Tronc Guts New York Daily News

The meeting lasted less than a minute. By the time it was over, reporters and editors at The Daily News had been told that the newsroom staff was being cut in half and that the editor in chief, Jim Rich, was out of a job.

According to The NYTimes, Grant Whitmore, an executive at Tronc, the media company that owns The News, presided over the meeting, which took place shortly after 9 a.m. on Monday in the seventh-floor newsroom at 4 New York Plaza in Lower Manhattan. About 50 members of the newspaper’s staff were in attendance. The group did not include Mr. Rich or Kristen Lee, the managing editor, who is leaving as part of Tronc’s aggressive plan.

The new editor in chief is Robert York, currently the editor and publisher of The Morning Call, a Tronc-owned daily newspaper in Allentown, Pa.

“We are fundamentally restructuring the Daily News,” an email from Tronc to the staff on Monday read. “We are reducing today the size of the editorial team by approximately 50 percent and re-focusing much of our talent on breaking news — especially in areas of crime, civil justice and public responsibility.”

Sports and the photo desk were expected to be particularly hard hit in the latest round of cuts, insiders said.

Crosstown rival NY Post reports Tronc bought the 99-year old tabloid from real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman for $1 in September — and has been cutting back-office personnel as well as design and production staffers. Much of the design and production work has been outsourced to Chicago.

First Edition June 26, 1919

The latest cuts — expected to play out over two days — mark the first major cutback of reporters, columnists and editors since the takeover. The expectation is that the company plans to refocus most of its efforts on digital.

“The decisions being announced today reflect the realities and the need to adapt an ever-changing media environment,” Tronc said in the email. “They are not a reflection on the significant talent that is leaving today. Let there be no doubt these colleagues are highly valued and will be missed.”

The New York Daily News, launched in 1919, had a peak weekday circulation of 2.4 million in 1947 and once sold more copies than any other paper in America. That total was down to 200,000 in 2017 when Tronc acquired the paper for a symbolic $1 plus the assumption of pension and operational liabilities. Layoffs began almost immediately and continued through the spring.

The Daily News isn’t alone in suffering cuts. More than a third of the largest U.S. newspapers, and nearly a quarter of the “highest-traffic digital-native news outlets,” experienced layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of 110 newspapers and 35 digital-native news outlets published Monday. Large papers (with a circulation of at least 250,000) were more likely to have seen layoffs than smaller papers.