First Oregon Media Insiders reported, then the Willamette Week's Byron Beck confirmed, that The Oregonian is about to offer all its part-time employees, in all departments, a buyout:
In an unprecedented move, every part-time employee at The O (that tallies up to around 300 people company-wide) is being offered a buyout by the powers that be (we heard it's driven by publisher Fred Stickel's office). In the latest cost-cutting measure during difficult economic times in the newspaper industry, the O's part-time employees have been told they will receive letters in the mail in the next week addressing their personal situations (salary, benefits, etc.).
And now Matt Davis at the Portland Mercury says that the O's competitor, the twice-weekly Portland Tribune, is hemorrhaging as well:
The Portland Tribune has been reportedly canning newsroom people today, and may go one day a week.
This all comes on the heels of some other things that I'd been hearing (the Trib eliminating all freelancers, and the Willamette Week paring its editorial budget to the quick). I never worked a hell of a lot for any of these places, but I'm sure glad I got out of that media market. Awful.
Update: Now Beck is reporting the Trib has:
laid off a news writer, a Web reporter and nearly the entire copy editing staff. We've also heard from at least one Trib insider that the paper will drop from twice a week (Tuesdays and Fridays) to once a week, on Thursdays.
Sad.
No copy editors? A good copy editor is worth a dozen mid-level managers.
And...once-a-week publication?!?!
Will it become the city's third alt-weekly? What the hell kind of business strategy is that?
The smartest thing the Trib could do is tack hard-right; that's the only market left in Portland. The city's already got the institutional left-leaning daily, the established alt-weekly, and the snarky alt-alt-weekly that's snapping at both their heels. Seems like the smartest thing to do would be to morph into a contrarian publication that snipes at all of them, rather than a sad mashup of all three, scrabbling for the same eyeballs and advertisers.
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