– Wage freeze at AH Belo: After layoffs, buyout offers and hiring freezes, what’s left in a newspaper company’s arsenal to rein in costs amid a downturn? The answer from AH Belo (NYSE: AHC) (NYSE: BLC), the Dallas Morning News and The Providence Journal, is to impose a pay freeze until the company returns to profitability. The move follows a similar action taken in August by The McClatchy Company (NYSE: MNI), and allows for exceptions approved by senior management.
— Star-Ledger says farewell to 40 percent of newsroom: Although New Jersey’s Star-Ledger received a reprieve earlier this month from being sold or shuttered, the cost of that save has been revealed: 40 percent of the newsroom agreed to buyouts, one of the largest cuts a newspaper has seen in a season that’s seen a lot of blood-letting.
— Newspaper sites’ Q3 traffic up 16 percent: Times are looking tougher than ever , the Newspaper Association of America, with Nielsen Online, found that newspaper sites recorded 68.3 million uniques on average (41.4 percent of all web users) in Q3, for a 15.8 percent increase. That’s also a healthy growth rate over Q307’s 3.7 percent online newspaper readership gains.
–NYT turns to video: Over the past year, NYTimes.com has pursued an aggressive video strategy. Now it’s giving its videos a better look — through widescreen views — and is offering more sharing tools as well.
Comments have been disabled for this post