The Star Ledger building, Thursday, March 27, 2014.
The Star-Ledger’s announcement of 167 job cuts — among 306 layoffs made by owner Advance Publications Inc. Thursday — reflect long-running troubles at the state’s largest newspaper, which has felt the impact of a nationwide drop in newspaper readership and advertising revenue.
Thursday’s cuts are the latest in a series of layoffs and buyouts since 2008 at the Newark paper, a New Jersey institution that has won three Pulitzer Prizes but lost millions of dollars in recent years. The cuts include 40 jobs in the newsroom, which is not unionized, bringing it to a staff of about 116, down from a high of 350 before the first buyout in 2008.
In addition to the Star-Ledger cuts, 124 full and part-time jobs were eliminated at other daily and weekly papers owned by Advance Publications Inc., in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and 15 at the company’s web site, NJ.com.
The layoffs are part of a plan announced last week by Advance to create a new company, NJ Advance Media, based in Woodbridge, to provide advertising, marketing and news content to The Star-Ledger, the three other daily papers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and NJ.com. The company plans to focus on efforts to grow its digital operations.
Star-Ledger employees were called in Thursday for one-on-one meetings, where they were either told they were being let go or offered a job with the new company. The new jobs, in some cases, carried salaries more than 5 percent lower, along with reduced benefits, according to employees who asked not to be identified. According to the newspaper, the cuts included the entire full-time business staff and positions in sports, features, photos and news.
Employees described a grim atmosphere at the company, after months of rumored job cuts that led to many employees finding work elsewhere, including political reporter David Giambusso, who announced last week on Twitter that he plans to join the news web site capitalnewyork.com. Amy Ellis Nutt, a Pulitzer winner for feature writing in 2011, will remain with the paper, according to NJ.com.
“The staff has been anxiety-ridden leading up to this day,” said one employee. “It’s taken an emotional and mental toll on people.”
“The mood is very downbeat. People are kind of shellshocked,” said an employee who was laid off Thursday. Even the workers who were offered jobs, this employee added, “are so upset” about laid-off colleagues.
Employees who were laid off will get severance equal to 11/2 weeks’ pay for every year worked — but to collect it, they will have to work until September, when the new company is up and running, according to several employees.
A call to the paper’s publisher, Richard Vezza, was not returned. Matt Kraner, who will be president of NJ Advance Media, was quoted by the newspaper as saying the new company will add to the staffs of the Star-Ledger and NJ.com by offering jobs to journalists at the company’s other newspapers as well as hiring from outside the company.
“It’s really a tragedy,” said Jerome Aumonte, an emeritus professor at Rutgers University and author of a 2008 book on the New Jersey newspaper industry. “If you look at The Star-Ledger, it’s almost like visiting a person in intensive care, and every time you go back, their health is a little bit worse.”
The loss of staff at the paper, he said, will mean fewer investigative stories and less information overall for New Jerseyans.
The Star-Ledger has been affected by a nationwide drop in readership and advertising revenue for the newspaper industry. The company said the paper was on track to lose $19 million this year. Last year, the parent company threatened to close the paper if it did not win concessions from its production unions; the two sides reached a deal in September.
Its circulation has dropped dramatically over the past two decades, from about 473,000 daily in 1993 to 167,600. Advance Publications Inc. is privately owned, so it does not release revenues or earnings.
Nationally, newspaper industry revenues have dropped by about one third since 2006, to roughly $64 billion, according to a report Thursday from the Pew Research Center.
The Star-Ledger won three Pulitzer Prizes in recent years — one for a series on two victims of the Seton Hall University fire; one for the paper’s coverage of Gov. James McGreevey’s resignation after he said he was gay and admitted an affair with an aide; and one for coverage of the sinking of a fishing boat off the Jersey shore.
Journalists at the paper “have done brilliant work over the years,” said Steve Wilson, coordinator of the undergraduate journalism program at Rutgers, who called the job cuts “a disservice to Essex County and the State of New Jersey.”
The Star-Ledger, Wilson said, “has become a victim, like so many other papers, of changing times and changing readership patterns.” He also said the loss of local ownership of newspapers has put more emphasis on profits, rather than public service.
Matt Rainey of Clinton, a former Star-Ledger photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his work on the Seton Hall fire series, was among of those mourning Thursday’s layoffs.
“It’s so radically different from what it was in its heyday,” he said of the paper, which gave him and a reporter almost 10 months to work on the fire series.
“The public, the people of New Jersey, will miss out on the potential of seeing extraordinary journalism, and that saddens me,” said Rainey, who took a buyout in 2010 and now runs his own photography business. “Those stories are still happening in the state, but there is a diminished ability by all the news organizations in the state to devote the kind of resources to those stories that we were able to devote in the past.”
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