The Sacramento Bee is offering voluntary buyouts to a majority of its full-time employees in the latest round of cost-cutting at the newspaper.Publisher Cheryl Dell says buyouts are being offered to 55% of the paper's full-time employees and a smaller number of part-timers. The buyout offer includes about 200 of the 240 full time news and editorial-page employees.
Ms. Dell says ad revenue is down more than 22% this year at The McClatchy Co.'s papers in California and Florida.
Sacramento-based McClatchy, which announced a wage freeze almost two weeks ago, owns 30 daily newspapers nationwide.
The Modesto Bee offered all its full-time employees buyouts last week, and the Sacramento paper's move Monday comes on top of the elimination of 86 jobs there in June. The paper hinted more layoffs are possible.
Wall Street Journal; August 26, 2008
