Are we six months from the Freep just reprinting the AP feeds?
Most likely it’s cost-cutting. There have been a lot of newsroom cuts recently; the San Diego Union-Tribune offered buyouts to a number of its employees, a year after doing the same, and the Arizona Daily Star just laid off nearly a dozen employees. Google newspaper employee buyouts and you’ll see a lot of papers doing the same. This has been going on for a while now, but it’s been mostly behind-the-scenes workers, such as administrative and clerical workers. A good chunk of them don’t get buyouts; they only get told that their job has been eliminated and don’t come in tomorrow. You don’t tend to hear about these ones. Empty jobs are frozen and go unfilled, and capital investment is often limited to new systems that will allow work to be done with fewer employees. When it starts hitting the newsroom, though, it’s a sign that things have gotten particularly bad. As with many other industries, the older workers make more money. In newspapers, it tends to be a LOT more. (When I started I
