N&O to cut 10% of its news operation

Media27

Can’t help but find it a little ironic that on the same day that Jim Valvano’s basketball program of the 1980s got just a little vindication that WRAL breaks this story

The News & Observer is preparing to lay off about 10 percent of its newsroom staff and will announce other cuts affecting its news operation, sources inside the N&O tell WRAL.com.

Asked about layoffs, Felicia Gressette, vice president of marketing for the N&O who spoke on behalf of publisher Orage Quarles III, said, “We’re just not going to comment.”

When asked about other cost-cutting moves, Gressette noted: “Any changes will be announced in the N&O, not WRAL.com.”

Other cutbacks and changes include:

* The folding of the Business section into the City/State section. Business is currently published as a separate section, although the newspaper no longer runs extensive stock listings.

* The size of the space devoted to news will be reduced.

First, how in the world can they reduce their Business coverage any more than they already have? Their business section is horrible.

Secondly, we selfishly hope that they do not touch their ACC Blog, ACCNow. This site quickly became one of our favorite on the internet and deserves a ton of credit for its dynamic coverage of the ACC.

Lastly, my favorite quote from Pack Pride’s message board reads as follows:

Barry Saunders can now go back to being a street mime.

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27 Responses to N&O to cut 10% of its news operation

  1. john of sparta 06/10/2008 at 8:15 PM #

    Payback is a bitch.
    Of course, no newspaper needs a business section
    just like they don’t need a sports section.
    It’s all rigged. NBA (heard the latest?), Horse racing,
    NHL, NASCAR debris cautions….etc. N&O could be a
    “tip sheet” in 2010 with 4 pages.
    Whether it’s derivatives or subprimes…
    whether it’s playoffs or trades, pro sports
    is about money not winning.
    Vinny better watch his back.

  2. gopack968 06/10/2008 at 8:43 PM #

    I was in Sacramento, CA last weekend, home of the biggest McClatchy paper, The Sacramento Bee. There was a piece on Sunday in the Bee by the editor, Melanie Sill – the former managing editor of the N&O – that described the very same consolidation plan. Must be a corporate level restructure.

    I still read the N&O before I go to work every day, but I am in a shrinking minority.

  3. BoKnowsNCS71 06/10/2008 at 8:52 PM #

    The Net is killing the newspaper medium. The Classifieds which 20 years ago were 2 sections and thick and a way to evaluate the economy — are now thinner than a free calendar.

    The N&O while privately owned was really loyal to its employees and many stayed on for years past the normal retirement age. My mom worked there along with Jesse Helms back on the late 30’s. I worked there in the early 70’s. And the people I met stayed loyal to it and the Daniels Family returned that loyalty.

    But now — times have changes and the new owners can’t afford those employees plus news information can be captured more easily. And blogs are making us all reporters.

    It’s just another fact of changing technology,costs, business, and keeping cost of the product low (even though the N&O just raised home delivery prices this month).

    But I suspect the pricks — er I mean thorns in the side of the Wolfpack faithful who wear light blue underwear will still hold on to their jobs. Just to tick us off.

  4. packof81 06/10/2008 at 8:59 PM #

    My grandpaw once said that paper wasn’t fit to wrap fish with.

  5. McPete 06/10/2008 at 9:11 PM #

    “I still read the N&O before I go to work every day, but I am in a shrinking minority”

    That’s not exactly true. The N&O has been able to maintain its circulation both daily and sunday for the past 10 years despite national downward trends. add in the web hits for the site, and it’s safe to say more people are reading the N&O than ever. however, the decline is due to advertising revenue diminishing as avertisers spend their money elsewhere. it’s a bad environment for sure, but not because no one is reading anymore.

  6. wfpk99 06/10/2008 at 10:28 PM #

    This may sound silly, but as long as the Sudoku, Crossword, and cartoons are delivered to my front door, I’m good.

  7. SMD 06/11/2008 at 7:25 AM #

    Perhaps I am showing my age (which really ain’t old!) but I still prefer to read the actual paper. I polish off about 2 to 3 of them a day. Then, I use the internet to supplement and get breaking news, blogs, etc.

    Change always has an upside and a downside.

