The Journal Register Co., parent of the New Haven Register, expects to lay off between 30 and 40 employees in the coming months.
The layoffs will affect workers in the business operations side at the company’s Sargent Drive headquarters, whose work is being consolidated at the Journal Register’s back-off Shared Service Center in Michigan, according to CEO John Paton.
The employees learned the news at a meeting Thursday.
Paton wrote in an email message to the Independent Friday that the layoffs will take effect over the next few months. The exact termination dates and number of layoffs have not yet been set.
“I thought it best we alert the staff to this move before finalizing all results, because I believe it is better to be transparent and alert employees early to anything that may affect them,” Paton said.
The layoffs do not affect the news side of the operation. When Paton took over the company, he said in an interview that his intention is to preserve editorial jobs and pare down the non-news departments to make the company more efficient and profitable in the new-media age. Read that interview here.
Paton took over the company after it filed for bankruptcy. He has worked aggressively to have his newsrooms produce not just print newspapers but all-day multimedia websites. The company has experimented with new web platforms and tools, handed video cameras to its reporters, started blogging with a vengeance (including inviting citizen bloggers), and, most recently, working together to produce a report on the effects of the federal economic stimulus law on communities throughout the company’s circulation areas.
The company faces an upcoming challenge as AOL’s Patch.com project prepares to launch new hyperlocal for-profit sites in suburbs throughout the New Haven region.
“Wherever we can do something once and do it well we will, as a company, move in that direction,” Paton wrote on Friday. “Our company already has a back office Shared Service Center in MI. It does high quality work very efficiently.”
He said the laid-off workers will get severance and outplacement counseling. If qualified workers want to be transferred to Michigan, the company will “see if we can make that happen,” Paton wrote.
“This is not a move made by a struggling company. It is one that has been made as the result of strategically re-positioning what is currently largely a newspaper company to become an efficient media company. A very necessary strategy and, in this case, tactic if newspaper companies are to thrive in the future as news companies.”
