Well, this is never good.
It's a big number of cuts. Huge, in fact. Two things jumped out at me.
1) MORE buyouts? Seriously? I guess there could be people who are still there because they didn't get bought out a year ago. Rumour had it that the Edmonton Journal had so many people jump at the buyouts that they couldn't accommodate them all. I'm sure they weren't the only ones. But still. I know of a couple of newsrooms that got rid of a lot of people and haven't replaced anywhere near the capacity they had before.
2) This graph:
On the publishing side, CanWest said it was making the cuts through restructuring the community newspaper group, streamlining production and reducing web operations of certain newspapers. The publications were not named.
Community papers aren't exactly known for being overstaffed. They're a great place to work in part because you do everything - reporting, layout, shooting photos, online...But it's because they're such barebones shops. It'll be interesting to see if they eliminate or merge papers in B.C., where they have quite a large chain of community papers.
The story I saw on CBC tv mentioned on-air jobs being cut, which immediately made me think of my old boss. The place where I used to work lost a lot of people to Global News, especially to on-air positions, and my old boss made a habit of pointing out how poorly CanWest's shares were doing. At one point, when Global announced a spate of new foreign bureaux, he even said that he wouldn't recommend working for them, since they could shut down at any moment and leave you stranded in Beijing. Anyway, as the CBC online version makes clear, the on-air job cuts will be at E! and not at Global.
Either way, yikes.
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