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News industry woes may lead to layoffs at Isthmus

Pat Schneider and Samara Kalk Derby  —  7/08/2008 6:43 am

Isthmus, a Madison weekly newspaper, is considering layoffs to cut costs in the wake of the advertising-draining technological revolution that is shaking the news industry.

"We are making plans that may involve layoffs. Nothing is decided," Isthmus Publisher Vince O'Hern said Monday. "It may involve some people taking leaves, and some people not being on staff anymore."

O'Hern would not say who was facing layoffs, calling it "speculative" at this point, but said the paper would not lay off more than one or two staff members.

"We're looking at ways to reduce expenses like everybody has to," he said. "Nothing is certain."

The migration of advertising revenue to the Internet has caused deep layoffs in daily newspapers large and small across the country, but has had a lesser effect on alternative weekly newspapers like Isthmus, according to O'Hern. And even among the "alts" it is the bigger, more established papers that are feeling the pinch, said O'Hern, who called the Internet impact on media a "tectonic shift" in a June 27 column.

Isthmus, now in its 32nd year, claims a circulation of 61,000.

O'Hern would not reveal how much the paper's advertising revenue is off, but said it has been "pretty flat" for the past couple of years. "Classified has been way off, like everybody else," as some advertisers opt for free Internet sites, and advertising for employment and housing has evaporated with those markets.

O'Hern said Arts and Entertainment Editor Dean Robbins was taking a leave at his own request.

News Editor Bill Lueders said Robbins would take an unpaid six-month leave to tend to "personal projects and other work." Other than that, talk of any staff changes is premature, he said.

Isthmus employs 10 editorial staff people, including five section editors, some of whom also write for the paper. Total staff size is about three dozen, Lueders said. "That's pretty big for a paper our size."

Lueders lamented what he interprets as an "erosion of trust" in newspapers by the reading public in recent years. That's regrettable, he said, as "now more than ever, newspapers can make a claim to being accurate and reliable. Other media with no scruples as to whether something is true are dominating the discussion."

Marc Eisen, Isthmus' executive editor, declined to talk about the possibility of layoffs. "I'm not going to talk about it publicly for a while," he said Monday.

It's a hard time all around, said James Baughman, director of the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication, adding that he was surprised by the potential layoffs.

"The conventional wisdom is that it was alternative publications like Isthmus that would not suffer like you all have, as daily newspapers have, in so many markets," he said.

What Baughman said he is hearing is that a lot of advertising is going online, but that companies are also cutting their budgets, and that ad budgets are going down in many cases.

"Instead of moving their money around, some companies are just cutting their ad budgets," he said. "There is a lot of uncertainty out there as well as economic unhappiness and concern."

Pat Schneider and Samara Kalk Derby  —  7/08/2008 6:43 am