Posted by Community on November 05, 2010 at 12:12:40:
More than 100 may have been let go as ad situation keeps deteriorating
October 31, 2010
You can get out a razor and quickly take out a patch of hair, the sudden bald spot perhaps dotted by a nick or two. Or you can yank follicles out three or four at a time over a few weeks, and it's possible others will not immediately notice the thinning atop an increasingly sore scalp.
Sun-Times Media, parent of the Chicago Sun-Times and several suburban print and digital titles, has been plucking away for a while now. It's been eliminating a few jobs at a time in a bid to take on the challenges that continue to affect the entire media business a year after a group of local investors saved the local company from liquidation.
The number of those recently cut loose across the entire operation, from the increasingly interdependent and consolidated newsrooms to back-office operations to the drivers whose work was outsourced this month to the Chicago Tribune Media Group, is said to be in triple digits. But the company, whose spokeswoman has been one of the casualties, wouldn't give a hard figure.
"That's a number I'm not prepared to share," said Jeremy Halbreich, the chief executive who steered Sun-Times Media out of bankruptcy last year. "A lot of that is, by virtue of being a private company, we don't feel the need to be publicizing those things. … Any time you do this kind of stuff, you always do it as invisible to the consumer as possible."
But he also made no effort to dispute what he referred to as the "rough calculation (where) you've got us at 100-plus." That includes the drivers, some of whom he said retired, while others landed with the rival Tribune, whose parent Tribune Co. continues to operate under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection it sought in December 2008.
At the same time, Halbreich said Sun-Times Media has been hiring in its interactive division, whose growth he attributes "in part … because the Sun-Times was woefully underresourced and underdeveloped in that area for many years, so we're playing catch-up."
The company made some cash this year by unloading its magazine on the North Shore. It's looking for other ways to shave costs here and there. But there still is the human toll, people like former Sun-Times sports columnist Carol Slezak, who exited after more than a decade of service.
"Do we wish we didn't have to do it? Of course, but it is the reality," Halbreich said, who indicated the cuts are driven by two factors, one he and his team planned on and another it didn't.
Sun-Times Media invested in a new content-management system that's finally becoming operational. The goal is to share resources in a way that also eliminates overlapping responsibilities, which, like taking its own trucks off the streets and completely outsourcing distribution, should produce a cost savings.
"The other thing is that most of us in the traditional media business … anticipated that maybe things (in the advertising market) would have flattened out sometime this year," Halbreich said. "So we laid in financial plans reflecting some of that, and it hasn't happened."
Beyond that, figures announced last week by the Audit Bureau of Circulations showed the flagship Sun-Times' paid average circulation declined 9 percent weekdays and 5.5 percent Sundays in the six-month stretch that ended in September compared with a year earlier. Across all eight of the company's area daily newspapers, the weekday decline was 8.9 percent, and its suburban Pioneer Press weeklies dropped by 12.8 percent.
The Tribune, which has greater weekday and Sunday paid circulation, slipped 5.2 percent weekdays and around 4.4 percent Sundays, closer to the national averages that showed declines of 5 percent weekdays and 4.5 percent Sundays. A massive distraction subsided in recent days with the resignation of Randy Michaels, chief executive of parent Tribune Co., taking a little off the top.
Sun-Times Media employees privately grumble it would be easier to steel themselves to the trims at their company if the reductions came all at once rather than as a slow drip in which it's hard to shake the uncertainty of not knowing if or when one might get tapped on the shoulder.
"How is that anxiety any different from anyone in our business today opening up a newspaper on any given day and seeing Gannett or the New York Times or McClatchy (report their) revenues are still down?" Halbreich said. "People know there's a ripple effect. They understand that."
That Mesirow Financial chief James Tyree, Sun-Times Media's chairman and the man who assembled the investors that gave the company second life a year ago, is beginning treatment for stomach cancer is just one more thing to think about, although it hasn't yet seemed to have much impact.
Tyree, in fact, in an e-mail to colleagues last week, said he planned "to work throughout this process," and he has "freed up my schedule from everything except business and family so I will have significantly more time to provide to both and focus on getting well."
On the plus side, Halbreich said this latest wave of cuts is, in fact, drawing to a close.
"Rest assured, we are very sensitive to employees' morale," he said. "From the outside, I can see where maybe it looks kind of confusing and threatening."
Dish cleared: News Corp. and Dish Network announced an agreement on carriage fees Friday. This averted the threatened removal of Fox-owned broadcast stations from the satellite service. It also restored cable channels FX, National Geographic Channel and 19 Fox regional sports networks that were taken off Dish four weeks earlier as negotiations dragged on.