The story was published on the front of the business section. The newsroom layoffs - including eleven reporters, eight copy editors, three management-level editors, and four photographers - were part of a company-wide restructuring, Moss said, adding that “‘There could be the need for further reductions’ in the newsroom if revenue does not improve,” as the Beacon Journal reported the next day. A company spokeswoman put the paper’s profit margins “in the low double digits.” That would mean that the Beacon’s margins were better than 20 percent four years ago. Moss told the staff the news last Tuesday, saying that costs needed to be aligned with revenue and that advertisers have “cut back significantly and impacted our financial health.” According to Moss, the newspaper’s profits have fallen some 50 percent over the past four years. Very discouraging.”Įthridge will be one of 39 newsroom employees to lose their jobs. “Hard-charging reporter, and she’s just had it. Great writer,” veteran columnist Bob Dyer says of Ethridge. “Part of me wanted to stay and fight the good fight,” she says, but “another part of me just said, ‘You know what, maybe it’s just time to move on.’” It’s really devastating.”Īnd so Ethridge is taking a voluntary layoff (thus saving someone else’s job) and will move on, “telling people what they need to know” through freelance work, perhaps, at magazines or other newspapers. “It’s a very surreal atmosphere, ‘cause everything’s in flux and everybody’s upset. “You feel it already - you feel the complete vibe changing in the newsroom,” says Ethridge, a business columnist. “We were already to my mind short-staffed to begin with, and now it’s going to be even tougher.” “If you cut a quarter of the newsgathering staff and tell the others that remain that you may cut again, how can you possibly motivate people to do their jobs to the best of their abilities?” she asks. And so when she landed a reporting job at the Beacon in 1988, Ethridge says, “I was thrilled.”īut the deep cuts in the Beacon Journal’s newsroom announced last week - one-fourth will be laid off between now and October - have hit Ethridge hard. Her brother was managing editor of Knight Ridder’s Charlotte Observer for much of the 1980s. The reporter has skills for crunching basic census data, building relationships, creating multimedia and telling great stories.Mary Ethridge grew up with Knight Ridder, and with the Akron Beacon Journal, where her father was editor. The beat focuses on income inequality, poverty, jobs, housing, redevelopment, and efforts by residents to overcome other obstacles identified in our 2019 “This is Akron” series. From 2007 to 2017, roughly 2,700 refugees from Bhutan arrived in Akron. This reporter covers underrepresented communities, including African Americans (who earn 53 cents for every dollar white residents earn) and immigrants who are coming to our coverage area. She is from the Kurdish region of Turkey and was raised in The Netherlands and upstate New York. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of Journalism and she received an M.A. Before journalism, Bayram worked as a high-school writing teacher in Brooklyn, New York, and as a book editor for a European experimental arts non-profit organization, where she collaborated on several anthologies that examine the role of culture in contemporary political movements. She was an invited speaker to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 2020 Sharing Knowledge Conference on a panel about the intersection of public health and mass incarceration. Her reporting on Mississippi’s sentencing laws and efforts to prevent the state from demolishing a Jackson landmark earned Bayram two first-place awards from the Associated Press. Previously, Bayram was a staff reporter at the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi, where she covered local government and criminal justice. Seyma Bayram covers minority and immigrant communities for the Akron Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio.
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