ABC News Lays Off 25% of Staff

There was a time when I watched “World News with Peter Jennings” almost every evening to understand the American affairs and culture.

As I get to understand the U.S. systems and broaden my perspective, I’ve been disappointed at the quality of the U.S. media reporting to a large degree. For instance, what role has the major media played to enlighten the public on the current state of the U.S. economy and what needs to be done to get it back on track? The underlying problems are complex including media consolidation.

Of course, the same question can go for other countries as well.

As in other sectors, there seems to be a lack of integrity to one extent or another in the field of journalism.

Journalism is close to my heart for various reasons.

From the New York Times:

If “Good Morning America” or “World News” look any different in the coming weeks, it might be because ABC News is employing nearly 400 fewer people.

Earlier this week, ABC News, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, largely completed one of the most drastic rounds of budget cutbacks at a television news operation in decades, affecting roughly a quarter of the staff. The cutbacks promise to change ABC both on- and off-camera.

The business of news is a particularly ugly one these days, and news outlets across the country have trimmed their staffs. But it is exceedingly rare for a newspaper or a network to shed a quarter of its employees all at once, as ABC has done.

In the future, more segments will be reported, filmed and edited by jacks-of-all-trades, called digital journalists, internally. They may lack the polish that a traditional four-person crew can provide, but they are much less expensive. Sometimes two of the digital journalists will team up for reports.

Inside ABC News, it is widely believed that the cutbacks were mandated by Disney. The cuts came shortly after CBS News, one of the other three network news divisions, lost about 70 staff members. The third division, NBC, is in a much better financial position because it has a cable news arm, MSNBC.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/business/media/01abc.html?partner=rss&emc=rss