AP sources: Chicago Tribune to cut 80 news jobs

Managers informed employees of the impending job cuts Tuesday afternoon in a series of meetings, according to two people familiar with the situation who requested anonymity because the company made no announcement.

The goal in the latest round of cuts is to trim $8.8 million in salary and benefits, according to one of the people. Specific jobs to be eliminated were not disclosed to staffers.

Employees were told that 55 or 60 layoffs will be made from the current total of 578 newsroom positions by the end of August. Twenty positions already are vacant.

Company representatives declined comment.

The latest round of cuts at the 161-year-old newspaper, one of the nation's largest, is painful but not unexpected. Like the Chicago newspaper, all Tribune Co.-owned dailies are making staff reductions and reducing the number of pages they print as advertisers and subscribers migrate in droves to the Internet.

Tribune's largest paper, the Los Angeles Times, disclosed plans last week to cut 250 positions, including 150 jobs in the print and online news departments, and cut its weekly page count by 15 percent. That will result in some sections being eliminated and story length being trimmed.

The changes have accelerated under Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell, who took control in December as part of an $8.2 billion buyout that took the media conglomerate private under a heavy debt burden. Tribune eliminated hundreds of jobs earlier this year, sold Long Island-based Newsday to Cablevision Systems Corp. for $650 million and is taking bids on the Chicago Cubs baseball team.

Tribune Co. Chief Operating Officer Randy Michaels told lenders on a conference call last month that the company can save a lot of money by trimming staff and "rightsizing" its newspapers. He said Tribune executives were evaluating the productivity of individual journalists with an eye toward cutbacks.

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