The buyout at the AJC is offered to 290 full-time employees (of 408) in the newsroom. They want to bring the 408 down to 350. The deal is available to almost everyone who has 5 years with Cox (including service at other newspapers); they rounded some people up with 4+ years to make them eligible too. A few senior manager types and a few key people in our Digital department (which is what we call the website) are exempt and may not take the buyout. Those who do will receive 2 weeks pay and benefits for every year, up to a maximum of 52 weeks. The company stops your Flex credit and 401K match on your last day of work, so the health benefits will cost you more.
If they do not get 58 takers (56 now because there’s been a resignation and a firing), they will lay people off to get to that number. Layoffs get 1 week of pay and benefits per year of service, with a minimum of 4 weeks and max of 26.
If they get more than 58 applications, they will decide which ones to accept to keep a balance of job skills within the newsroom. If there are more applicants than they need in any one job title (copy editor, reporter, designer, whatever), they will decline the applicants with the least seniority. Those people would be exempt from this round of layoffs, but not necessarily in any future round of layoffs.
We have til July 31 to decide whether to apply. They will notify us the following week and last day of work is Aug. 30.
Laid-off employees, if layoffs are necessary, would be notified the week of Aug. 11. I think they would leave right away but would be paid through Aug. 30, when severance pay would kick in.
There is a reorganization of sorts which they insist is not a reorg. We separated our two content departments a year ago into Enterprise (primarily concerned with print) and News & Information (primarily concerned with breaking news on the website). They will be combined again into one department, but the details are hazy. A new organizational chart will be released after Aug. 11, and employees whose jobs have been eliminated in the reorg will be asked to reapply for another job. This is the third time in 7 years we have had to reapply for our jobs. It gets old.
They have also eliminated all the zoned editions and a few features sections like Better Health. The content will be squeezed into other sections. The Print Department (primarily designers, copy editors and section editors) will probably have the most positions eliminated because there will be less work.
No idea how many people will take it. Some people think they won’t get 58. Others think many more. There are rumored to be about 31 takers so far.
It is commonly believed that the next round of staff reduction will be layoffs only, so a lot of people are factoring that in. We had 43 buyouts last summer out of a pool of about 80 who were eligible.
There is a separate buyout of advertising people (the Revenue Dept) of a little more than 100 people. I don’t know much about that.
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