LA Times Staff Cuts.

According to a story on the Los Angeles Times website, they are going to cut 150 staffers or 5 percent of its workforce. This will affect about 70 newsroom staffers. Some fellow photographers will most surely be affected. This comes at a crucial time for our industry, and I think it is a mistake on the Tribune's (the L.A. Times' parent company) part.

The print news business is changing at a very fast rate. It is moving from the printed newspaper, which had a limited newshole, to the World Wide Web, with its unlimited amount of space for sharing the stories of our fellow man. Blogs, multimedia slide shows and video are just a few of the new products hitting the web on our newspapers' web sites. The news beast is growing and it feasts on content. I know from experience that there are many days when it is a struggle just to get enough copy to fill a paper with limited space. Alas, weather/wild art.

Who is supposed to get this content if owners just keep cutting budgets and staffs? No wonder circulation is dropping. Staffs are being cut to shreds, our equipment is not being replaced and stories are not being covered. People are getting their news elsewhere. This in turn is causing advertisers to pull their accounts and forcing greater cuts to satisfy the bean counters and Wall Street types that own most of today's papers. I am lucky to work for a paper that is mostly family-owned and does not have the Wall Street pressure. Don't get me wrong, we still have no budget, but at least we are not cutting jobs.

What is the solution? As I see it, increase the budget, add jobs and tell the bean counters to give us some time to turn this ship around. The only way a newspaper can compete with the big media companies and 24-hour cable news outlets is tell a different story, a local story. This takes photographers and writers in the community telling local stories. Why would the average reader want to read wire stories that are a day old in the paper when they can get that from TV, practically in real time?

To create in-depth local content, photos, videos, stories and blogs takes manpower and proper equipment. You don't get that by cutting budgets and telling those who are left to do more. We are only humans and can only do so much in a given time period. If you have six assignments in one day, odds are none of them is going to be quality, or worth our readers' time.

Well I am done this rant for now. Good luck to those that will be looking for a job soon, hopefully I will not be one of them.