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The E. W. Scripps Company started a fresh round of buyout offers and layoffs on Tuesday as part of a broader strategy to address its sizable debt load by cutting down on employment-related expenditures.
According to multiple employees familiar with the matter, the layoff notices and buyout offers are impacting nearly all Scripps-owned stations across the country, including key markets like Detroit, Cincinnati, Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix and West Palm Beach.
Layoff notices have been received by some non-union technical workers in information technology and broadcast engineering departments, according to a knowledgeable source. Union-backed reporters, photographers and graphic designers have received buyout offers instead of layoff notices because of terms found in their collective bargaining agreements with the company, two other sources said.
The layoffs come about a week before Scripps is scheduled to report is third quarter (Q3) earnings, and about two weeks after the company offered its Chief Executive Officer Adam Symson to hand-selected publications for softball interviews about the company’s use of artificial intelligence to evolve its local news products.
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Many Scripps-owned news producing stations have switched to a new production technique internally called “Stacker,” where newsroom managers assemble recorded news segments into a 30-minute or 60-minute newscast.
In at least one Scripps newsroom, two producers said they weren’t permitted to use the new Stacker technique because they were reassigned to write and develop content for Scripps’ website and 24-hour news streams. One other producer complained that the Stacker process was “unstable” because it introduced significant errors into the workflow, some of which were visible to viewers in their news broadcasts later in the day.
But Stacker is being pushed across Scripps-owned stations because the company sees it as a way to cut down on costs, two people said. Many producers fear their jobs could be on the chopping block in the coming weeks and months as more stations evolve their products using the technique. Some producers at stations that adopted the Stacker process received buyout offers on Tuesday.
In addition to news production roles, some Scripps-owned stations have also cut roles in engineering and marketing departments, according to people familiar with the matter. The precise number of cuts across Scripps’ local stations was unknown, nor was it clear if corporate roles were impacted.
A spokesperson for Scripps has not yet returned an inquiry seeking comment on the layoffs and buyout offers.
Scripps executed a similar round of layoffs in September as part of a broader restructuring of its news-producing local TV stations, which are now overseen by regional general managers who are assigned outlets across 11 different regional territories.
