Job cuts: Quantifying the severity

Posted by Sarah Schewe on August 12, 2008 at 8:50 AM

Mark Potts, of the Recovering Journalist blog, has recently tried to put a total on the severity of recent cut backs in the newspaper industry. "Over the past few days, I've built a database of the cuts over the past year at the nation's 100 largest newspapers."

Some key findings:

-Some 6,300 employees at the 100 largest newspapers have lost jobs in the last year (and more than half of these cut backs have come since the beginning of June)

-Nearly two-thirds of the top 100 papers have cut staff in the last year, including all but four of the top 34.

-28 of the top 100 have cut more than 100 jobs, 7 have cut more than 200 (in the past year)

-Virtually all cuts have been to the print side of papers. Few, if any, have cut online staffers

Potts collected his (admittedly, unscientific) data through Romenesko posts. If you want to "see the gory details" - as he calls them - a PDF of the data is downloadable from Recovering Journalist.

Source: Recovering Journalist