R.G. Griffing, editor of the San Antonio Lightning, confirmed persistent rumors today that our local Hearst-owned daily would be cutting jobs again this year to compensate for declining revenues. Read the leaked memo to Express-News employees here. Griffing told the Current he confirmed the document’s authenticity with E-N publisher Tom Stephenson — the first time Stephenson’s taken his call, he says. (The Current has a call in to Stephenson, too.) In the meantime, we’re pleased to have correctly decoded Editor Bob Rivard’s self-congratulatory Sunday editorial as damage control.
All needling aside, it’s not good news to hear that our daily’s newsroom may be suffering more cuts — absent signs that the blogosphere is taking up original reporting en masse, we still need our ground scribes, here and across the way.
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2008.