First came an announcement in January that the Seattle
Times would be
laying off 17 employees. Then came word that
the Seattle Times Company would be selling off four newspapers it owns
in Maine. Neither bit of news was surprising—just more runoff
from the slowly melting glacier that is the newspaper industry, where
profit margins and readership numbers have been sliding steadily
downhill as advertisers and eyeballs migrate to the web.
On April 7, a large chunk of that glacier broke off. The
Times, which employs over 1,800 people locally, announced it
would be cutting nearly 200 jobs—about 10 percent of its
workforce—in order to shore up its finances. The paper’s newsroom
is set to suffer the highest losses of any Times department:
49 jobs will be cut there through a combination of layoffs, buyouts,
and the elimination of unfilled positions.
Publisher Frank Blethen, in a memo to employees, said the move was
necessary and directly attributable to “continued and increased loss of
traditional newspaper revenue.”
Employees said the paper will be shuttering its two remaining
suburban bureaus, one in Snohomish County and one on the Eastside.
According to the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, which represents
employees at the Times, the second hardest hit job
classification after bureau reporters will be the paper’s three-year
residents—generally younger reporters who essentially work a
long-term internship. Almost the entire crop of Times residents appears to be slated for layoff, a particular irony given the
difficulty that newspapers, with their aging writers, are having
reaching younger readers.
Sherry Grindeland, an 11-year veteran of the Times who will
be laid off because she works in the Eastside bureau, said she wasn’t
surprised. “The handwriting was sort of on the wall,” she said.
