Tribune Company to Cut 700 Newspaper Employees
The Tribune Company, owner of The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, will lay off 700 employees at those newspapers and the six others it owns, it said in memos to the staff on Wednesday.
The cuts, which represent about 6 percent of the company’s 11,000 employees, will affect mostly its business side, Peter Liguori, chief executive of the Tribune Company, said in the memos. The aim, Mr. Liguori said, is to “unify the noneditorial functions of our publishing businesses.”
Tribune is preparing to spin off its newspaper unit into a separate company and shift its focus to its television holdings. In July, the company paid $2.7 billion for 19 local television stations, signaling that it was accelerating its transformation to a broadcasting company.
In addition to The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, the Tribune Company owns The Baltimore Sun; The Hartford Courant; The Orlando Sentinel and The Sun-Sentinel in Florida; The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa.; and The Daily Press of Newport News, Va. It also owns a national cable station, WGN America.
The cuts will not affect “front-line reporters,” according to a person with knowledge of the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity, but there will be some newsroom losses. A spokesman for the company, Gary Weitman, declined to comment on how the layoffs might break down across the publications, and how many journalists’ jobs might be trimmed.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/business/media/tribune-co-to-cut-700-newspaper-employees.html?_r=0