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Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Media A 30 Percent Rise in Newspaper Layoffs in 2011

Posted by Eli Sanders on Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 6:00 AM

As publishers scrambled to bring costs in line with diminishing revenues, 3,775+ newspaper jobs were eliminated in 2011, according to Erica Smith, the author of the Paper Cuts blog. The toll this year is nearly 30% greater than the 2,920+ cuts Smith reported in 2010.

...Barely 41,000 journalists will be left at America’s newspapers at year’s end.

Read the whole thing, and don't miss the depressing chart that shows newsroom staffing now lower than it was in 1978, when people started keeping track of this sort of thing.

Comments (6) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

1. Revenues fall.
2. Staff gets cut.
3. Quality declines.
4. People go elsewhere to find something better.
5. Go to 1.

I believe the correct term is "death spiral."

Posted by TechBear on December 20, 2011 at 6:35 AM

Clearly, they need to start accepting ads from massage parlors and escort services.

Posted by Fifty-Two-Eighty

on December 20, 2011 at 7:25 AM

Following on, I'd be curious to know (in a non-snarky way) how staffing levels have changed at the Stranger since 2008, or if that feels too personal, alt-weeklies compared to dailies.

Posted by rob!

on December 20, 2011 at 8:35 AM

What's a newspaper?

Posted by Will in Seattle

on December 20, 2011 at 10:38 AM

But has there been a correlating increase in on-line media hiring? And how much of these layoffs is directly linked to newsprint, printing hard copy, deliveries and labor related to hardcopy only? We talked for decades about a "paperless" society. It's here.

Posted by Vince on December 20, 2011 at 10:40 AM