The paper I worked for in the 1990s, the Regina Leader-Post, is still a good case study.

It didn't hire a full-time staff reporter between 1990 and 1995 and shed several editorial jobs through attrition, cut back on rural coverage, eliminated at least one contract job and reduced the editorial budget in general.

And in early 1996, when Hollinger took control of the paper, another 25 per cent of the paper's overall staff.

Not only that, it continued to shed editorial jobs for years afterward.

Before Hollinger's cuts, the newsroom head count was about 72. That is probably in the mid to high 40s now.

And of course in the immediate aftermath of the downsizing and before the newsroom became unionized, people were fearfully working much longer hours without any increase in pay to make up for those who got whacked.

This is called "boosting productivity."

Some mild rebounding in hiring occurred in 1995. For example, the Edmonton Journal was looking to building some sort of super-reporting team.

In 1996, the CBC went through another round of cuts (the 1990s were not a kind time to the Corpse) and CP eliminated about 50 jobs -- at the behest of Hollinger, which wanted its fees reduced.

But I didn't see a serious rebound in jobs until late 1996/early 1997. Hollinger did make some investments in the editorial staffs of their metro papers.

Some expansion of opportunity could be attributed to the development of the Web as a news medium, but in hindsight, not that much.

The real salad days were in early 1998 when the National Post was hiring its inaugural staff. This not only vastly expanded the market for journalists but helped boost salaries too.

But the bloom is off that rose as well.

I've heard stories that some rookie reporters at the N-P are making salaries in the high 30s.

And from what I hear, the overall job market right now isn't too buoyant.

To return to the L-P for a moment, our bosses were just grim-faced about the business's economics in the early 1990s.

In 1992, Saskatchewan faced one of its worst crop years ever, the NDP government was trying to reduce the $800 million provincial deficit bequeathed to it by the Tories, and the entire country was just starting to technically emerge from a vicious recession.

However, the paper never lost money through this period. The operating profit margin I heard bandied about was 15 per cent (is anybody's mutual fund returning 15 per cent these days?).

To the L-P's owners, it wasn't making enough money -- something Michael Sifton, now the capo of Osprey, candidly admitted in a news conference the day of the Hollinger downsizings in Saskatchewan.

However, that is a valid concern.

Advertising was changing, and this was reducing papers' revenues. For example, some grocery stores could be counted on to buy a million lines of display advertising annually. But that money got spent on flyers instead.

How newspapers fight back will be a crucial question for both journalists and the communities they serve.

Unfortunately, newspaper ownership is based on the notion of high operating profit margins.

This American Journalism Review article is almost 10 years old, but the lessons within it are worth reviewing:

Learning to Love Lower Profits

A veteran journalist warns newspaper owners: Adjust to changing realities (and more modest profit margins) and nurture your products, or face the prospect of new rivals.

Bill Doskoch
Toronto, ON

> From: "John Miller" <jmiller@ryerson.ca>

> Date: 2004/09/28 Tue AM 04:27:29 EST

> To: "Hugo Rodrigues" <hrodrigues@sympatico.ca>, <caj-list@eagle.ca>

> Subject: RE: time burglars, was: domestic war zones

> This thread adds to the anecdotal evidence that staff at many papers

> is thinner now, and reporters are hard pressed to cover all the breaking news that official bodies tend to shower on us. There's no time to spare looking for stuff that's not handed to us on a platter or press release.

>

> I am just sorting through data provided for a research project I am

> doing on newspaper staffing, and note some interesting trends: Compared to 10 years ago, medium and small dailies tend to have fewer reporters and supervising editors. That is not true of large (over 100,000 circ) papers. So the brunt of staff cuts -- er, sorry, synergies -- has fallen on the papers with the fewest resources. In many of these communities, they are the only media, and their staffs are stretched thin covering several levels of government and school boards and the increased responsibilities thrust on smaller communities by provincial downloading. One could reasonably argue from this that concentration of ownership and the increased trend of smaller-paper empire building is affecting democracy -- citizens are being denied the news that is harder to dig out. The watchdog role of the press in many communities might be seriously damaged.

> This is all very preliminary and I still have to crunch all the

> numbers, but I am working on direct staff comparisons over a 10-year

> period provided to me by 35 Canadian dailies. The base line is 1994,

> which I recall was hardly a buoyant time for newspaper staffs because

> we'd just emerged from a recession.