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Last week, Mr. Zell, chairman and chief executive of the Tribune Company, and Randy Michaels, the chief operating officer, announced a set of deep cuts, saying that shrinking revenue left them no choice. They said they would trim 500 pages of news each week from the company’s dozen papers, including The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times. Their aim is a paper with pages — excluding classified advertising and special ad sections — split 50-50 between news content and ads.
Journalists may recoil, but is a thinner, flashier, more local newspaper, with a smaller newsroom staff, the best financial model for an industry that is enduring a painful contraction with no end in sight?
Conversations with analysts and executives yielded an impassioned argument on that subject — it is a question they have asked themselves many times — but no consensus. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is this: Newspapers around the United States have tried a lot of approaches, newsy to fluffy, parochial to international, voluminous to sparse — and all are in trouble.
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