The Telegraph

Earlier this month The Telegraph announced intentions to cut 80 positions as the newspaper moved to share resources with its Sunday operation, The Guardian reported. These layoffs signify a 14 percent reduction in staff, which previously consisted of 550 editorial workers. The redundancies will be met with 50 new “digitally-focused” jobs, resulting in a net loss of about 5 percent. Most of the job losses will come from The Sunday Telegraph rather than the weekday operation.

Chief Executive Murdoch MacLennan said the merger shows the newspaper’s digital-first ambitions, solidified with an £8 million investment “to complete our transition to a digital business,” according to The Guardian.

The Independent

In February Managing Director Andrew Mullins declared the Levedev titles’ intentions “to become one of the very first truly integrated multimedia companies, publishing continuously on print, TV and other digital platforms.” He said that its soon-to-be-launched local TV channel London Live will share journalistic resources with other titles, according to MediaGuardian.

There’s little doubt that learning new digital skills while coping with fewer resources has put newsrooms everywhere under pressure.

The annual Pew report on the state of the American media noted today that, “a number of fourth-quarter announcements of layoffs, wage freezes, furloughs and internal cost-reduction task forces suggests that the intense pressure to do more with less while finding some money for new efforts is probably industry-wide.”

What does this mean for journalists who are being paid significantly less to work longer hours? In the case of one former reporter for the Chicago Tribune’s TribLocal, it has led to legal action. The Chicago Tribune reported at the end of last month that Carolyn Rusin, who was employed as a staff reporter for TribLocal between July 2010 and October 2011, was filing a lawsuit stating that she regularly worked more than 40 hours a week, but was only paid for five hours of overtime in 2011.

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On 8 February, the same day that The Washington Post announced its fifth round of voluntary redundancies in the past several years, the Forbes website posted a long profile of Washington Post Chairman and CEO Donald E. Graham by Jeff Bercovici titled "Nice Guy, Finishing Last: How Don Graham Fumbled the Washington Post Co." that highlights a number of challenges and setbacks the company has suffered in recent years.

Among these are missed opportunities with Facebook and Politico, as well as major losses sustained from Newsweek (reportedly $40 million in the two years before the company sold it) and recent problems relating to its Kaplan education unit.

As all of these areas have suffered, so has the company's best known product, its namesake newspaper, which has seen circulation fall by 40% since 1995 (to just over 500,000).

Forbes quotes analyst Ken Doctor as saying that in the most recent quarter, the Post had "the worst performance of any of the public newspaper companies", in the US. Things are even off on the digital side, where "digital ad revenue, rather than rising to offset the inevitable loss of print sales, actually fell 14% in the most recent quarter", Bercovici writes.

BBC World Service rocked headlines when it announced in January that it would be making major cuts to save money after a budget cut from the government. A cross-party of MPs is now asking that the budget cut decision be reversed in order to save the news organization's reputation, according to the Guardian.

The House of Common's Foreign Affairs Committee released a report today, April 13, entitled "The Implications of Cuts to the BBC World Service," reported Journalism.co.uk. It contains 37 pages of written testimonials on the importance of the service from former BBC correspondents. The document is available in pdf form here.

The committee's chair Richard Ottaway said, "The value of the World Service in promoting the UK across the globe, by providing a widely respected and trusted news service, far outweighs its relatively small cost."