    Does anyone else remember Mickey McCarthy in the N&O? He wasn’t exactly a friend of State’s, but he used to write the best Friday prognostication column before the college football games. It was very witty.

    And to really go old school – does anyone else remember when the N&0 would run little cartoons featuring the local teams on the sports page? It was sorta an editorial cartoon where they would make sun of whatever the storyline was for the week.

    Good times.

  8. BillyTheKid 06/11/2008 at 7:42 AM #

    SMD, I’m with you 100%! I think it’s a real shame that we Americans don’t have the attention span to sit and read an actual paper anymore. We’ve become an nation of 5 year olds with ADD.

  9. GAWolf 06/11/2008 at 8:04 AM #

    What did you say, Billy?

  10. PAPacker 06/11/2008 at 8:11 AM #

    Anybody remember “It’s haaaaard being a pimp(coach)” featuring Chuck Amato and his bitches? That was a pretty low point for the N&O. They never got why that was so offensive to so many people. So much for sensitivity from the all knowing media.

  11. StateFans 06/11/2008 at 8:24 AM #

    I’m in the ‘old school’ camp. I read the Charlotte Observer every day even though it may be the worst newspaper in America. Also read the Wall Street Journal every day. I can’t find all of the things that I would like to read quick enough online.

  12. Noah 06/11/2008 at 9:11 AM #

    Newspapers probably ought to go back to being more locally owned and family businesses.

    You can make a good return on your investment with a newspaper. But they aren’t a growth industry. If you’re buying a stock, you want growth, not stability. Newspapers will give you a solid return, but it’s pretty much going to be the same return tomorrow as it was yesterday.

    Banks are seeing the same things. It used to be that banks were very nice “little old lady” stocks. You could buy a 100 shares of stock in the First Bank of Podunk and 20 years later, it would have kept up with inflation and grown a little and would be a nice way to save a few bucks. Better than stuffing it in the mattress, anyway…

    Radio stations went through it too. You’d have the local owner of the big station in town. You’d see your DJs and you could call them and they’d tailor their programming and music to the tastes of the town…so everyone thought “their” radio station was the best. Remember when WRDU 106.1 was consistently voted one of the best small-market stations in the nation in RS polls?

    ClearChannel figured out that they could buy up all of the stations, get rid of everyone except for a few board operators, play the same 100 songs over and over again and make a ton of cash. Banks and newspapers saw the same thing happen.

    Doesn’t make for a very good product.

  13. packpigskinfan23 06/11/2008 at 9:58 AM #

    Come on guys!! Think of the ENVIRONMENT! Think of all the trees we could save if you old dim-wits quit reading the paper and got on the internets! I thought at least SMD would understand this!

    I kid… I kid… =)

    I like to read a physical paper… but I do wish they were put out late afternoon with the mornings updated news instead of morning/early afternoon with last nights news…. I caught all that already.

  14. Hot Sauce 06/11/2008 at 10:05 AM #

    Does this mean that coverage of NC State athletics will go down 10% also? I guess you can’t really cut out what you don’t really cover.

  15. RAWFS 06/11/2008 at 10:05 AM #

    Newspapers are dinosaurs: already out of date when they are published, limited to to 2-D media and non-interactive. They will go the way of the telegraph given time.

    I note that ESPN is gobbling up leading sportswriters from newspapers, offering them the capability of instantaneous publication, multimedia and of course, access to their air, and it is draining a lot of the top talent away from the papers.

  16. PacknSack 06/11/2008 at 10:24 AM #

    Papers will be getting smaller too. They’re cutting content, but not mentioning that the “web width” will shrink too. Papers are printed on what’s called a 50-inch web (measured diagonally) — it used to be 54 back in the day. By this time next year, if not by the end of this year, many will move to a 44-inch web. The Indy Star has already done it. Look for your paper to get get a column narrower on each page, but subscription and newsstand prices will not pass these savings on to you.

    That being said, web content won’t go anywhere, only get bigger.

  17. gopack968 06/11/2008 at 12:04 PM #

    For a metropolitan area of our size, we are lucky that the N&O is as good as it is. Not great, sometimes awful (there are elements on that staff that do really hate NC State – I truly believe that), but usually good.

