Companies

The Tribune Company is expected to announce staffing reductions as early as today at its flagship Chicago Tribune as well as its largest-circulation newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, as revenue in the newspaper industry declines. While no official announcement had been made about the cuts, reports in both newspapers late last week, citing informants they did not identify, said they were imminent...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Los Angeles Times will offer buyouts to up to 150 employees to offset declining circulation and advertising in the latest effort by parent company Tribune Co. (TRB.N: Quote, Profile , Research) to cut jobs ahead of its plan to go private in an $8.2 billion deal. The buyouts would equal 3 percent to 5 percent of workers at the Times, Tribune's largest newspaper, publisher...

April 23 (Bloomberg) -- The newspaper business is bad and getting worse, billionaire Warren Buffett said last month. He was talking about U.S. papers, which are among the investments of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the holding company he heads. Shares of publishers outside the U.S. are another story. Newspaper stocks overseas rose 25 percent on average in the past year, according to data compiled by...

On the wall of Lionel Barber's office is a curiosity that says a lot about the Financial Times editor. It is a note written by him to the late Hunter S Thompson after they had spent an evening together chewing the fat. It lists the running mates for two former US presidents, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, whose names neither could recall during their discussions the previous night. Thompson...

CHICAGO: The Chicago Tribune has launched a community journalism Web site encouraging readers in nine suburbs to post their own unedited articles, photos and blogs. "This started with the question of how can we make the paper more relevant to readers who continue to live further and further away from the center city," said Ted Biedron, president of the Tribune division that designed the site. The...

When Time Inc. killed off Teen People last July but decided to continue publishing it online, the move made sense to some observers, given teen media usage habits. Nearly a year later, though, the site’s audience size has dwindled to 218,000 uniques, according to comScore Media Metrics, and by the end of this month, TeenPeople.com will be absorbed by People.com. Other magazines, however, continue...

A dozen companies that own about 250 daily newspapers are preparing to expand a ground-breaking partnership with Yahoo Inc. to share advertising and editorial content, several newspaper executives familiar with the situation said. The companies, facing the flight of readers and advertisers, are working with Yahoo to give wider Internet play to their news reports, draw users to their Web pages and...

The National Union of Journalists is planning a "quality journalism" campaign to make sure that media workers can resist what it calls employers' attempts to "squeeze more and more" out of staff. Many journalists working on multimedia projects and new platforms such as podcasts were "approaching breaking point", warned the NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear. With the union's annual conference...

NEW YORK: With newspaper publishers scrambling to assemble lucrative online advertising alliances, McClatchy Co. has abandoned its nascent partnership with Tribune Co. and Gannett Co. to defect to another team of publishers negotiating a wide-ranging deal with Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc., according to a published report. An agreement between Yahoo and the consortium — which already includes 12...

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- Gannett Co. said Thursday that it has agreed to sell four daily newspapers to GateHouse Media Inc. for $410 million. Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper publisher, said it is selling the Norwich (Conn.) Bulletin; the Rockford (Ill.) Register Star; the Observer-Dispatch in Utica, NY; and The Herald-Dispatch in Huntington, W. Va. The transaction is expected to close at the...