeks to decide if they wish to apply. If not enough people take the offer, layoffs would follow, probably sometime in March.
Executives declined to specify a target number of staff reductions.
The Mercury News blamed plunging advertising revenues, and tough economic times in Silicon Valley and throughout the state and US, for the cuts. The newspaper already laid off 31 employees last July, around the same time that it accepted 15 resignations.
”The fact that the country is in a recession, particularly the coasts, has really hurt,” Tully said.
Members of the Newspaper Guild said they were not surprised by the announcement.
”We’ve been through this a number of times,” said Mark Schwanhausser, a business reporter who has worked at the Mercury News for 25 years. ”You just wonder when it’s all going to end. The problem is nobody knows where the bottom of this is.”
John Armstrong, the president and publisher of Bay Area News Group-East Bay, blamed ”very tough times of historic proportion” for across-the-board cuts at those newspapers.
Bay Area News Group is majority owned by Denver-based MediaNews Group. – Sapa-AP