During a conference call this morning, Creative Loafing President Ben Eason and COO Kirk MacDonald told managers at the six papers in the CL chain (CL Tampa, Sarasota, Atlanta and Charlotte, the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper) that their salaries are going to be cut in the range of 5%-15%, effective the first payroll period in April. Eason and MacDonald will take the biggest cuts. City Paper Editor Eric Wemple expressed gratitude during the call that the company had decided to go this route instead of laying off any more staff. (Here's his post, live-blogged during the call.) In Tampa, in addition to the salary reductions at the corporate level, the paper's publisher, ad director and editor — that's me — will be taking cuts.
MacDonald explained the cuts as a reaction to declining ad revenues. In this climate, he said, "the cost structure at all media companies, including ours, is too high." Creative Loafing filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last October, and is in the midst of reorganization; Eason expressed confidence that the company will emerge from bankruptcy by late summer.
Meanwhile, Tampa's paper has something to celebrate. Preliminary financials for the month of February show the paper breaking even after a stretch of losses, and traffic to the paper's website has markedly increased since a redesign was introduced in mid-January.
So, with good bad news and good good news at hand, CL Tampa is throwing a party. We'll be formally launching the new site tonight at an Open House at the CL offices tonight from 6-8 p.m. Meet the CL staff, talk with our new team of bloggers and have a drink on us.
This article appears in Mar 4-10, 2009.