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Idle Chatter: NBC, Give Back Those B...   Late(ish) Breaks: WSJ.com, Gawker, more
Jul 3 2008 10:29AM EDT

More on the 'LA Times' Staff Chop

When men plan, God laughs. When men's plans involve the proper staffing level of the Los Angeles Times in an era of industry-wide recession, God guffaws so hard he falls off his chair and lies convulsing on the ground, and maybe loses control of his bladder a little bit.

"When Samuel Zell took control of Tribune in December, he said he did not plan newsroom cuts," recalls The New York Times today. Fast-forward to February, when L.A. Times publisher David Hiller "said he expected to decrease the news staff by 40 to 50 positions." And then fast-forward again to yesterday, when Hiller said, whoops, no, it'll actually be 150 newsroom jobs -- a number that will require layoffs, and not just buyouts, unlike previous rounds of trimming.

Are you seeing a pattern here? Is there any possible way the 720 editorial staffers left at the Times come Labor Day can go about their jobs without wondering, on a daily basis, when the next cull will come?

Obviously, the entire newspaper industry is going through a period of massive retrenchment, and some argue the personnel cutbacks at most papers don't even adequately reflect the utter cratering of ad revenue. But what's the point of placing a number on the anticipated chop if it's just going to be revised upwards every couple months? Isn't that the sort of thing that drives already nervous people over the edge? Don't they teach this stuff in business school?

On the plus side, those 17 percent fewer newsroom staffers will have 15 percent fewer pages to fill. Yay?

------

Correction: In yesterday's item about this, I said Hiller had projected the need to eliminate 100 to 150 jobs in the newsroom back in February. That range was actually for the Times overall; Hiller said the newsroom portion of that would be about 40 jobs.

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