Our newsroom 'guild' votes Tuesday on whether or not they will allow wage cuts for guild members. The proposed wage cuts would be 0-6%, applied progressively based on annual salary. There are a number of other concessions the company is asking for as well. Basically, if we make those concessions, the company will only lay off 16 full time guild employees rather than 21.

With my head buried in the daily grind of newspaper web development, I missed a very interesting twist in the story of Omniture, the stats tracking software we all love to hate.

I haven't been in the field long enough to know exactly how Omniture did this, but somehow the company became the premier stats tracking provider for online journalism. It must be that Omniture has an amazing sales team. The Omniture situation seems to follow the pattern of things we pay a lot for when we could get a similar or even better service for free.

So I decided to head out to lunch with a buddy from work today, and while I was out the world went insane. Both parties in the house of representatives worked together to defeat the $700B bailout plan, the Dow Jones had its largest single-day point drop in history, and our publisher (a 41 year bee veteran), Ray Steele resigned. A new guy, Will Fleet, will be taking the reigns in two weeks. Needless to say, I was a little shocked when I came back.

In this age where information is power, it's hard to understand why we're all wringing our hands at the current state of the economy. Here at newspaper firms, we have libraries full of valuable information at our disposal. Most of it just sits on the shelf undisturbed for ages. Some forward-thinking news outlets saw the opportunity to digitize their information in the hopes of transforming the old library into a serious revenue machine.

Uptake on the initial buyout packages appears to be pretty slim and almost certainly lower than the 13-25 number that I heard through the grapevine. Barring some kind of miracle, there will have to be more painful layoffs near the end of the month. This time no departments are safe. I've been picking up pretty strong signals that even my own web team is no longer invincible. In a meeting today, my suspicions were reinforced. We're planning to lose at least one member of our six member team.

The Fresno Bee continues to do everything it can to stave off more inevitable layoffs. I don't blame them, but I sure am getting tired of the bad news:

We are offering voluntary buyout packages under a Voluntary Separation Program to employees as another step to reduce expenses as we change our business practices to adapt to the economic challenges and transition to an integrated multi-media company.

I ran across this note from Ray Steele, publisher of the Fresno Bee sent this morning:

Because of continuing economic challenges, we are implementing an across-the-board wage freeze.

This is an important part of our effort to manage through an economic downturn that is having an unprecedented negative effect on revenues, and, therefore, our financial health. While we have taken many steps to reorganize and streamline operations to respond to these economic challenges and change our business model, we need to do more to control expenses.

I'm going to use this post to talk a little bit about myself. I work for the Fresno Bee, a leading newspaper in Central California. I started working here a few years ago as a summer intern during a site redesign. The Fresno Bee eventually hired me on as a part-time employee in the newsroom while I was still in school and eventually as a regular full-time newsroom employee.

It's no secret that newspaper classified ad revenues have fallen dramatically since craigslist became a major player in that market. David Boardman, executive editor for the Seattle Times wrote a column claiming that in 2000 classifieds made up as much as 50% of total ad revenue for the company. This year, that number has fallen to 20%. In the same period, craigslist revenue grew from practically nothing in 2000 to an estimated $80-100 million for 2008.