    Traveling around the country on business I am often appalled at how bad many local papers are. The Sacramento Bee is awful – and the darned ink still stains your hands!

  18. RAWFS 06/11/2008 at 12:08 PM #

    ^ The Sacramento Bee is now edited by Melanie Sill of N&O fame.

  19. EverettBeez 06/11/2008 at 1:49 PM #

    My paper here (Anniston Star) is locally owned (its in a trust so it can’t be bought) and they are destroying it by continuing to shave content. some days the front page is nothing but boxes telling you to look inside for the full story. Monday & tuesday its less then 10 pages, with want ads! They say their circulation is up, but it won’t last. I can’t start the day with out my paper. It will be a shame to see the N&O, for all its problems, killed the same way – starving it of content, especially local content.

    If you think the Charlotte paper is bad (I read it when I visit friends) try the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram or the Tuscon daily – trash, totally worthless trash. Its not worth the time to unwrap either.

    Many of us can remember the hey-day of the N&O, when Claude Sitton had a trophy room of heads – Lt. Gov Jimmy Greene, (anyone have his daughter for science in 8th grade? man, she was a wild one!), a Wake Co. school superintendent, and the real prize, Jimmy V.

    I hated their political positions on nearly every issue, but you knew where they stood, they were aggressive, and twice a year they got it right.

  20. EverettBeez 06/11/2008 at 1:54 PM #

    RAWFS, paper editions of the news are dinasours, but there is something physical and mental about handling the news in that fashion that I can’t give up. the wed is wonderful (and I read the n&o nearly daily on line), but its not the same. You can’t read the web on the crapper – well you can, but the wife always freaks out if you take the lap top in the bathroom – you also can’t drain ground beef with the web edition. the lap top also doesn’t soak up spills or dog “accidents”, nor is it sterile, so it can’t be used when you need to deliver a baby in the back seat of a car.
    the paper edition has problems, but at least its manageable. the web can really just overwhelm you.

  21. RAWFS 06/11/2008 at 3:23 PM #

    Everett,

    I see your point, and agree with some of them. But at the same time, I am of the age where I remember life before I had the Internet (mid-1980’s) and still enjoy the newspaper and books, magazines, etc.

    The younger generations, well, they grew up reading computers. They’re used to making comments to articles, not having to write a letter to the editor, hope they publish it and pray they don’t edit it to the point of mangling what you were trying to say.

    Anway, they are becoming the preferred target audience as guys like me cycle out of the all-hallowed 18-34 demographic. To them, a newspaper really is an anachronism.

  22. highstick 06/11/2008 at 9:22 PM #

    You guys think the N&O and the Charlotte Obs. are bad, try the Rock Hill Herald! Gee whiz, it’s another McClachey paper, no wonder! I read the Herald and Charlotte Obs. daily so I must really be stupid and I’m admitting it!

    Talk about old days at the N&O, I can remember doing a couple of part time gigs at the N&O on Friday nights when I was a student taking call in scores for high school football games in NC.

  23. EverettBeez 06/12/2008 at 7:27 AM #

    You are right about the trends RAWFS, but it seems to me newspaper readership had been trending down since the early 80s. then they were worried how to get the younger generation to read the news at all! I was one of the few folks I knew at App to read a daily paper. In fact, with out me, there was a whole row of folks that would’ve failed “Current Events 102”.

    Good on-line sites are important today, and all the cool things you can do on the web are great – LIKE THIS SITE!! – but killing off the paper edition by starving it of content is no solution. But in the end, it does have to be a business decision.

  24. PacknSack 06/12/2008 at 9:34 AM #

    Newspapers ignored the internet for too long, then they tried to get caught up too late. The big problem is newspapers as a whole aren’t willing to put in the capital investment to make the internet work and profitable. They are all so desperately trying to protect their ridiculous profit margins (15-20 percent).

    The industry is waiting for a paper to come up with a new model that works and then copy it. I love newspapers, and what’s going is just breaking my heart.

  25. DFMo 06/12/2008 at 8:24 PM #

    No one here mentioned the little insert in the N&O last week that announced rate hikes. Or are they just picking on me?

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