Tribune Newspapers To Cut News Content By 20 Percent

Tribune Publishing’s newspapers including the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune this week found out what a new round of staffing cuts will mean for deadlines and the size of their papers — and the operative word, as elsewhere, is “tight.”

In a Sunday e-mail from the Chicago-based Design Production Studio obtained by The NY Post's Media Ink, the company said that all papers must slash local and feature pages by 20 percent, move up their deadlines by as much as two hours and that most of the special sections should be put on “pause.”

That’s despite the fact that Tribune’s papers have already gone through several rounds of painful cuts. The copyediting and design of the Daily News, for example, has been operating out of Chicago for the past two years.

And if local editors thought they could rely on wire copy to fill empty pages, that’s likewise being curtailed. “Local markets stop pulling their own national wire stories and better utilize existing mods,” read the directive.

Sunday’s memo came two days after dozens of employees opted to take advantage of the voluntary buyouts pushed by cost-slashing hedge fund Alden Global Capital. No official estimate on the number of buyouts was available but one source estimated it was close to 100 people nationally.

Alden took over Tribune publishing last month in a deal valued at $633 million. The New York-based investor began moving for editorial buyouts within days of the takeover and the deadline to accept the offers was June 16. The Fund didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Among those who took the buyout package was Rick Hutzell, the editor-in-chief of Capital Gazette, who noted in his farewell column published Saturday that he was leaving three years after a crazed gunman attacked the paper and killed five colleagues.

At the Chicago NewsGuild, union rep Greg Pratt tweeted that 26 Guild members had taken advantage of the buyout, which of course would not have included non-union editorial management types. Sources said that at the Hartford Courant, eight people opted out.

The NewsGuild, which represents eight of the nine major metro dailies, said Tribune accepted 65 buyouts of unionized members. That included 24 at the Chicago Guild and eight buyouts at the Daily News. That number does not include non-management Guild people or the South Florida Sun Sentinel, which is the only non-unionized metro daily in the company.

It is now estimated that the total estimate number of buyouts came to just under 100 people. An additional 21 editorial unionized workers had their buyout requests denied, the NewsGuild said.