The cuts amount to about 17 percent of the newspaper's editorial staff of 200. They were achieved through attrition, buyouts and layoffs, Managing Editor Rick Hall said Tuesday.
Hall declined to say how many employees volunteered to leave the LDS Church-owned paper or left involuntarily.
Employees who left voluntarily and involuntarily will get 1.5 weeks of pay for each year of service, plus three additional weeks of pay, Hall said. Layoffs were effective immediately. No more are planned.
The paper said it will no longer print a separate edition for Utah County, but will continue to operate a bureau with fewer people. Business news will be moved inside the A section, the paper said on its Web site.
The Sunday arts and travel sections will be combined into one section, the paper said.
"We are going to focus [on the Internet] like every other paper. We are going to focus on the news that people need and also the news that people want. We just have to be more responsive and continue to work hard," Hall said.
In June, the News said it would eliminate up to 35 jobs because of falling advertising revenue mostly because of fewer classified ads. The paper said ad revenue had declined by 32 percent since January as advertisers sought out other media, including the Internet.
"I think we no longer have a monopoly on being the gatherers of news and I think we no longer have a monopoly on advertising now. . . . There are lots of ways people can produce news and there are lots of ways people can advertise products," Hall said.
Also last month, the News said it had sold several properties in downtown Salt Lake City to help finance the severance packages it would pay to laid-off employees.
The properties, which were jointly owned until last year by the News and The Salt Lake Tribune, were sold to the real-estate arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for slightly more than $3 million.
The Tribune's staff of about 170 people is shrinking through attrition but the paper is not planning any layoffs, Editor Nancy Conway said.
To rein in expenses, The Tribune will also reduce the number of pages it prints daily, though no decision about how many pages has been made, Conway said.
pbeebe@sltrib.com
