By: The San Jose Mercury News will avoid layoffs as it cuts 16% of its newsroom staff through buyouts and attrition, the newspaper said Friday.
The Knight Ridder-owned newspaper notified employees that 52 reporters, copy editors, photographers, and newsroom support staff had accepted buyouts or agreed to retire, said Executive Editor Susan Goldberg.
"I think everybody in the room was enormously relieved that we were able to avoid layoffs," Goldberg said. "We're still going to lose some institutional memory and some wonderful people, but this is a much better way to go."
The newsroom will shrink from 332 to 280 editorial employees. Several additional positions on the newspaper's business side also will be eliminated through buyouts and attrition, Goldberg said.
"I don't think it will affect the quality of the reporting we do," Goldberg said. "There are going to be some things we're not going to do, but we're going to focus just as deeply on technology coverage and telling the story of this diverse community."
The 52 job cuts include employees at the newspaper's Spanish-language publication, Nuevo Mundo, and Vietnamese-language newspaper Viet Mercury. The Mercury News announced last month that it would stop printing Nuevo Mundo and sell Viet Mercury after failing to make them profitable.
San Jose-based Knight Ridder Inc., the country's second-largest publisher of newspapers, is facing pressure from its largest shareholder, Naples, Fla.-based Private Capital Management LP, to pursue a sale of the company or face dire consequences including a possible shake-up of the company's management and board of directors.
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