Tribune Publishing to Dump Staff; Sun-Times CEO Leaves Town

Chicago’s two newspapers made announcements Monday that more people will be leaving their employ.

At the Chicago Tribune, voluntary buyouts are being made available across Tribune Publishing nationwide this month to all non-union employees to cut costs. How many buyouts is not known.

The buyouts would give employees one week of base pay for every year of employment up to 10 years, two weeks for 11 to 20 years and three weeks for years 21 and up, with a cap at a year’s pay.

Meanwhile, the CEO of Wrapports, the company that publishes the Chicago Sun-Times, is leaving for Ohio. Timothy Knight, the former Chicago Tribune and Newsday exec who came aboard as Michael Ferro bought the Sun-Times in 2011 and promised to rebuild the company into a digital juggernaut, will be president of the Cleveland-based Northeast Ohio Media Group.

What this portends for the future of the Sun-Times isn’t clear. Media reporter Robert Feder describes Knight’s departure thusly on RobertFeder.com:

Knight never achieved his stated goal of making Wrapports profitable by introducing “cutting-edge technologies, new content portals and other tools that will expand and drive richer and more satisfying content to readers, while providing more targeted and measurable promotion options for our advertising partners.” Mostly, it seemed, the company failed with a series of half-hearted initiatives while cutting staff and selling off assets.

As it jettisoned its portfolio of suburban daily and weekly publications and websites — nearly 40 in all — Wrapports invested in a hyperlocal news-aggregation startup called Aggrego, and created the Sun-Times Network, an array of clumsy and useless digital sites targeting cities across the country.

Wrapports sold its suburban dailies and weeklies, a network that stretches from north to west to south and into Indiana, to the Chicago Tribune for $23 million last year.

Tribune Publishing’s stock price has lost half its value, and its revenue projections are being lowered.

Tribune Publishing issued revised financial guidance for 2015 on Sept. 18, lowering full-year revenue estimates by about $25 million to between $1.645 billion and $1.675 billion. The company also lowered adjusted earnings estimates by about $17.5 million to between $145 million and $160 million.