Romenesko Misc. | Chicago Tribune | Editor & Publisher Sam Zell and
Randy Michaels tell Tribune employees:
What has become clear as we have gotten intimately familiar with the business is that the model for newspapers no longer works. Supply and demand are not in balance, and that manifests itself in two ways:
1. We are not giving readers what they want, and
2. We are printing bigger papers than we can afford to print
...We must also strategically align the size of the paper we produce with what advertisers want. We will be assuming a 50/50 ad-to-editorial ratio base as a floor to right-size our papers. With that benchmark we can significantly scale back the size of the papers we print, and take significant costs out of our operating run rate.
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COO Michaels says the productivity of the reporting staffs at Tribune's smaller dailies is much higher than at larger papers. "We can eliminate a fair amount of people, while eliminating not much copy," he notes. ||
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