News of the latest layoffs in town didn’t make NewsChannel 8 — even though they occurred right inside the station’s Elm Street studios.
Faced with an auto industry-driven advertising downturn, management eliminated an estimated 22 positions over the past two weeks. Hardest hit were photographers.
Five employees have taken buyouts. Five other full-time union staffers, four managers, and four part-timers have been laid off, according to George Roelofsen, Jr., a news photographer who serves as president of NABET-CWA Local 51014. Five other employees have kept their jobs by slipping into vacant positions or “bumping” less senior workers.
(Math explanation: That adds up to 23 employees, even though 22 positions were eliminated. That’s because the bumping took place in waves: one person whose position was eliminated bumped an employee who then bumped a less-senior person in another job, according to Roelofsen.)
The shake-out, of who will land where, is continuing.
An assistant news editor, Virgina Fisher, was among those laid off. Eight photographer/editor positions (under various job titles) were eliminated, along with some sales jobs, Roelofsen said.
Management informed the staff informed of the job eliminations over the past two weeks, with the biggest batch announced Wednesday. Friday morning the four part-timers were scheduled to get the news, Roelofsen said.
The WTNH job cuts are but the latest workforce cuts in Connecticut amid the recession. They’re also the latest evidence of contraction in newsrooms across the country.
WTNH hasn’t reported on the cuts or issued a press release.
“When the city loses jobs, we run around to interview everybody and tell their story. Now we’re losing our jobs, and management doesn’t want to say anything about it,” said one station employee, who described morale as “terrible.”
WTNH General Manager Jon Hitchcock told the Independent that the cuts are in response to “the general advertising climate.”
Hitchcock declined to discuss details. But he confirmed that management did eliminate jobs and lay off some employees.
A drop in auto advertising “in particular” led to the move, he said.
“We’re trying to re-engineer the way we do business,” Hitchcock said. WTNH has launched a slew of web-only features from blogs to high-school football and basketball sections. On-air personalities regularly steer viewers to the website. The station claims the highest online viewership of any TV station in the state.
The station is owned by Providence-based Lin Television Corp.
The station appears to be moving more quickly than some other Connecticut mainstream news outlets toward the recognition that differentiated “TV” and “newspaper” and “radio” and “online” newsrooms are converging into multi-platform 24-hour web-anchored operations.
As old-style newsrooms evolve, they’re searching for a new revenue model to pay for fact-gathering and publication.
In the short run, that means reporters and editors and photographers across the country are losing their jobs.
The Tribune Co., owner of the New Haven Advocate and Hartford Courant, declared bankruptcy this month. The New Haven Register has been shedding jobs as regularly as snakes shed skin, as its parent company prepares to close two other Connecticut dailies.
One WTNH employee employee wondered aloud about the effect of newsrooms shrinking simultaneously at the station and at the Register, the city’s last daily print newspaper.
“We take so much [news] from the newspaper, and they take so much from us,” he said. “I wonder where the news is going to come from now.”