Like I said with the LA Times lay offs people are tired of biased reporting. The left will never admit it but that is whats happening.
Of course they will print this under their latest Losing Iraq headline.
Pray for W and Our Troops
reading the l.a. times is like reading your old left wing college prof’s junk.
They could always try printing it on soft 2 ply paper.
...These sources didn't know how many jobs are targeted companywide but said the Chicago Tribune Co. is expected to issue a request for buyouts on Monday, with a goal of eliminating 100 positions. If the offers don't generate enough savings, one source said, the company may resort to layoffs. ...
Living on the Razor's Edge
As we're currently seeing in the housing market, if you borrow a lot of money through an exotic loan, and the value of your house starts falling or you run into trouble making payments, you can be in a world of trouble. That's why mortgage foreclosures are skyrocketing.
Well, the same principle applies to the newspaper business. As the Sam Zells of the world make highly leveraged purchases of newspaper companies, counting on the cash flow of the business to keep making payments over time on their enormous loans, they're taking the same sort of risk—on a much greater scale. As long as the cash flow keeps coming in, they're OK. They're living on the edge, but they're OK. But if cash flow drops below projected levels, they've got problems.
Which is why the latest results from Tribune Co. ought to make Zell and his bankers—and close watchers of the newspaper business—lose sleep at night. There are some real red flags in this story. Not only is revenue declining, but cash flow "fell much more precipitously," because high-profit-margin pieces of the business such as real estate and auto classifieds are being particularly hard hit. Uh-oh. "Analysts said there was no evidence the company has hit bottom." Yikes.
And then there's this:[Zell] and Tribune Chief Executive Dennis FitzSimons have said the company will be able to pay down its heavy debt load if it can simply maintain last year's cash-flow level of $1.4 billion.That's the razor's edge Zell is living on—and there already are indications that the cash flow is declining.
Zell is a smart man, and his bankers are no dummies. No doubt they've looked carefully at projections that indicate that there will be sufficient cash flow to pay off the debt load and keep Tribune Co.'s loan payments coming. But it's not good that there already may be issues with the company's cash flow.
And remember, this is all happening in a healthy economy. If we get a recession—which many economists predict—newspaper advertising will be hard hit, and so will the cash flow of Tribune Co. and the other highly leveraged newspaper companies in Minneapolis, Philadelphia and elsewhere. If you think the newspaper industry's in shaky shape now, just imagine what a recession would do to it. It won't be pretty.
well, look on the bright side. Think of it as “ONLY 13 billion in debt”, not, say, 26 billion. There see, things are looking better already...
The horror, the horror.
Fire them all.