Furloughs coming to several NM newspapers

Posted 2/08/2009 08:39:00 PM

There’s more bad news about newspapers: MediaNews Group is making all employees at its nine New Mexico newspapers -- including the Las Cruces Sun-News -- take one week off without pay before March 31 in an attempt to avoid layoffs.

“We tried everything to avoid this but we still thought that having one week of unpaid leave might alleviate the need for layoffs in the future,” Senior Vice President of Operations Tony Tierno was quoted by The Associated Press as saying.

Employees were notified on Friday that they have to take the time off, and were also instructed to not talk with the media about it.

In New Mexico, MediaNews owns the Ruidoso News and White Sands Missile Ranger. In addition to the Sun-News, it is the majority stakeholder in the Alamogordo Daily News, Carlsbad Current-Argus, Deming Headlight, Farmington Daily Times, the Four Corners Business Journal in Farmington and the Silver City Sun-News.

The weeklong furloughs apply to all of those newspapers, and also apply to MediaNews papers in several other states, including the El Paso Times in Texas.

The news comes as an industry that was already struggling to adapt to the shift to the Internet has been struck hard by the current recession. Around the nation, newspapers including the New York Times and Tribune Company’s Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are struggling to make ends meet.

And the furloughs are a new indicator of struggles among New Mexico newspapers. In recent years, the Albuquerque Tribune has shut down. MediaNews has eliminated its capitol bureau. The Albuquerque Journal and Santa Fe New Mexican have cut positions. (By way of disclosure, I used to write for the Sun-News and The New Mexican.)

MediaNews’ financial struggles have been the subject of controversy lately. Its largest newspaper, the Denver Post, has a joint operating agreement with the city’s other daily newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, which alleged recently that the Post violated the agreement when it borrowed $13 million from the jointly owned operating agency to pay newsroom employees. The Post denies the allegation.

Employees at the Post are unionized, and no furloughs have been announced there, but the newspaper is seeking to cut the costs of payroll and benefits by $2 million and has also frozen pensions and halted matching payments for the retirement plans of non-union workers.