Mercury News Averts Major Layoffs, But Newsroom is Now Down to 260

It looks like both sides blinked a bit.

Hours before a planned layoff-by-phone of 101 Mercury News staffers, the company's new owner, MediaNews, and the Newspaper Guild came to a wide-reaching two-year agreement. Those two years now seem like an eternity in the chaotic newspaper industry. These 24 months will buy time for MediaNews to assess what kind of efficiencies it can wring out of Bay Area operations, while pursuing growth initiatives, like its recent deal with Yahoo. That time period will also give the Guild some time to make its own new strategies for dealing with an industry stunned by its own circulation and ad revenue decline.

For readers, though, it's another step downward in coverage. At its peak in 2000, the Mercury News -- considered among the top 10 papers by many -- had 400 people in the newsroom. With today's agreement, that number will move to about 260 (the actual cut is still in flux) from 280. Do the math. That's a 35% decrease in six years. Yes, you can make the case that the Merc staffed up too greatly in grasping to be The Newspaper of the Silicon Valley for the globe. And that it rode the '90s recruitment wave too boldly. But still, that was impressive coverage, and coverage that is plainly lacking in depth and breadth in today's papers.

Look at the announcement and you can see some big wins for both sides:

For MediaNews:

----Most importantly, it will now be able to share more newsroom and ad sales work with its other Bay Area properties.
----Job Cutbacks, Moves: The company is shifting 45 financial and classifieds jobs to an existing call center 45 minutes away in San Ramon. It is proceeding with 27 layoffs.
----Wages: It agreed to a 2% wage increase, less than inflation.
----Health Insurance, Pensions: It got union members to start paying more for insurance premiums. It froze the pension program and instituted a matching 401-k.

For the Guild:
----It lives to fight another day, keeping the contract's "evergreen clause" that keeps contract terms in place even as a contract expires
----It cut the number of layoffs by three-quarters;
----It prevents a two-tier wage system being put in place at the Merc.
----It won a pledge of no more layoffs -- but only until July 1 of next year.

So it's a breather, that's all, and sitting in San Jose, you can feel the anxiety being reduced. No longer do the 446 Merc employees who received notice of potential layoff have to wait by their phones to see if they still have their jobs. 

The settlement doesn't reduce the point of clustering, it in fact underlines its economic importance.  In the case of Merc, MediaNews' plan is clear: it needs to wring economic efficiencies out of the paper to make the deal work and as it envisions the ongoing struggle for print revenue, and one way it needs to do that is by clustering.

MediaNews put together the Alameda Newspaper Group years ago, including such titles as The (Vacaville) Reporter, Alameda Times-Star, The (Fremont) Argus, The (Hayward) Daily Review, Marin Independent Journal, San Mateo County Times, Tri-Valley Herald, Vallejo Times-Herald, Milpitas Post, and Pacifica Tribune. Small-circ papers. Small staffs. Low-wage reporters and staff generally.

In clustering, MediaNews is among the industry leaders, though it's a strategy that almost all have embraced. Efficiency drives consolidation of printing, production, ad selling, circulation -- and editing, reporting and presentation, as much as union contracts will allow. It drove the move of the 45 jobs to San Ramon. In fact, it's a centerpiece of the Bay Area strategy now hindered by a recent judge's decision delaying a MediaNews/Hearst Bay Area partnership, because of concerns of a clustering approach involving both the MediaNews properties and Hearst's money-losing San Francisco Chronicle.

And that's one of the big rubs in these negotiations at the Merc. We'll have to see how this deal plays out: how much and what kind of stories will the Merc use from relatively inexperienced East Bay reporters over the next two years? There's no new two-tier wage system at the Merc, but it will be "sharing" more content with the other papers.  What exactly will that mean?

You can see some of the change in the paper already, one-source stories subbing for those that used to have three or four. Lack of  experience allowing some naive reporting to get into print.

The Newspaper Guild was planning a bigger action day -- next Monday, Dec. 11 -- around the larger topic of layoffs, which presumably will go on, given ongoing disputes at other papers including the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. At SaveJournalism.org, it is beginning to detail the job losses overall, and, importantly, that this is a matter for the general reading public and not just those who lose their jobs.

On that site, they offer these numbers, which cover newsrooms as well as other newspaper departments:
---34,000 jobs have been lost in the newspaper industry the last five years;
---44,000 jobs have been lost total in the news industry.

My own number tracking tells me that the daily newspaper industry had about 54,000 newsroom jobs at the end of of 2004. That number was down to about 52,00 the end of last year, a 3.5% decline in one year. Now it looks like we'll be flirting with the 50,000 number as all cuts -- from big announcement to none at all -- take hold. 2007 budgeting is ugly. Combine actual job cutbacks with "churn",  keeping jobs in the budget but not letting them be filled "for the time being."

The numbers tell us one thing; the actual coverage tells us more. As readers and journalists, in print and online, we'll all be watching.

Comments

[Holly Mullen]

Ken:

Your old (emphasis on old) editor from St. Paul here. I've been working for Dean Singleton now for three years at my hometown paper, Salt Lake Tribune. Interesting thoughts you offer about the Mercury-News' contract battle. No guild here (big surprise in Utah, eh?), but we are slowly getting MediaNews-ized.

Worst effect I can see: Very young and inexperienced reporters and part-timers, which allows management to skip out on traditional benefits. Also, very top heavy with editors and sub editors--more of them than I ever remember when the paper was family-owned. So much for saving money.

I'm watching the Bay Area and St. Paul with great interest.

Hope all is well.