WPRI | Providence Newspaper Guild
The Providence Journal will offer buyouts to employees and impose layoffs if it doesn’t get enough takers, Ted Nesi reports. Employees have until Sept. 17 to volunteer; their last day at work will be Sept. 30.
The Guild doesn’t know how many employees A.H. Belo, which owns The Journal, is targeting. Anyone accepting the buyout will receive “1.25 weeks of base pay for each continuous year of service at The Journal, capped at 10 weeks,” Nesi writes, citing a Guild report. The paper offered buyouts last December; the company “needs ‘significantly more’ ” employees to leave, the Guild says.
The Guild also warns against morbid newsroom behavior:
No one wants this. Pressuring friends to make certain decisions or openly speculating about whose job you might try to move into are only going to make it worse. We can’t control the economy, but we can control how we treat each other during this time. A little compassion can go a long way.
In March, Belo execs got big raises.
Guild President John Hill expressed his outrage to Nesi at the time:
“They told us that the business needed that sacrifice in order to keep going, and it is galling and insulting to turn around and take that money that they saved by sending our people out the door and then put it in their swimming pools and their Lexuses … They saved money because people here made sacrifices.”
