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The Wall Street Journal is eliminating 50 editorial positions in the latest cuts to hit the US newspaper industry.
The editor of the Chicago Tribune and the publisher of the Los Angeles Times have resigned as parent company Tribune Co moved to axe staff and shrink its papers
to save money.
And the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has announced it will cut nearly 200 jobs.
The Journal cuts are part of a realignment that combines editorial oversight for its print and online editions, managing editor Robert Thomson said yesterday.
The positions going are primarily at the Journal's South Brunswick, New Jersey, offices, which the paper opened shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks near its headquarters in Manhattan.
In June, Thomson began revamping the Journal's newsroom structure to facilitate co-operation among print and online reporters and those at Dow Jones Newswires, the company's real-time financial news service.
The job cuts are part of that restructuring, he said. "The reasons for these changes are strategic, even if some of the benefits are economic," Thomson said in a note to staff.
A former editor at the Times of London, Thomson joined the Journal as publisher in December after News Corp bought the paper's parent company, Dow Jones, which also owns Barron's and Dow Jones Newswires.
Thomson became the Journal's managing editor in May, taking over from Marcus Brauchli, who resigned in April and was recently named executive editor of the Washington Post.
Thomson also serves as Dow Jones editor in chief. Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton is now publisher of the Journal.
Since the purchase of Dow Jones closed in December, News Corp's chairman, Rupert Murdoch, has moved quickly to reshape the Journal with more general and political news to compete more aggressively with the New York Times for national readers and advertisers.
Chicago Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski and Los Angeles Times publisher David Hiller resigned this week as Tribune Co cuts costs to offset declines in advertising and circulation revenue that have sharpened this year for most newspapers in the US.
Hiller, who stepped down after 21 months at the helm of Tribune Co's largest paper, was the third publisher at the Times since Tribune bought the paper in 2000. Lipinski has been in the top post at Tribune Co's flagship paper for seven years. Her departure comes a week after the 161-year-old newspaper told its staff it would eliminate about 80 newsroom jobs.
"This position is not the fit it once was," Lipinski told her staff, adding that there was no one reason for her decision to leave. Associate editor Gerould W. Kern will replace her.
The Times did not immediately announce Hiller's successor. His predecessor, Jeffrey Johnson, was ousted in late 2006 when he balked at trimming newsroom staff to cut costs.
The paper plans to cut 250 positions, including 150 in the print and online news departments, and reduce its weekly page count by 15 per cent. Some sections will be eliminated and stories shortened.
Meanwhile, Gannett, the largest US newspaper publisher, yesterday reported a 36 per cent drop in second-quarter earnings.
The USA Today publisher's profit of US$233 million ($301.8m) compared with US$366 million a year ago.
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