By: E&P Staff So everyone now knows that Dean Baquet, editor of the Los Angeles Times, and Publisher Jeff Johnson, don't want to -- and may refuse to -- make any more Tribune-mandated newsroom cuts, in the near future. But how many cuts does Tribune really want?
The speculation increase along with rumors that Tribune may be getting ready to unload the paper.
The Times' media columnist, Tim Rutten, wrote this weekend, "Nobody is talking for the record, but it's a fairly open secret that people in Chicago believe this paper's staff ought to be somewhere around 800. Johnson and Baquet believe that's far too few people to continue providing the people of Los Angeles with a newspaper of acceptable journalistic quality."
The current edtiorial staff is about 940.
Meanwhile, Phil Rosenthal, the Chicago Tribune media columnist, writes: "Johnson and Baquet may have raised morale in their newsroom on Spring Street, but they risked raising hackles at the Tower on Michigan Avenue....
"Even with the backing of 20 Los Angeles civic leaders who sent a letter to the Tribune board last week urging it 'to resist economic pressures to make additional cuts' at the Times, Johnson and Baquet may make Smith and Tribune Chairman and Chief Executive Dennis FitzSimons less amenable to compromise, not more so.
"On the other hand, if Johnson and Baquet dig in their heels, do Smith and FitzSimons really want to bring the Times a third publisher and third editor in the last 18 months?
"A $2 billion repurchase of Tribune's outstanding shares--financed by asset sales, cutbacks and borrowed money--has yet to produce a hoped-for surge in share price. The result is that an enterprise making a profit margin of about 20 percent, as the Times reports it is, is asked to do better.
"Staff reductions have become endemic to the newspaper business. The Dallas Morning News is shedding one-fifth of its newsroom. The Akron Beacon Journal is dumping one-fourth. From the inside, it's always painful. You, as a reader, are the ultimate judge of how much it really hurts, if at all."
Concerns are rampant at Tribune's Hartford Courant, as well. Rinker Buck, staff writer at the paper, penned a letter (posted at Romenesko at www.poynter.org) to Stephen D. Carver, president/publisher, which opens:
"Two weeks ago, what should have been a proud moment in the life of an historic institution -- the elevation of the popular and talented Cliff Teutsch to editor of the Courant -- was marred by fresh promises by Tribune to exact more job cuts. We can't even get through the choice of a new editor around here without the negative spin of Tribune's rote management default: gutting the very property it claims to be managing for shareholders. This is an open e-mail from a concerned and experienced newsman who isn't afraid to tell you that Tribune?s 'cost center' mentality is alienating your workforce, driving readers away in droves and contributing to a loss of confidence among advertisers and the civic community."
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