For weeks now, staffers at the New York Daily News have braced for cuts. On Monday, those cuts were announced in an impersonal email. It doesn’t appear as though everyone who is being laid off even knows yet.
Tronc, which owns NYDN, sent an email to staff Monday morning announcing it would be “fundamentally restructuring the Daily News,” according to a copy of the memo obtained by the Daily Beast’s Max Tani.
“We are reducing today the size of the editorial team by approximately 50 percent and re-focusing much of our talent on breaking news — especially in areas of crime, civil justice and public responsibility,” the email said.
Tani wrote on Twitter that “multiple staffers” told him NYDN employees were called in for an all-staff meeting and told to wait for the email.
Later in the email, Tronc wrote: “With the exception of a few particular employees who are not in the office today, Human Resources will communicate with everyone leaving the Daily news by the end of the day,” suggesting many employees still don’t know whether they have a job or not. Those who are laid off, per the email, will “be paid for the next 90 days and be eligible for transitional benefits after that.”
The biggest cut was editor-in-chief Jim Rich, who foreshadowed the layoffs in an ominous tweet Monday morning.
He also changed his Twitter bio to read: “Just a guy sitting at home watching journalism being choked into extinction.”
Robert York, who was the previous editor-in-chief at Tronc’s Morning Call paper in Allentown, PA, will take over from Rich.