Pioneer Press to cut 40 jobs because of slow ad sales

Faced with steep declines in advertising, the St. Paul Pioneer Press announced plans Monday to cut 40 full-time positions from the company roster in the next two weeks, many of them from the newsroom.

The announcement, made by Publisher Par Ridder to a somber staff at a late-afternoon meeting, echoes similar cutbacks recently announced at financially battered newspapers throughout the country.

"This is a newspaper industry thing," Ridder said in an interview. "National advertising has dropped significantly for the last three months." At the meeting, Ridder said the company needs to reduce staff numbers from 745 to 705 by Dec. 1. The cuts will be made through voluntary buyouts, job elimination and layoffs.

"The changes will not affect the Pioneer Press' focus on local news or its continued commitment to excellence in servicing readers and advertisers," Ridder said.

In the newsroom, those reductions will involve first offering buyouts to 10 full-time employees, said Editor Thom Fladung, "although if I got 15 that would be all right, too." If not enough staffers take buyouts, the paper will resort to layoffs, he said. The paper is looking to reduce the newsroom from its current 205 to between 180 and 185 employees. The rest of the newsroom cuts would come from eliminating part-time positions.

David Hanners, a Pioneer Press reporter for the past 12 years, said newsroom employees were told "how advertising, especially national auto advertising, is in the toilet and there isn't a lot you can do."

Newsroom workers will get two weeks' pay for every year of employment up to 52 weeks, and the company will share insurance costs for part of that period, he added.

"With the sale and everything else, it's been a year of ups and downs," said Hanners, 51. "The whole industry is in some sort of adjustment mode."I'm too old to get philosophical with a kid ready to go off to college," Hanners said. "But we have a workforce that skews older, and I think there are some people who would be interested in the buyout."

He said staffers can apply for buyouts, but management can deny those requests for critical positions.

Suburban editor Jack Sullivan, who is active in the newsroom's union, said the voluntary nature of the buyouts was a plus: "There's a sense that the package will be attractive to many in the newsroom."

Sullivan added that he thinks "people are concerned about a smaller staff putting out the newspaper. We're confident it will be a very good newspaper, but we don't know what it will look like, with the number of people we'll have.

"It's somewhat disconcerting, but that's countered by the faith we have in the people who work here."

The changes come as Minnesota's oldest newspaper adjusts to its third owner in 2006. Knight Ridder sold its newspaper chain, which included the Pioneer Press, to the McClatchy Co. earlier this year. McClatchy, which also owns the Star Tribune, then put the St. Paul paper and 11 others back on the block.

The Pioneer Press then was acquired by the Hearst Corp. and Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group Inc. as part of a $1 billion cash deal that also included three California-based newspapers. Currently the paper is owned by Hearst but managed by MediaNews Group, which eventually will own the paper outright when the complicated financing deal is completed.

Singleton told Pioneer Press employees in April that no jobs, wages or benefits would be cut as a result of the sale of the paper. Ridder said Monday that Singleton's remark remains true, explaining that the current cuts "have been made in response to what we've seen happen [with advertisers] in the last five months or so."

The cuts were the first Ridder has made since he became a publisher in 2001 and come on the heels of the paper's recent announcement of continued circulation growth; it's one of few in the country to report such gains.

"It's been a tough day and it's a tough situation, but if you want to be in the newspaper business in 2006, these are the kind of things you have to do," Ridder said.

Staff writers Curt Brown and Joe Kimball contributed to this report. Deborah Caulfield Rybak • 612-673-4996 • dcrybak@startribune.com