Posted by chicagomedia.org on June 06, 2008 at 10:09:04:
CHICAGO -- Tribune Co. executives outlined plans Thursday to reduce costs by trimming pages and editorial content from their daily newspapers and said they are evaluating the productivity of individual journalists with an eye toward possible cutbacks.
Chief Operating Officer Randy Michaels, while not citing specific layoff plans, told the media conglomerate's lenders that the company can save a lot of money by eliminating some staff as it "rightsizes" its newspapers.
He said the smaller papers will begin appearing June 22 with the Orlando Sentinel first, followed by the company's seven other dailies by the end of September. That means a new look and, as conveyed by Michaels, a warning for any unproductive journalists.
"All I would say is if you work hard and you're producing a lot of output for us, everything is great," Michaels said on a conference call where he and CEO Sam Zell updated the company's bondholders on Tribune's financial situation. "But we think we have a way to rightsize the paper and significantly reduce our costs."
He said at the same time the new size papers are launched, "we're going to roll out a different look and feel in each market, emphasizing what people are telling us they want in the research -- charts, graphs, maps, lists."
While shrinking newspapers' page size and even cutting back on the number of pages is not new in a troubled industry, gauging whether to retain journalists based on the total of words they write would be.
Michaels, a longtime radio industry executive who used heavy cost cuts to help Zell turn around Jacor Communications, said as much as a newcomer to the company whose papers include the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant. Another Tribune newspaper, Newsday, is in the process of being sold to Cablevision Systems Corp. for $650 million.
"We always look at the productivity of our sales people, but nobody's ever said, 'How many column inches does a journalist write?'" he said.
He noted the average Tribune journalist in Los Angeles produces about 51 pages of content a year compared to about 300 pages in Hartford or Baltimore, although he acknowledged that investigative and in-depth reporting takes more time.
"When you get into the individuals, you find out that you can eliminate a fair number of people while eliminating not very much content," Michaels said. While other factors have to be taken into account, he said, "we believe that we can save a lot of money and not lose a lot of productivity."
Responding to a question, he said decisions involving the journalists will not be made at company headquarters but by the individual newspapers. He called the data on their productivity "helpful data for each of our publishers to have."
Tribune, where Zell took control in December as part of an $8.2 billion buyout taking it private, eliminated more than 400 jobs earlier this year. Asked if the company has more impending layoffs planned, Tribune spokesman Gary Weitman said the company declined to comment beyond what was said on the call.
On another subject, Zell said prospective buyers of the Cubs and Wrigley Field should receive the company's financial books from Major League Baseball within a week. Preliminary bids, he said, will be due about a month after that.
Tribune continues to explore a possible sale of Wrigley by itself to an Illinois state agency but won't delay the overall sale while trying to make that happen, he said.
"Regardless of the direction of the deal, we are committed to maximizing the value of the assets," Zell said. "There's never been a better time to market the team and the ballpark. The Cubs are in first place and driving record attendance."
Like other newspaper companies, Tribune has suffered from a steep decline in revenue as readers and advertisers migrate to the Internet. It also carries a huge debt burden as part of the deal.
The Newsday sale has relieved financial pressure on the company, Zell said. "We're comfortable that we're in good shape" in terms of meeting required benchmarks and being on track to make debt payments, he said.
(AP)