Gannett to Furlough Workers for Week [View All]

[DeepModem Mom]

Source: New York Times

The Gannett Company, the nation’s largest newspaper publisher, said on Wednesday that it would force thousands of its employees to take a week off without pay in an effort to avoid layoffs.

Gannett, which owns 85 daily newspapers across the United States including its flagship USA Today, said it could not say exactly how many people would be required to take time off, or how much money the company would save. But it said it would require unpaid leave for most of its 31,000 employees in this country.

Also on Wednesday, USA Today notified its staff of a one-year pay freeze for all employees....

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With the newspaper industry in increasingly dire financial straits, Gannett’s mandatory week off takes its place in a growing list of grave moves. Layoffs have been widespread, the newspapers in Detroit halted home delivery four days of the week, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy protection and owners of The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer warned that those papers could shut down....

Gannett eliminated 3,500 jobs throughout the company in 2007, and a similar number last year, though it has not provided a final 2008 figure. The deepest round of cuts came last fall, when it laid off some 2,000 or more newspaper employees in little more than a month.

Most of Gannett’s newspapers are small, but they include some major papers, including USA Today, The Detroit Free Press and The Arizona Republic. In this country, it also has hundreds of smaller, nondaily papers and 23 television stations....

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/business/media/15paper.html?_r=2&hp