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The Star-Ledger, New Jersey's largest daily newspaper, said today it is cutting 167 jobs, including 25 percent of the newsroom staff.

(Frances Micklow/The Star-Ledger)

By Mark Mueller and Ted Sherman/The Star-Ledger

They gathered in knots inside and outside the state’s largest newspaper, trading information in subdued tones. Copy editors and advertising reps. Reporters and clerks. Veterans of three decades and 20-somethings new to the business.

The layoffs imposed at The Star-Ledger today cut across all departments, decimating some and taking substantial chunks out of others. In all, 167 staffers — one third of the newspaper’s non-unionized employees — will lose their jobs.

In a newsroom of 156 — including reporters, editors, photographers, videographers and support staff — 40 positions will be cut, including one job left vacant by the recent departure of a staff writer. Some 250 unionized employees are not affected.

Layoffs had been expected since last week, when the newspaper’s owners announced the formation of a new company meant to better compete in the digital age.

NJ Advance Media will absorb employees from the The Star-Ledger, NJ.com and other newspapers owned by Advance Publications in New Jersey. In turn, the new company will provide content, advertising and marketing services to the newspapers and the website. The sales and marketing arm is to launch in June. NJ Advance Media will begin providing content in September.

Each of the newspapers, including the Times of Trenton, the South Jersey Times and the Express-Times of Easton, Pa., will remain distinct companies and will continue to publish seven days a week. In addition, The Star-Ledger will continue to publish Inside Jersey magazine.

Another 124 full- and part-time jobs were eliminated at the company’s weekly newspapers and at the dailies in Trenton, Easton, and South Jersey. At NJ.com, 15 of 77 employees were let go. The day’s toll across all Advance properties came to 306 layoffs.

In Newark, the losses cast a pall through The Star-Ledger building as employees learned their fates. Among the newsroom casualties: the remaining full-time business staff and multiple positions in sports, features, photos and news.

"It’s been a gut-wrenching day for the entire staff, and an obviously devastating one for those who have been laid off," said Amy Ellis Nutt, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2011 and who remains with the paper. "We saw this coming for some time, but you’re never fully prepared. The sad fact is, when all is said and done, The Star-Ledger will be much diminished for the loss of so many of our colleagues."

The moves come in response to a major transformation of the American media landscape. In the face of plummeting print advertising revenue, newspapers and magazines have hemorrhaged jobs, reduced days of publication or scaled back home delivery. Some publications have been shuttered altogether.

The Newhouse family, which owns dozens of newspapers across the country under the Advance Publications umbrella, has reacted with an aggressive embrace of digital-first journalism, which places a premium on continuous online updates, reader engagement and story-telling that harnesses the tools of the internet, including interactive graphics.

Some in the industry contend the primacy of digital news places too much emphasis on online hits at the expense of thoughtful, deeply reported stories and enterprise.

The Star-Ledger has gained a reputation for such coverage, winning three Pulitzer Prizes and a host of national awards over the past decade. In addition, the New Jersey Press Association has bestowed its General Excellence Award on the newspaper in each of the past four years.

Other Advance Publications properties, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Oregonian, have already undergone the transformation now underway at The Star-Ledger, to mixed reviews.

Matt Kraner, who has served as NJ.com’s president and who will become president of NJ Advance Media, sought to dispel worries about the quality of journalism once the new company launches.

"The staff we will have, the leadership we will have at NJ Advance Media, is going to be a high-quality staff of journalists, and there will be evidence of that once we launch," Kraner said in an interview today. "Our focus will be growing audience through quality."

Despite the cuts, Kraner said the number of reporters, photographers and videographers at the new operation will ultimately be larger than the news staffs of The Star-Ledger and NJ.com combined. NJ Advance Media will achieve that by offering jobs to journalists at other Advance properties in New Jersey and by hiring 27 fresh employees, he said.

At its peak, The Star-Ledger employed more than 350 journalists. But it has been steadily shedding jobs since 2008, when 151 newsroom employees accepted buyouts. Additional buyouts were offered in 2010, followed by the newspaper’s first layoffs last year. Thirty-four people, including 18 full-time newsroom employees, lost their jobs.

At the same time, the owners of the paper threatened to shut down the presses without significant concessions from production unions, which ultimately ratified new four-year contracts and agreed to buyout packages for at least 55 workers.

Advance Publications is privately held and does not publicly disclose earnings, but company officials say The Star-Ledger was on track to lose $19 million this year.

Star-Ledger Publisher Richard Vezza said such losses can’t be sustained.

"It’s pretty clear in today’s environment that the company needs to make a strong move into digital, and this is a strong move in that direction," he said.

Rick Edmonds, a newspaper analyst with the Florida-based Poynter Institute, a nonprofit group that educates journalists and publishes the Tampa Bay Times, said the Newhouses are making a big bet — and an uncertain one — that revenue from online advertising will one day eclipse print ad revenue, restoring profitability.

"They’re betting quite specifically that digital revenue will pick up steam," Edmonds said.

The problem, Edmonds said, is that digital ad revenue has fallen into retreat over the past five years and that news companies face intense competition for ad dollars from behemoths like Facebook and Twitter.

Kraner, NJ Advance Media’s president, said the growth of digital advertising has been strong at Advance in recent years.

"We’ve had robust growth, and we plan to continue to have robust growth in our digital advertising revenues," he said.

Kraner expressed optimism about the operation moving forward, saying growth will come from a larger online audience and that savings will be achieved by avoiding duplication.

As an example of savings, he pointed to a central production hub — a place where copy editors, designers and paginators work — that will put out all of the newspapers instead of each publication doing its own production. Kraner declined to say where the office would be located because its lease had not been finalized.

NJ Advance Media’s main newsroom will be in Woodbridge, with smaller news offices elsewhere in the state.

The Star-Ledger will remain a presence in Newark, though a vastly diminished one. The newspaper has been seeking to sell its building on Court Street. Vezza, the publisher, said he expects the remaining employees in Newark will be moved to a new location in the city later this year or early next year.

Most employees laid off today will not be let go immediately. As a condition of severance pay, they will be required to work until June or September, depending on their positions.

Employees who are not retained will receive severance equal to a week-and-a-half for each year of work at the newspaper, capped at 26 weeks, according to the information packets.

Other employees will receive offers to work at Penn Jersey Advance Central Services, another new company that will provide support in the areas of areas of circulation, information systems and technology, finance and accounting to NJ Advance Media, to the New Jersey newspapers and to the Express-Times.

Employees will have a week to decide if they will accept the offers. Some employees were given offers at lower salaries. They also are expected to pay more toward health care.

A small number of people will continue to be employees of The Star-Ledger. They include those who work on the editorial page, the newspaper’s metro columnists and the staff of Inside Jersey, The Star-Ledger's monthly magazine.

The Star-Ledger remains New Jersey’s largest daily newspaper, with a print circulation of 167,600 and 265,500 on Sunday, not including digital circulation, which boosts that to 285,200 daily and 369,700, based on audited numbers for the six-month period ending September 2013.

Kevin Whitmer, The Star-Ledger's editor, will serve as editor and vice president of content at NJ Advance Media. Lamar Graham, now NJ.com's chief content officer, will serve as a vice president of audience development.

Barb Chodos, currently NJ.com's general manager, and Steve Alessi, a vice president of sales for The Star-Ledger and NJ.com, will both serve as vice presidents of sales for the new media company.

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