Media carnage: Tribune Co. slashes Courant staff.

Rumors (apparently promulgated by Tribune management) of big staff changes were proven true today as The Hartford Courant dropped about 100 people. Among these were Mark Pazniokas, veteran political reporter in Hartford, and one of the two authors of the Courant’s Capitol Watch blog.

The paper’s report on itself offers some details. Excerpt:

The cuts include about 30 writing, editing and news support positions, bringing the news staff to 135 — down from 235 at the start of 2008. With the layoffs, the newspaper will no longer have a reporter assigned to Washington, D.C.

Most employees affected are being notified this week, said Stephen D. Carver, publisher and chief executive officer. The layoffs are mostly at The Courant but also at subsidiaries New Mass Media, which comprises the chain of Advocate weeklies, and Valu Mail, the direct-mail business owned by The Courant.

Courant survivor Dennis Horgan blogs about The Mardi Gras Massacre. Excerpt:

This is not good management. This is loathsome and mean-spirited and casually cruel. The bosses there have plenty of experience in laying off the workers so it is hard exactly to imagine why they chose this gruesome way to deliver the news, to punish one and all in the process. Was the old way getting boring? Do they need variety in such things? They won’t say. It is impossible to respect such as that. Impossible.

So much for my brightening mood about the direction of things.

Sources: The Hartford Courant, Courant cutting about 100 jobs.
Dennis Horgan, The Mardi Gras Massacre.