Newsroom layoffs stifle US journalism-lobbying group
Wed Dec 7, 2005 05:43 PM ET
By Dan Wilchins
NEW YORK, Dec 7 (Reuters) - Political lobbying group MoveOn, best known for efforts to unseat U.S. President George W. Bush in the 2004 election, protested job cuts in American newsrooms on Wednesday, saying it would stifle good journalism.
At a media conference in New York, the group delivered a petition with 45,000 signatures to executives of newspaper publisher Tribune Co.(TRB.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , objecting to the company's layoffs of more than 800 newspaper workers, which will likely include reporters.
Tribune Co.'s papers include the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.
"We're concerned about the ability of newspapers to report news. Good watchdog journalism costs money, but it's what communities rely on newspapers for," Noah Winer, media action director at MoveOn, told Reuters.
U.S. newspaper circulation has been in decline since 1984, according to the Newspaper Association of America, hurt by competition with the Internet and cable TV news and rising distrust of a media dogged by reporting scandals in recent years.
Tribune Co. is just one of a raft of companies to announce newsroom layoffs. In September, The New York Times said it was laying off about 80 reporters, while Knight Ridder's two Philadelphia newspapers, the Inquirer and Daily News, said they would cut 16 percent of their newsroom staff through buyouts or layoffs.
Newspaper employment has broadly been declining since 1990. Since 2001, the number of newspaper reporter jobs has fallen 4 percent to 54,134, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Josh Douglass, a lifelong reader of Tribune Co.'s Newsday, said layoffs at the Long Island, New York-based newspaper could prevent political scandals from coming to light.
"If there are no reporters there to get friendly with people and find out what might be going on behind closed doors, that's a real problem," Douglass said.
Most major U.S. newspapers are owned by publicly traded companies that produce profits for shareholders. Newspaper publishers' shares have fallen this year and increasing use of the Internet as a source of information raises uncertainty about newspapers' future earnings, said John Morton, president of Morton Research Inc. in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Tribune Co. reported a 19 percent rise in operating profits for the first nine months of the year, but that has not been enough to boost its share price.
Weak share prices pressured Knight Ridder, the second largest newspaper publisher in the United States, to say last month it was considering selling itself.
Barbra is going to be really p*ssed now!