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MediaBuyerPlanner: The Orange County Register is experiencing a shortfall of more than $20 million in advertising revenue, and will offer buyouts to employees rather than immediately cutting jobs.
If enough employees don't accept the voluntary severance package that is being offered, however, the paper will consider layoffs, writes the Los Angeles Times. The declines in advertising - which have also been experienced by "almost every other metropolitan newspaper," according to the Register - have meant that, while the paper remains profitable, it is not up to the level that shareholders and investors expect.
Declines became more pronounced in the last three months and affected every ad segment except for new-home ads.
The buyouts will be offered to about a third of the paper's 1600 full time staff members, excepting sales, print operations and OC Post employees.
The cuts are not the result of the launch, in August, of the OC Post, says N. Christian Anderson III, publisher and chief executive of the Register.
Layoffs in the newspaper industry are increasingly common in the past year, as circulations and ad revenues sink. In one of the most high-profile of recent cases, the editor and publisher of the Los Angeles Times publicly refused to make cuts demanded by owner Tribune Co.
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