The Globe and Mail is offering a new round of voluntary buyouts to staff as the newspaper moves to cut costs in the face of a slump in print advertising and to position itself for the digital era.
The newspaper did not say how many it was seeking, but CEO Phillip Crawley said in an interview he would be “happy” with 60, the same number who took packages under a similar program in 2009.
A buyout of that size would represent about 8% of the newspaper’s 770 employees.
Crawley said staff were informed of the offers at a meeting Monday afternoon.
Asked if there could be layoffs, he said that would depend on which employees take the buyout offer and what happens in the market.
“So there was no firm commitment to anything more than offer the voluntary buyout,” he said.
Crawley said there were areas of the business where the company still needed to recruit new staff, “particularly on the digital side, areas like video.”
“But there are other areas where we don’t need to be as heavily staffed as we currently are in some of the more traditional parts of the business.”
Crawley said that the company already outsources some of its editing and mentioned advertising sales as another area undergoing change.
“It’s that getting the balance of the business right as the business transitions,” he said.
“We feel that we’ve got good assets we just want to make sure that we’ve got the skills in the right place for where the business is going.”
