Earlier in the month, Tribune Publishing got rid of Austin Beutner as the publisher for the LA Times & the San Diego Union-Tribune. As Matt Potter has pointed out in the Reader, the executive who replaced Beutner, Tim Ryan, has a reputation as the “layoff czar”.
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Tribune Publishing owns 11 daily newspapers and about 60 news and information sites.
Tribune has long pushed to centralize virtually all operations and direct them from headquarters in Chicago, running its newspapers as a group.
Hamed Khorsand, an analyst for Woodland Hills, Calif.-based BWS Financial, said Tribune Publishing did little to assuage investor concern, where fallout from the abrupt leadership change in Los Angeles has magnified the impact of lowered financial guidance.
Beutner, a former Wall Street investment banker who also served as deputy mayor of Los Angeles, was named to his post at the Los Angeles Times one week after the spinoff.
Efforts to reach Beutner on Tuesday were unsuccessful.
“The appointment of a publisher transferred from outside of the Los Angeles area, and the continued practice of having key decisions made by a body located approximately 1,750 miles and two time zones away, is clearly not in the best interest of operating, growing and nurturing a local newspaper”, Supervisors Ridley-Thomas and Antonovich said in their motion. Broad’s overtures were rebuffed by Tribune Publishing.
The board of directors of Tribune Publishing Co., parent company of the Los Angeles Times, expressed confidence today in the paper’s newly appointed publisher in the wake of calls for local leadership to be restored.
All in all, employees of the Union -Tribune and Los Angeles Times should probably expect more layoffs.
“We are fully committed to our five-point transformation plan to create value for all shareholders and stakeholders alike, which we launched past year when Tribune Publishing became a publicly traded company”, according to the board.
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In a press release issued late afternoon on Friday, Tribune Publishing said its total revenue for the year will be between $1.645 billion to $1.675 billion.
