Washington Post to Cut 80 Newsroom Jobs - New York Times

Washington Post to Cut 80 Newsroom Jobs - New York TimesMarch 11, 2006
Washington Post to Cut 80 Newsroom Jobs
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

The Washington Post is planning to cut about 80 jobs, or about 9 percent of its newsroom, over the next year, joining a roll call of major American newspapers reducing editorial positions as the industry continues to face a sluggish advertising environment and declining circulation.

"During the past year newspaper revenues have flattened while expenses — particularly newsprint — have continued to rise," Boisfeuillet Jones Jr., the paper's publisher, said in a memo to the staff. Mr. Jones said the cuts would come through buyouts and attrition, not layoffs.

The Post last offered buyouts in late 2003, when it reduced its staff by 7 percent. More people than expected took the buyout, leaving the paper short-staffed and prompting it to rehire, on a temporary contract basis, more than a dozen of the 54 people who had just left.

Leonard Downie Jr., the Post's executive editor, said in an interview that the goal of the latest cuts was to operate more efficiently.

At the same time, the paper wants its journalists to feed more to the newspaper's other outlets, including its Web site, blogs, online chats, television appearances and its new radio news station, which is to start at the end of the month.

"We're not anywhere near maximizing what we can do in our multimedia presentations," Mr. Downie said. "We're trying to have us all think in a different way, not that we're newspaper people but journalists."

The multimedia demands already have some journalists worried about being stretched too thin to provide material for the paper, from which the spinoffs derive.

"They want us to spend more and more time supporting these other platforms but they are all derivative of the reporting we're doing for the paper," said Rick Weiss, a science reporter at The Post and co-chairman for the Post unit of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. "If we don't dredge up the news, we have nothing to pass on. But we have less and less time to do that dredging."

Mr. Downie said he recognized the concern but did not see a problem.

"By and large it does not take a whole lot of time to talk on the radio or do an early draft of your story for the Internet," he said.

The goal is to eliminate about 80 full-time positions, Mr. Downie said. The paper has nearly 900 newsroom employees, close to its peak employment of just over 900.

Mr. Downie said other cost savings could come from having foreign correspondents cover broad topics — terrorism, say — rather than cover specific countries, thus allowing for the elimination of some foreign bureaus. He said the paper remained committed to covering the war in Iraq and would "absolutely not" pull back from its Baghdad bureau.

He said the paper might merge operations in certain Maryland suburbs, where, he said, it has been clear that some readers will always read The Post and others will always read The Baltimore Sun and there was no point in going to extra lengths to try to make them switch.

The Post has been a rare bird among big newspapers. More diversified than many newspaper companies — it owns Kaplan Inc., a profitable test-preparation and education service — the Washington Post Company had avoided the buyouts taking place over the last year at other papers, including The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. But the gains at Kaplan have been offset by losses in print publishing.

This month, The Post reported revenue of $252.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2005, down 3 percent from a year earlier. Its advertising revenue fell 7 percent in the quarter, partly because of one less reporting week in 2005 compared with 2004. Daily circulation dropped 4.3 percent, to an average 694,100 in 2005; Sunday circulation fell 4.1 percent, to 969,000.

Mr. Downie said that while still strong, circulation had dropped in Fairfax and Montgomery Counties, home to some of Washington's most affluent and fastest-growing suburbs. "We're concerned about them," he said, attributing the decline in part to a rise in non-English-speaking immigrants and to more readers going online.

Despite the pending loss of jobs, Mr. Weiss said the atmosphere in the newsroom was not doom and gloom but a recognition that things elsewhere were worse. "Everyone realizes the industry is changing fast, for better or worse," he said, "and staying the same isn't an option."