Another quality newspaper is making deep cuts. Here’s the latest from the N&O:
In an effort to streamline its operations, The News & Observer Publishing Co. will offer voluntary buyout packages to some employees today. The package will be offered to 204 of the newspaper’s roughly 900 employees, though only a small percentage of those people are expected to accept and leave the company.
Publisher Orage Quarles III said the decision to trim the company’s staff came following a period of declining revenues and other factors such as the rising cost of newsprint and gas.
“It’s almost a perfect storm of factors,” he said. “We’ve got to get the organization to a size that supports the revenue.”
Those who accept the offer will leave the company on May 23.
I remember when the News & Observer won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for “Boss Hog,” its exhaustive coverage of the environmental and health risks posed by the waste disposal practices of the state’s powerful hog industry. That was when newspapers were fielding foreign bureaus, juiced by dot-com advertising and exploring the startling power of mapping and database mining at your desktop.
Now it feels like we’re the ones who are wallowing in stuff that’s not good for us right now - nostalgia, despair, and fear. Can we muster the entrepreneurial creativity to rescue ourselves? Send me your comments.
