Business

Newhouse cuts at Newark Star-Ledger

The Newhouse-owned Newark Star-Ledger newspaper is giving pink slips to 34 employees — including nearly 10 percent of its editorial staff — as it continues to wrestle with a soft advertising market.

The daily, the largest in New Jersey, is losing more than $10 million a year, sources said.

Publisher Richard Vezza maintains the red ink is not that high, but declined yesterday to disclose a specific amount.

Vezza did not disclose how much he expected to save with the trims.

The newsroom cuts include eight full-time reporters and 10 part-timers out of 195-person staff. It is the first time the paper has had to resort to involuntary layoffs to reduce staff.

The Newhouse family also swung the ax at other Northeast papers owned by its Advance Publications unit — trimming a total of 26 other jobs. Twelve staffers were cut at The Express Times in Easton, Pa. (10 full-timers and two part-timers), 11 lost their jobs at the South Jersey Times and three staffers were axed at the weekly North Jersey Newspapers chain.

Vezza blamed the cutbacks on general economic malaise, the worsening environment for newspapers and the after-effects of Superstorm Sandy.

The involuntary cuts contradict a Newhouse family promise not to make such a move if the newsroom kept out a union.

In 2008, the Newhouse family had threatened to sell the paper if it did not get significant staff reductions. Ulltimately 304 people, including 151 in the newsroom, agreed to take voluntary buyouts.

Vezza said Newhouse has no plans to cut any of the Northeast dailies to a three-times-a-week schedule, as the company did with its Times-Picayune in New Orleans in September.

“It’s a general cutback due to business conditions,” he said. “I’ve got no plans to take it to three times a week or cut frequency.”

Newhouse cut the frequency of the Syracuse Post-Standard and the Patriot News, in Harrisburg, Pa., to three days a week this month.

The company said it would push for concessions when contracts with two big unions, the Pressmen and the Newspaper Mailers & Deliverers Union, expire this summer.

Elsewhere in the hard-pressed New Jersey newspaper market, the Atlantic City Press, a daily owned by Abarta, Inc. of Pittsburgh, has been put on the block.

Albarta CEO John Bitzer III said this week that the paper, which has been in his family for 60 years, would be better served by being part of a larger newspaper company.