Skip to main contentAdvance Publications continues its newspaper-cutting march to the sea.
The New Jersey-based company that owns The Oregonian is planning to cut newsroom staff at The Cleveland Plain Dealer by a third and reduce print editions to three days a week, according to the newspaper Guild at The Plain Dealer. Poynter broke the story this week.
"Friends and supporters, we wanted to let you know that The Plain Dealer has told the Guild it plans to reduce the number of Guild members in the newsroom to 110 next year," the Guild wrote on its Facebook page this week. "The paper said most of the reduction would be through layoffs, though some employees will be offered jobs at cleveland.com. They will not say how many or what those jobs would be. The Plain Dealer is pressing for the ability to handpick who stays and who goes."
The belief that Advance plans to cease publishing a daily paper in Cleveland is so widespread that employees have started a public "Save the Plain Dealer" campaign, with billboards and a locally brewed "7-Day Lager."
Advance, owned by heirs of press magnate S.I. Newhouse, has already ended
daily publishing at eight newspapers in Michigan, Alabama and Louisiana—including the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
In August, WW reported widespread fear within The Oregonian that such print reductions and mass layoffs are headed for Portland.
The Cleveland Scene—the city's alt-weekly—published a similar warning this week:
WWeek 2015