Paper cuts: as about 80 employees--and the new owner--of the Durham Herald-Sun learned, they can be painful.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: FEATURE

We didn't fire everybody," Bob Ashley, the executive editor of The Herald-Sun, says with a nervous chuckle. "They're out on assignment." The newsroom of Durham's daily newspaper is nearly empty. Fluorescent lights give a sickly green cast to the warren of paper-strewn desks. Blinds are drawn, sealing out time of day and turn of season.

Like beehives, newsrooms tend to be utilitarian spaces animated by their occupants--buzzing when filled with caffeine-stoked reporters, still after deadline. But the emptiness here seems grim. Seventeen--one in five--of this newsroom's occupants were let go the first week of January. Overall, a slightly larger percentage--about 80 of 351 employees--lost their jobs.

The cuts began Jan. 3, the day Paducah, Ky.-based Paxton Media Group Inc. closed its purchase of The Herald-Sun, which had been locally owned for more than a century. They proceeded with callous dispatch. Axed staff were forbidden to gather their belongings and escorted to their cars. One top executive was ordered to stop writing an e-mail to his boss. It didn't matter--Paxton already had canned the publisher.

The sale and firings generated media coverage out of proportion to their economic impact. The region's dominant newspaper, The News & Observer in Raleigh, and the alternative Independent Weekly in Durham larded their pages with stories, publishing more than a dozen during the next several weeks. A TV station posted a truck and reporter across the street Jan. 3 to broadcast live reports.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Why so much attention for such a small layoff? After all, the state's manufacturers have bled tens of thousands of jobs the past decade. Vanity likely contributed, with reporters and editors assuming everybody thought the loss of journalism jobs as tragic as they did. So did self-interest: touting a competitor's travails. Plus, it probably scared them a bit, driving home the point that a college degree and clean fingernails no longer provide job security. As the state's textile, furniture and tobacco workers know--and their downsized white-collar brethren have learned--jobs are only as secure as the next profit-and-loss statement.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Now Ashley and his boss, new publisher Bob Childress, will be the ones looking over their shoulders. Many Herald-Sun survivors say they distrust Paxton. And the competition--especially the fourfold-bigger N&O--smells blood. The Herald-Sun, with a weekday circulation of more than 50,000, is the largest of the 29 newspapers Paxton owns, and the company paid a hefty price--an estimated $110 million to $120 million--for it. But the paper, like most U.S. newspapers, has been losing circulation much of the last decade. Paducah is watching.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Ashley and Childress, seated in the publisher's roomy corner office, have just spent an hour explaining why The Herald-Sun couldn't have survived without the layoffs. "The paper was losing money and was heavily overstaffed," Childress says...