Our colleague Tom Murphy, over at RedwoodAge.com, picked up an AP story the other day: "Soft economy speeds newspaper decline, job cuts." McClatchy, owner of the Bees in California, is among the chains leading the cutbacks, with the Sacramento Bee offering buyouts to a majority of its full-time employees. While it’s true that, as the AP points out, "Newspaper executives are cutting operating costs even further because advertising revenue has fallen faster than anyone anticipated," there’s another element in the mix: Most of these major cutbacks are coming from large newspaper chains, which have borrowed billions from private and public equity markets to finance recent newspaper conglomerations that they claimed would help put the industry back on firm financial footing.
