Spain’s top daily El Pais chops one-third of staff

Picture taken on Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2012, of an issue of Spain’s top daily newspaper El Pais in a bar in Madrid. El Pais announced Tuesday that it will lay off about 150 staff and cut others’ pay as it struggles to survive falls in sales and advertising revenues. AFP PHOTO/DOMINIQUE FAGET

MADRID—Spain’s leading daily El Pais is axing one-third of its staff and slashing salaries as it battles a growing media crisis, employees said Tuesday.

El Pais, part of the Prisa media group, announced there would be 128 layoffs and 21 early retirements, bringing the total cut to 149, a staff works committee statement said.

All staff take a 15-percent pay cut, it said, describing the plan as “mean.” Those laid off will get 20 days’ pay for each year worked up, going back a maximum of 12 years.

The blow to the 466 staff at El Pais, born May 4, 1976, in the post-Franco transition to democracy, is a confirmation of deepening troubles in Spanish media, which have cut nearly 8,000 jobs since 2008.

Newspapers, radio and television are struggling with a crisis that has lowered sales and drained advertising. At the same time they are confronted with the rise of online news where profits are hard to come by.

El Pais staff blame not only the economic and media crises but also the management of the newspaper.

Prisa group chairman Juan Luis Cebrian, who first broke the news to senior editors and staff representatives on Friday, came in for heavy criticism from staff.

El Pais workers voted 303 to 1 in favor of a motion to censure Cebrian for “his lack of loyalty to the staff and his harmful management as chairman,” said another works committee statement Monday.

They also voted heavily in favor of authorizing the works committee to call a strike and called on Cebrian to “return a large portion of the millions of euros he has earned in the last years.”

Prisa accounts show Cebrian made more than 13 million euros in cash and shares last year including a large compensation payment for his role in the recapitalization and refinancing of the group.

“You cannot say you are very sad because you have to fire your friends at El Pais when you are making that kind of money,” said the head of the El Pais works committee, Manuel Gonzalez.

Prisa’s management notes that its directors’ salaries are voted on annually by shareholders, and that El Pais accounts for less than 10 percent of the global group’s revenues.

El Pais says staff numbers have remained stable since 2007, and each employee costs the paper an average of 88,000 euros a year.

“We are not going to make the same newspaper with less resources. What is needed is a transformation,” the newspaper’s director Javier Moreno was quoted as saying in a company statement Friday.

Prisa, the largest Spanish media group, announced a net loss of 53 million euros ($69 million) in the second quarter of 2012. Heavily in debt, it announced in January last year 2,500 job cuts, or about 18 percent of the staff, in Spain, Portugal and Latin America.

It is only one of many media groups suffering in the crisis.

Spain’s second-largest daily, the conservative paper El Mundo, announced this summer a cost-cutting plan that affects about 130 staff, according to management.

“It is not just an economic crisis but also a crisis of the economic model for news media. We have to adapt and that means becoming profitable on the Internet,” said El Mundo deputy director Inaki Gil.

Laying off the most experienced journalists impacts on the training of newcomers, said the head of the Federation of Spanish Journalists’ Associations, Elsa Rodriguez.

“It leads to a loss of rigor, a loss of quality,” she said. “Weak journalism leads to impoverished democracy.”

According to the federation, 7,901 journalists have lost their jobs since the start of the crisis in 2008, including 3,039 since January this year.