LA Times Cutting 300 Staff

According to internal memos reposted on the paper’s Reader’s Representative blog, The Los Angeles Times is downsizing both the paper itself and its staff.

In the coming weeks, we will introduce a number of changes to the way we do business, including a new sectional line-up for the paper. These are necessary to facilitate greater efficiencies in how we approach our operations, production and distribution and, as a result, we expect to eliminate approximately 300 positions…

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. … 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.

Via LAT.