Cuts Coming Next Week at 'The Wall Street Journal'

When Gerard Baker starts his new job as The Wall Street Journal's new deputy editor in chief next Wednesday, he'll have a lot of names to learn. But not quite as many as if he'd started sooner.

According to multiple sources within and close to the Journal, the newsroom is due to undergo another round of personnel cuts late next week. It's unclear exactly how many employees will be affected, but two sources put the number of people being targeted at 50. (If, as seems likely, that is the number of people on the list to be offered buyouts, then the actual number of jobs eliminated could be substantially lower.) It's also rumored that there will be parallel cuts at Dow Jones Newswires, and that one or more Journal bureaus may be eliminated as part of the cutbacks. A Dow Jones spokeswoman declined to comment.

Since Rupert Murdoch took over Dow Jones at the end of 2007, the Journal has been relatively exempt from the wave of downsizing that has swept the newspaper industry. The exception was last summer when the paper eliminated 50 copy editing jobs in South Brunswick, N.J., and handed out a passel of exit packages. (Some of the copy desk jobs were re-created in Manhattan.) Recently, Dow Jones notified employees that their salaries would be frozen for the duration of 2009; many took that as a sign that more drastic measures, such as layoffs, wouldn't be necessary in the short term. Now, says one staffer, "Everyone's under this haze of anxiety."