Job cuts at papers shrink coverage

JOBS CUTS AT PAPERS SHRINK COVERAGE
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Thomas S. Mulligan and James Rainey]
Experts say the American appetite for news is as strong as ever. But buyouts and layoffs are being imposed at newspapers all over the country. California is especially vulnerable because of the severity of its real estate downturn. Along with real estate, advertising in related categories such as home furnishings, hardware and even big-box electronics retailing has been slowing, newspaper executives say. Even big-city papers such as The Times that have suffered sharp declines in print circulation in recent years have seen their total audiences grow, when viewers of their Internet sites are included. Political candidates, corporations, even churches find that they can lure more traffic to their websites by slapping on a news "ticker" or a digest of wire-service stories. The problem is that few news organizations have yet found a way to make the kind of money online that they had generated from print. "Citizen journalists" -- unpaid volunteers, mainly -- have stepped into the breach here and there, but research by the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that most of what they are producing is commentary rather than eyewitness accounts of news events or meat-and-potatoes coverage of school board meetings and the like.
http://www.latimes.com/business/printedition/la-fi-coverage29feb29,1,268...
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