NEW UPDATE:
New names of those laid off at The Commercial Appeal have surfaced. Here they are:
The Commercial Appeal
The Commercial Appeal
The Commercial Appeal
The Commercial Appeal
Also included were (no photo of these existed on the CA’s website):
Andrew Smith – digital producer
Kyra Cross – digital producer
Scott Armand – digital producer
UPDATE:
Names of some of the CA staffers laid off Tuesday are slowly emerging. So, this is in no way a complete list but it’s accurate, according to our sources.
The Commercial Appeal
The Commercial Appeal
The Commercial Appeal
The Commercial Appeal
The Commercial Appeal
The Commercial Appeal
The Commercial Appeal
ORIGINAL POST:
A new wave of layoffs has come for The Commercial Appeal (CA).
Different sources are reporting that between 12 to 16 staffers were let go Tuesday. No firm details are yet available on how many were laid off, who was laid off, or what positions were vacated. We’ll post those details as we get them.
Gannett Co., Inc., the Virginia-based owner of USA Today, purchased the CA and other Journal Media Group papers in $280 million deal that closed last April. As a part of that deal, Gannett said it would not layoff anyone in the CA newsroom for one year after the deal closed.
A clause in a merger document said “for a period of not less than 12 months” after the deal is done, Gannett is to “maintain the editorial staffing levels existing” just before the deal was done “in all newsrooms” of Journal Media Group and its subsidiaries.
However, some CA staffers weren’t sure Gannett would adhere to the clause and didn’t feel the company was in any way legally bound to the promise. But Tuesday’s layoffs came almost exactly one year after the purchase was closed.
Two CA staffers were let go in October, though details of that event were scant. In January, the paper cut all of its freelancers. Some writers were called back to work on a more limited basis.
Layoffs were not new to the Memphis newspaper before the Gannett purchase, however. Major and minor changes to the paper here have come in recent years (with big layoffs in 2010 and 2014) as the news industry as a whole has shrunk.
However, the Gannett-generated layoffs here now may be different as the company’s “Newsroom of the Future” plan has purged numerous newsroom jobs across its properties. When the plan was instituted at Nashville’s The Tennessean in 2014, the entire news staff was released and allowed to re-apply to the paper for new jobs with new titles.
Sources also say that seven staffers were let go at the Knoxville News Sentinel Tuesday and three were laid off at The Tennesseean.
