Scary figures

This is only tangentially related to foreign news, but since we were talking during our April 17 class about job cutbacks at journalism organizations, I thought some of you might be interested in the latest gloomy figures. The American Society of Newspaper Editors release a report this week that showed that U.S. daily newspapers lost 2,400 jobs in 2007, reducing the size of the newsroom workforce to 52,600. As Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute, an expert on the business of journalism, reports in his Biz Blog, the drop-off was even higher than the 2,000 jobs lost in the recession year of 2001 and doesn't include hundreds more buyouts and layoffs announced so far in 2008.