Seattle Times Co. to cut 86 jobs


The Associated Press
Published: January 10th, 2008



The Seattle Times Co. is eliminating 86 jobs, most through attrition but 17 through layoffs, in a plan to cut costs by $21 million, company officials confirmed.
All but one of the layoffs under the plan confirmed Tuesday are in the circulation department. Besides The Times, the largest daily newspaper in Washington state, the circulation department handles delivery in the Seattle area of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and the Financial Times.

Of the 69 positions to be eliminated by attrition, 55 are vacant, said Vice President Jill Mackie. The Times will therefore reduce its number of current employees by 31, to 1,889 from 1,920, she said Wednesday.

Another 18 circulation workers face reductions in hours that will make them ineligible for medical benefits, according to the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, which represents 630 employees at The Times.

SE Living, a Sunday tabloid section for southeast King County, will no longer be published, and the Shop SE advertising section that appears in The Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Wednesdays will be refocused to cover all of South King County.

The Times is run by the Blethen family, which holds a 50.5 percent stake in the company. The rest is held by McClatchy Co. who also owns The News Tribune. The Times and the Post-Intelligencer, owned by Hearst Corp., operate separate newsrooms, but The Times handles circulation, advertising and printing for both papers under a joint operating agreement.

The first round of layoffs is set for February and the second in July, said guild administrative officer Liz Brown.

“The Times believes they can make the reduction they need to make primarily through attrition,” Brown said. “At this point they are not going to slash their news staff, which is what a lot of newspapers are doing now, and in that regard, the news could have been much worse.”

In a memorandum to staff last month, Seattle Times Publisher Frank Blethen wrote that the company faced dire financial circumstances and would undergo a “painful downsizing.”

On Jan. 3, the Yakima Herald-Republic announced a handful of job cuts and other reductions amounting to less than 3 percent of the newspaper’s staff of 196 people. The Yakima newspaper is owned by The Seattle Times Co.

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/northwest/story/250700.html