More Cuts to the Virginian-Pilot

The newspaper meltdown proceeds apace in Virginia. Pilot Media, which owns the Virginian-Pilot and other print and online publications, is implementing employee buyouts and other cuts that will result in a reduction of “less than 10 percent” of the company’s 543-person workforce. So reports the Virginian-Pilot.

Publisher Pat Richardson said the Norfolk-based company remains profitable, but that revenues are shrinking faster than expenses. Digital revenues are increasing but not fast enough to offset declines in print revenue. “We’re going to continue to invest in content and in sales,” she said, as well as digital, in a restructuring that she describes as “rebalancing the organization.”

Other than mentioning cuts to in-house advertising design, the article does not say which departments will be affected. The company hopes to meet its targets through voluntary buyouts of employees with more than 25 years of service, of whom there are 70. Presumably, that means some of the staff reduction will hit the newsroom. With all due respect to the folks who print the newspaper and sell the ads, the newsroom is the heart and soul of the newspaper.

I acknowledge this is idle dreaming, but… Perhaps Google, Facebook and others who have figured out how to monetize newspaper content better than the newspapers themselves will devise a revenue-sharing scheme to help keep newspapers alive. After all, if newspapers go out of business, who will create the content for Google and Facebook to aggregate and monetize?