CBS Moves Ahead With Some Layoffs In News

News operations at CBS stations in several cities started a series of job cuts this week as the network itself, CBS News, moved ahead with plans to lay off about 1 percent of its nearly 1,200 employees.

Over the last several days, layoffs were ordered at local stations that CBS owns, including ones in New York, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco. Dana McClintock, a spokesman for CBS, said the actions at the network and the local stations were not related.

“This is not the result of any corporate mandate,” Mr. McClintock said. The moves are the latest in a wave of cuts at news operations in both television and print organizations.

The cuts at the local stations owned by CBS were related to the financial performance of the station group in the first quarter of 2008, a CBS station executive said. The executive, who requested anonymity because the company was restricting comment on the moves, said that CBS had not issued a corporate order to cut jobs but that the stations “had to deal with their budget numbers.”

The executive added, “It looks big and ugly, but it’s not something that was ordered from on high.”

CBS revenues declined 14.6 percent in the fourth quarter. Like most media stocks, the share price has also been in decline, almost 20 percent for the year.

At the network news division, the cuts will not include any on-air staff members, CBS executives said, and are concentrated mainly on technical and support personnel. The “Evening News” program will not be affected, CBS said.

But the cuts will be felt at the network’s “The Early Show,” which is losing five employees. Those layoffs come on top of an exodus in the last several months of more than 20 people during an upheaval that brought in a new executive producer, Shelley Ross, who was fired six months later. Some of the now vacant jobs will be retained, CBS executives said, but other will be eliminated.

If the numbers remain as announced, job cuts at CBS News will be less than those at its news counterparts at ABC and NBC. Sandy Genelius, the spokeswoman for CBS News, said some jobs were being redefined and others would be open to be filled by others.

ABC News announced last week that it was eliminating about 20 jobs (though an ABC spokesman said ABC will add other positions and keep this overall job loss to less than 10 positions). The division president, David Westin, has said he intended to cut about 30 jobs by next year.

NBC News ordered a series of job cutbacks two years ago as part of a companywide initiative called NBC 2.0, which set a goal of cutting 700 positions at the company by the end of this year. About 30 of those cuts have come from inside NBC’s news operation, which is much larger than CBS’s because it includes a separate cable news channel, MSNBC.

The NBC initiative did involve cuts in the news operations of the stations it owns in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Washington.

Not all the 29 CBS stations enacted cuts this week, but most of the biggest ones did.

The cuts have generally been in the range from 3 percent to 5 percent of each station’s staff, with Boston’s WBZ apparently instituting the biggest reduction, paring about 20 positions. Chicago’s WBBM cut about 17 jobs; San Francisco’s KPIX dropped 14 positions; Philadelphia’s KYW cut 12, Pittsburgh’s KDKA and Sacramento’s KOVR both dropped 10 and KCNC in Denver 6. In addition, stations in Los Angeles, Dallas and Minneapolis cut an undisclosed number of positions.

In all those cases, on-air staff members were dropped, including many long-time reporters familiar to viewers in those cities. That was also the case at WCBS in New York. Included on the list for that station’s cutbacks were two long-time reporters, Andrew Kirtzman and Scott Weinberger.

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