layoffs

At least a dozen employees at KYTV and KSPR in Springfield, Mo., including anchor Jerry Jacob, were laid off Friday morning in what management has called a consolidation of newsrooms.

The cuts, which are impacting about 2% of Vice Media’s 3,000 person staff, comes as the company grows its video operations internationally.

Just four days after News Director Frank Volpicella was abruptly let go with no tangible explanation, Meredith’s CBS affiliate in Atlanta dropped five more employees Friday in the latest house-cleaning move. The list: chief meteorologist Jim Kosek, managing editor Paul Caron, operations manager and chief engineer James Estes, noon producer Jason Becknell and Volpicella’s news administrator Amanda Smith.

The Los Angeles Times on Friday issued a staffwide announcement that it’s offering buyouts to the newsroom. The announcement, which came in a memo from editor and publisher Davan Maharaj, described the buyout program as limited in scope and attributed it to adverse industry conditions.

The cuts, which come as Verizon combines HuffPost’s owner AOL with its new acquisition Yahoo, could happen as early as today.

According to sources, layoffs are expected to take place across AOL and Yahoo that could number up to 1,000 jobs. That is less than 20% of the combined company, according to sources. This action is not unexpected, given that both companies have a lot of redundancies, including in human resources, finance, marketing and general administration.

Noncommercial KCPT has eliminated one part-time and three full-time positions. Two producers, an education coordinator and the executive producer for cultural affairs were cut, said Angee Simmons, VP for TV production and creative services.

The Sacramento Bee on Monday enacted a round of layoffs, the latest in a series of staff reductions executed by its corporate parent, The McClatchy Co. Bee Executive Editor Joyce Terhaar acknowledged the layoffs Monday morning in an email to staff that did not specify the number of staffers cut.

The New York Times plans to release “more information by the end of the month” about a buyout program for editors amid a much-anticipated reduction of the editing staff. A memo sent to the newsroom this morning by Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joe Kahn said: “We’re working hard to improve and streamline our editing system. Our goal is to preserve meticulous text editing while meeting the demands of digital, which requires more speed and more visual storytelling. We have also said that we expect some reductions in the size of the newsroom, including in the editing staff.”

ESPN, which laid off 100 people this week, has a multitude of problems, but the basic one is this: It pays too much for content and costs too much for consumers. That didn’t used to matter because, thanks to the way the cable industry “bundled” channels, cable customers were forced to pay for it even if they never watched it. Now, however, as the cable bundle slowly disintegrates, it matters a lot.

While it was a bad day at headquarters in Bristol, Conn., the company had good reason for the mass firings. Or technically 11 reasons. Here they are.

ESPN is cutting about 100 jobs, most of them on-air TV and radio personalities, as the cable sports giant searches for more efficient ways to engage viewers. So far, several people have announced on Twitter that they have been laid off.

The Disney-owned cable channel is set to reduce personnel in the coming months, with the bulk of cuts coming from the on-air ranks. The move is indicative of the growing pressure ESPN feels as the cable ecosystem evolves, and of how the network plans to adapt in response.

Disney has laid off 80 employees in its digital media unit, which includes multichannel network Maker Studios, as part of a restructuring process that began last year. The firings are the result of redundancies that happened when Disney integrated Maker into its consumer products and digital media division in December.

Spanish-language media giant Univision Communications will lay off almost 6% of its workforce — between 200 and 250 people — after it slipped into the red last quarter. the company said today. The layoffs, along with a planned restructuring, “are in response to difficult times, challenging times,” Isaac Lee, Univision’s digital, entertainment and news chief, said. “We need to position ourselves for the future.”

Starz Entertainment confirmed Thursday that it laid off about 50 workers due to a reorganization that began last spring. But the job cuts have nothing to do with the cable channel’s pending $4.4 billion merger with Lionsgate Entertainment. Instead, they stem from Starz rebranding the Encore channels into Starz Encore in April. The jobs affected were in creative departments.

Layoffs are underway at Gray-owned CBS affiliate WDBJ Roanoke, Va.

NBCUniversal’s cable networks USA and Syfy are laying off staff. The headcount reduction, which is said to affect less than 10% of the employees at the two networks, or about 25 people, stems from the February executive restructuring at NBCU’s cable division, which led to the consolidation of USA and Syfy into the Entertainment Networks Group under Chris McCumber.

NEW YORK (AP) — Wearable camera maker GoPro says it will eliminate about 100 jobs after its fourth-quarter sales fell far short of its expectations. GoPro says fourth-quarter revenue was […]

TOKYO (AP) — Toshiba plans to cut 7,800 jobs, mostly in its consumer-electronics business, as it reorganizes in the face of projected record losses for the current fiscal year. The […]

As the names of the roughly 300 laid-off ESPN employees leaked though the sports industry at the end of last week, many longtime executives reacted with a sense of disbelief. The cuts sent shock waves through the sports and media industries, incredulous that a company seemingly rife with cash would have to lay off so many good people. This was not a case of cutting fat, ESPN insiders say. Many capable executives and talented producers were shown the door last week.

The Bristol, Connecticut-based sports channel is one of the linchpins of the traditional cable bundle of hundreds of channels, which is under pressure from viewers migrating online. The job cuts are a “necessary part of our continued strategic evolution to ensure ESPN remains the leader in sports as well as the premier sports destination on any platform,” said ESPN CEO John Skipper in a memo to employees that was posted online.

Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN, confronting rising programming costs and a loss of viewers, plans to eliminate as many as 350 positions, about 4.3% of its workforce, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The cuts will be announced to employees as early as Wednesday, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter isn’t public.

After announcing a change in programming priorities in September, the Doral, Fla.-based Fusion, a joint venture between Univision and the Walt Disney-owned ABC News, has revamped its overall television schedule and laid off 30 full-time employees.

As expected, Fusion CEO Isaac Lee outlined, in a Thursday memo to staff, a series of changes to the television network’s “existing in-house, studio-based shows” that includes the discontinuation of its latenight series Come Here and Say That, hosted by Alicia Menendez. Another series, Soccer Gods, will become a “digital-first brand.”

It was expected to happen the minute Meredith merged KPHO and KTVK together in Phoenix. Sources report that firings are happening  now at independent KTVK.