More cuts

This is a bit late, but I guess it didn't seem like news in a way - the way the economy is going, media companies are bound to have cutbacks. What did strike me as important is that CTV seems to have so much money (enough to buy the hockey song, to win the bid to carry the Olympics, and to fly all the local anchors in and throw a massive party for their 50th anniversary) that I thought it would be a while before they talked cutbacks. And I worried very briefly for my friends in my old workplace, although as soon as I thought about it for five minutes it seemed impossible to cut any of their jobs - it's so bare bones as it is. I'm sure people in other newsrooms at other companies would say the same thing though.

Apparently the first casualty is the planned coverage for the APEC summit. They won't be sending a reporter anymore, and may be leaning on the Canadian Press to lend a hand with tv hits. They will also have a Globe and Mail reporter there (update: the Globe reporter stayed home too), so they have a couple of options. But it means viewers will now get the same coverage from multiple sources.

Next up for media cuts: CBC execs have been told not to fly to Paris so often.

And now the downside to being a reporter...

This is Scott Taylor, publisher of Esprit de Corps magazine, notorious un-embedded journo, and former Iraqi insurgent kidnap victim, to Macleans.ca

Q: There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the media would have stayed silent for a non-journalist. Was there something specific about this case that justified the blackout, or is there a double-standard at work in the way the media reports?

A: It usually isn’t the media that gets alerted first. There’ve been cases in Iraq where Canadians, or Iraqi-Canadians, have been taken, [such as] the woman who was released shortly after I was taken and had gotten out. [The government] had known about her. They were quietly negotiating for her release, and because she wasn’t a journalist, the media wasn’t aware of it. The fact is [in Fung’s case], it’s CBC, and you know someone’s gone off the radar screen. It becomes their own dilemma. Then [the government has] to say, look, we’ll do everything we can, but we need you guys to remain quiet. Whereas if it’s a private citizen [and] a ransom note [is] delivered to the family, you can just advise them and say, “look, we don’t want the media involved.” And in most cases they’ll say, “okay, if it’s going to mean increasing the chances of them being released.” In this case, it was just that rare occasion where there was no choice; the media found out before foreign affairs.

Next to go: ink and paper

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.