LA Times to cut 70 newsroom employees

The Los Angles Times will cut 70 newsroom employees, about 11 per cent of the staff. Here’s the memo to the staff from editor Russ Stanton:

Colleagues:

As you saw from Eddy's note, the tough economy is causing the company to implement another round of job cuts, including in the newsroom. In the coming weeks, the number of jobs across Editorial will be reduced by 70 positions, or 11%. As part of this move, we will be putting into place the final pieces of the newsroom reorganization that we began last year. This includes reclassifying jobs, reconfiguring desks, revamping our workflow and exploring new topic teams. The goal remains to operate a 24/7 newsgathering operation that delivers information to Southern California residents in any medium they consume it.

Other departments at The Times will be undertaking similar cost-saving measures, some more painful than the ones we will experience. We are all too familiar with this process, but over the past year in particular, we have come through each of these downsizings and continued to produce some of the highest-quality journalism in our industry. We simply don't know how to do otherwise.

John, Davan, Meredith and I, as well as your section editors and department heads, are available to answer your questions. We remain commited to providing our readers with an excellent general-interest newspaper and website with top-notch local, national, foreign, business, sports, feature and entertainment reporting.