Spain's top daily newspaper El Pais will lay off about 150 staff and cut others' pay next week as it struggles to survive falls in sales and advertising revenues, company sources said Friday.
The newspaper's publisher, major media group Prisa, which has reported hundreds of millions of euros in losses, said it would announce details of the "painful" but "inevitable" reductions on Tuesday.
The company did not indicate how many jobs would go but a source present at a meeting of management and staff cited Prisa's chairman Juan Luis Cebrian as saying that about 150 people would be laid off.
El Pais currently employs 466 people.
Cebrian announced to staff "an early retirement plan, a reduction of staff in local bureaus... a decrease of personnel in the Madrid and Barcelona offices and a pay cut," Prisa said in a statement.
The cuts were necessary "to guarantee the viability of the business in the coming years in the face of the serious fall in revenues due to the shrinking of the advertising market and the decrease in distribution", it said.
"It is not a question of wanting to improve profitability. The newspaper can no longer sustain its current cost structure," the statement quoted Cebrian as saying.
The works committee representing El Pais staff branded the cuts a "brutal attack".
It said in an online statement that it has "asked for negotiations to be opened to allow the situation to be tackled by the least traumatic means possible".
It called on management to postpone the announcement of the cuts and discuss voluntary redundancies and other measures, but Prisa said it would not delay Tuesday's announcement.
Prisa said newspaper distribution had fallen by 18 percent in Spain in the past five years and advertising revenue in the print media had plunged by 53 percent.
It also blamed its misfortunes on "the continued lack of a profitable business model on the internet" for news.
Source: AFP
