Star Tribune to cut staff as circulation, revenue fall

Bowing to the pressures of declining circulation and falling revenue, the Star Tribune on Monday announced a plan to cut 145 employees through buyouts or, if enough people don’t volunteer, layoffs.

The cuts represent 7 percent of the company’s 2,100 positions and include 50 positions out of 383 people in the news and editorial departments.

Publisher Par Ridder delivered the news in a companywide meeting in which he laid out the increasingly bleak fortunes for metropolitan daily newspapers. The company’s annual advertising and circulation revenue has fallen by $64 million during the past three years.

Classified advertising was down 23 percent in the first quarter over last year.

If current trends continue, Ridder said, the paper would begin to lose money in a year to 18 months.

“I think it’s probable that we can get the Star Tribune growing again, but clearly we are in a very difficult period,” he said.

The newspaper will pour additional resources into covering local news, online journalism and restructuring and expanding its advertising department to reach more customers, Ridder said.

Revenue at the paper hasn’t grown since 2004, but the tough times seemed to worsen last year, when advertising revenue fell 3.5 percent in the first half of the year and nearly 9 percent in the second half. Ridder said early indications are that the newspaper lost 30 percent of its classified advertising revenue in April over April of last year, and similar losses are being recorded at large newspapers elsewhere, according to Ridder.

“Classified business has just changed forever,” he said.

The buyouts will occur in departments across the newspaper, with about 50 coming from the newsroom, editorial and online, about 25 from circulation and marketing and about 75 from finance, human resources, IT and production.

The newspaper’s nonunion workers have until May 21 to volunteer for the buyout. The buyout package offers two weeks of salary for each year of service up to 26 years. The newspaper’s unions must approve the package before union employees would be eligible to take it. Local union officials of the Minnesota Newspaper Guild Typographical Union sent an e-mail Monday to members that it has “deep reservations” about the buyout package.

The announcement comes just weeks after the paper said goodbye to 24 newsroom employees who took a less-generous buyout triggered by the sale of the newspaper to Avista Capital Partners, the private equity firm that bought the Star Tribune in a $530 million deal that closed March 5. The two rounds of buyouts total about 20 percent of the newsroom staff.

The new buyout package offers about 35 percent more cash for longtime employees and six months of health benefits.

“It’s too much money to not think about for someone at my stage of life,” said Eric Black, a longtime Star Tribune reporter. “I’ll look at it, but like a whole lot of other people around here what I would like to know is what my work life would be like if I stay. But it’s a hard thing to know.”

Editor Nancy Barnes, meeting separately with newsroom staff after Ridder’s announcement, said she will restructure the newsroom in the days ahead. Some changes were immediate.

The paper gave an involuntary buyout to Rob Daves, director of the Minnesota Poll and the part-time manager of the newspaper’s community website, Buzz.mn.

Daves said he was called into a meeting with Barnes and Managing Editor Scott Gillespie after the newsroom meeting and told that his job had been eliminated.

The Minnesota Poll, an institution at the Star Tribune since its first story appeared on March 19, 1944, ran between six and eight polls last year. It has not run a poll so far this year, Daves said.

The poll, although usually concerned with politics, has over the decades polled Minnesotans on “whether oleomargarine should be allowed to be sold in the state and should it be colored and whether people have cabins up at the lake and everything in between,” said Daves.

Barnes said the Minnesota Poll will continue, especially during next year’s elections. Barnes said in her newsroom meeting that she plans to post a job for the Buzz.mn duties that Daves had been handling.

The newspaper’s reorganization may also include reassigning one of four local columnists — Cheryl (C.J.) Johnson, Doug Grow, Katherine Kersten and Nick Coleman. Features columnist James ­Lileks said on his personal blog Monday that his column, the Daily Quirk, would end and that he was being reassigned to a local reporting job.

The newspaper also expects to reduce its editorial staff by five staffers to seven.

Barnes said the paper will push more resources into local reporting and into “smarter, in-depth stories.” “I’ve sacrificed a lot of things in the newsroom to keep that strong,” she said.

Staff writer Susan E. Peterson contributed to this report.

Matt McKinney • 612-673-7329