The recent staffing cuts and consolidation of business functions at the Daily News follows a pattern established at other newspapers its Denver-based MediaNews Group parent owns. Just this year, the company reduced staff at its papers in Denver and San Jose, and employees of three papers in the San Francisco area were warned via memo in late October of pending layoffs. In the summer, the Denver Newspaper Agency, which runs business operations for MediaNews’s Denver Post, made cuts in its finance, human resources, and circulation departments. The cuts at the Daily News, which is part of MediaNews Group’s eight-newspaper Los Angeles Newspaper Group, will consolidate a number of business functions, a strategy outsiders say has been regularly employed by MediaNews group and steered by its Chief Executive Officer and Vice Chairman William Dean Singleton. Singleton runs a “lean ship” at other newspapers owned by MediaNews and streamlining the Los Angeles group of papers allows them to take advantage of economies of scale, said Kevin Roderick, editor of the L.A. Observed website. Los Angeles New Group President and Chief Executive Officer John McKeon declined to comment for this story. Last week, the media company announced that it was eliminating the position of publisher along with the directors of circulation, human resources and finance at the Daily News and assigning those responsibilities to executives already responsible for those areas at Los Angeles News Group. Four editorial positions were also eliminated. The editorial cuts came from the paper’s sports department and its Antelope Valley edition. The paper is expected this month to scale back its daily Santa Clarita wrap to Saturday and Sunday only, and its daily Antelope Valley wrap to Sunday only. News from the Antelope Valley and Santa Clarita is expected to be included in the main section of the paper. McKeon will take over the responsibilities of Daily News publisher formerly held by Tracy Rafter, who joined the newspaper two years ago. The moves represent a streamlining across LANG to make use of resources they can share, said Roderick at L.A. Observed. “Maybe they can share them wisely,” Roderick said. Brent Hopkins, a Daily News reporter and one of two union stewards, said that McKeon told him that additional layoffs were not planned although the possibility could not be ruled out. Before the recent cuts, the union represented 110 non-management employees. When rumors began to circulate three to four weeks ago about potential layoffs, Hopkins said he and the other union steward met with editor Ron Kaye to discuss the situation. The union contract with the paper does not set an established number of positions and the union was not consulted about which editorial staffers would be let go. The union did facilitate a voluntary layoff that resulted in one newsroom position being saved, Hopkins said. The day the cuts were made, Kaye had a meeting with the editorial staff during which he explained the challenges faced by the paper and the importance of working together, Hopkins said. The atmosphere around the newsroom has been mixed, Hopkins added, with one veteran editor telling him that Kaye’s talk was one of the best he’s heard. “It made me feel like there is hope and they didn’t just arbitrarily cut people or that they didn’t have a plan to get us out of this mess,” Hopkins said. The staff reductions come at the same time when circulation numbers are declining for the Daily News and other MediaNews papers in the region. For the six-month period ending Sept. 30 Daily News circulation dropped 10.7 percent to 151,215 daily copies and 12.7 percent to 170,434 Sunday copies. But the Daily News was already getting by with a small staff scrambling to get daily news, and any further changes in staff could cut into the paper’s enterprise reporting, Roderick said. “I would hate to see that suffer anymore,” he added. The cuts are indicative of what has been happening in the industry as a whole. The Los Angeles Times has also reduced staff in recent years through layoffs and buyouts. The pressure for profits does affect the impact that newspapers can have, said Manley Witten, an instructor in the journalism department at California State University at Northridge. “With fewer reporters and fewer editors it’s hard to serve the communities we are supposed to serve,” Witten said. In the class he teaches on editing, the students notice that common ownership leads to a similar look in their publications, be it newsprint or online. Recently, Witten’s students were looking at newspaper websites, including two from LANG and commented on how much the two sites looked alike, he said. “Even on the Internet where we’re supposed to have multiple voices and limitless bandwidth we find that numerous sites are identical as a result of being owned by the same company,” Witten said. He added that, as a journalism teacher, it’s challenging to counter layoff news with encouragement and not paint a bleak picture for the students. “What I try to remind them is there are 1,500 daily newspapers in the country,” Witten said. “They might have to leave Southern California but there are opportunities and just because a company owns multiple papers doesn’t inherently make them bad.”