Thursday, March 26, 2009

Newspaper troubles continue

With the announcement that newsroom salaries will be cut 5% and about 100 people laid off at the New York Times, the crisis in the newspaper biz got a little deeper. This site, however, has a lit of 10 newspapers that will survive the coming shakeout and might even be worth it for an investor to buy (somebody just bought the SD Union-Tribune at a fire-sale price. The Register wasn't on the list, but I don't think it's likely it will be for sale -- and I do think it will survive. But times are plenty tough. We've just had to cut departmental budgets again, layoffs are possible, and everybody company-wide will have to take a week of unpaid furlough this quarter. I hope that's enough to prevent further layoffs. We're making progress with hyper-local sections bringing in advertisers who can't use or afford the entire run of the paper, as well as a "create your own ad" online feature. But I don't think anybody really knows for sure what's going to work.

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