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March 28, 2024

Chronicle Plans to Cut a Quarter of the Newsroom

Important Details: The San Francisco Chronicle is readying significant job cutbacks in the newsroom, cutbacks that may include as many as 100 of the 400 journalists in its newsroom. That’s a 25% cutback, one of the steepest among reductions in force across the beleaguered newspaper industry. In total, 20 management jobs and 80 reporting/editing jobs appear to be on the line. Management at the Chronicle, owned by Hearst Corporation, said the company has lost $330 million in a span of about seven years.

The cutbacks come amid circulation losses among the greatest in the industry. Although recent declines — 2.9 percent to 386,564 daily during the previous six months and 3 percent to 438,006 Sunday — tracked the metro dailies overall, the Chronicle has sustained substantial decreases over the past three years, including a 15.6% daily decline reported a year ago.

The Chronicle will move to its new staffing levels first by offered buyouts, then by layoffs, says management, which is also moving to cut smaller numbers of positions in advertising and other divisions.

Implications: It’s a breathtaking number: $330 million in losses since the Hearst purchase of the Chronicle in 2000, or about a million a week. How can what has been, for most purposes, a monopoly daily lose a million dollars a week? Certainly, the Chronicle suffered its problems of its own — slow to merge and right-size the staffs it combined from the old Examiner (which Hearst had owned and sold in the Chronicle purchase) and a hard-to-shake reputation for being feature-rich and news-poor. But its problems have been exacerbated at being at Ground Zero of the Internet revolution. With above-average Bay Area broadband penetration, earlier mass adoption of digital news reading and hometown classified (craigslist) and retail (Google and Yahoo!) ad competition, the paper has been battered. Its attempt at more greatly reducing costs by sharing them with MediaNews (owner of the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times and a host of other adjacent to Chronicle territory papers) was quashed in a settlement over a citizen lawsuit claiming “unfair competition.” That settlement — which prevented more combining of production and business functions to save costs — was apparently the last straw. Now a new exodus begins, and it will be an exodus not just in number, but in experience. As has been the case elsewhere, usually the veteran journalists are the first to take the buyouts.

The Chronicle’s shock therapy stands out, but it’s worth noting that the down-the-road Mercury News has cut back its staff by 35% since 2000, albeit in several steps, rather than in one. What’s happened in the Bay Area first is a cautionary tale for news publishers everywhere. While what has happened in Northern California is arguably the deepest, the drivers — print circulation decline, more online reading and massive shifts of ad dollars to digital media — are the same across the world from Seattle to Berlin.