SF Chronicle to Cut 25% of Newsroom Staff

Another drive-by media quagmire.

To cut costs and try to adapt to a changing media marketplace, The Chronicle will trim 25 percent of its newsroom staff by the end of the summer.

"This is one of the biggest one-time hits we've heard about anywhere in the country," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, in Washington.

Eighty reporters, photographers, copy editors and others, as well as 20 employees in management positions are expected to be laid off by end of the summer. Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega said Friday that voluntary buyouts are likely to be offered.

Vega declined to say whether the paper is continuing to lose $1 million a week, as Hearst attorney Daniel Wall stated in court in November during a hearing on an antitrust suit filed by San Francisco businessman Clint Reilly.

We've discussed this issue before and it always comes back to a couple of factors. Relentlessly leftist bias at virtually all major dailies has turned off subscribers and the fact that younger generations simply do not read newspapers as much as we did growing up. I used to read three or four papers on average just 20 years ago, but there no longer is the time to devote to reading an entire newspaper, especially when much of the information presented is already outdated due to the immediacy of the Internet.

Still, those newspapers that continue to present a lopsided editorial slant will continue to suffer monetary losses. Whether they ever get around to balancing their coverage is another story.