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.

Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, spoke to BBC Radio 4's Media Show about the paper's recent decision to face the future with a "digital-first" strategy. He confirmed what most commentators already suspected, namely that the new strategy would result in "significant" job cuts.

According to Rusbridger, The Guardian's declining revenues and print readership are in line with the developments in the industry in general. He described the new strategy as a response to a "pre-crisis moment", a change of course before the newspaper is forced to make vicious editorial cuts, resulting in a lower-quality paper: "You don't want to get into that spiral of decline that we've seen with a lot of American newspapers."
As part of the strategy involves moving mobile and multimedia journalism to a more prominent place, the paper is preparing to hire more developers and other staff with expertise in digital news.

As for the resulting editorial changes, Rusbridger acknowledged that the paper couldn't employ as many people in the future as it does now. "We will need to lose significant numbers but we don't need to do it by tomorrow. We can do it over the next couple of years and we can have a civilised conversation about that." Including its sister publication The Observer, The Guardian currently employs 630 journalists.

AOL's hyperlocal news project, Patch, saw a huge boost in its traffic due to the November 2 midterm elections. According to Editor & Publisher, the network had a 300 percent traffic increase as visitors sought local results for the mid-term elections.

Warren Webster, president of Patch, said that Election Day accounted for the network's biggest traffic day yet, with the Santa Cruz Patch being the most popularly searched area.

The company, who said it is going to be the largest employer of journalists in the nation, has launched hyperlocal sites serving populations ranging from 15,000 to 75,000 across the United States, from Washington State to Rhode Island. However, the company is still expanding and according Nathalie Broizat, aims to cover 500 towns and regions by the end of the year.

In 2010 alone, Patch has hired 600 journalists and is still adding to that number. So where does this leave traditional local newspapers? Will the growth of Patch result in even further declines in local publications?

The recent media crisis has put a notable strain on the media industry. Despite this strain, which has lead some commentators to claim that print media is dying, there are now more journalism students applying for jobs in traditional journalism than ever before. Roy Greenslade, writing for The Guardian, recently commented upon this surprising fact.

Greenslade states that there is "intense desire to obtain a job on a newspaper." This fact was made abundantly clear last September when 1,200 people in the UK all applied for the same reporting job. Despite the diversity of jobs available in the journalism sector, recent graduates only want jobs at prestigious and well-known publications. According to Greenslade students searching for jobs should look towards other journalism sectors, including local reporting, magazines, and b2b publications.