By: Joe Strupp Just a month after cutting 76 jobs through a buyout offer, The San Diego Union-Tribune is eliminating 27 more positions through layoffs and plans to cut another 18 advertising jobs later this year through an outsourcing arrangement. Those follow 14 pressman jobs that were lost last week.
The paper said the combined cutbacks will mean a job force reduction of about 10%.
Union-Tribune Chief Executive Gene Bell, commenting in an online story late Tuesday, said the cuts were in reaction to "destructive competitive forces seldom seen before."
Bell added in a note to employees, ?If we fail to adjust our costs to comport with the realities in the advertising market, we face a slippery slope of ever more difficult measures. Our goal is to avoid sliding down that slope and, instead, to convert our many competitive strengths into new strategies.?
The Voice of San Diego reported that the layoffs included: film critic David Elliott, reporter David Washburn, director of photography Andy Hayt, photographer Sean DuFrene and assistant sports editor Michael Rosenthal.
The Voice added that the recent job cuts and layoffs have also hit parent company Copley Press's 10-person Washington, D.C., bureau, which has been cut in half. Those cutbacks included the departure of Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer, whose reporting on disgraced former Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham led to his resignation and conviction on bribery charges. It also won the paper a 2006 Pulitzer Prize.
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