TORONTO -
The staff at the National Post have been offered buyouts, the latest in a series of cross-Canada cuts at Postmedia newspapers as the chain's new owners try to cut operating costs.
Phyllise Gelfand, a spokeswoman for Postmedia Network Inc. confirmed that employees received a memo last Friday giving them one week to accept the voluntary buyouts, but added that not everyone who agrees to take the offer will be accepted.
"Voluntary buyouts are a tool that are available to operations as the undertake budget and strategy review for the new fiscal year," she said.
Under the plan, Post employees can get up to three weeks of pay for each year on the job up to a maximum of $125,000, according to an internal memo obtained by The Canadian Press.
The structural changes and issues facing our industry are causing us to review our operations and processes... Our focus is to improve the efficiency of our operations, reduce our costs, while positioning ourselves for the future," management wrote in a note to staff.
"Labour is our single largest cost," it said, adding that the buyouts are part of an effort to bring the chain's cost structure in line with a changing business model.
The National Post first started publishing in November of 1998, but many of the employees came over from the Southam newspaper chain.
The Postmedia consortium, which took over the chain earlier this year, is headed by National Post chief executive Paul Godfrey.
Godfrey has made it clear he wants the company to operate as a "digital-first newspaper" while still focusing on traditional print copies, which are a bigger revenue generator.
Before offering the buyouts to staff at its flagship paper, Postmedia began cutting jobs at its other daily newspapers earlier this month.
A voluntary buyout offer sent to full-time employees of the Ottawa Citizen offered four weeks of pay per year of service with a cap of $150,000, as well as medical and dental coverage for three months after the employee leaves.
Buyout offers were also sent to employees at the Victoria Times Colonist and other papers in the Pacific Newspaper Group -- the Province and the Vancouver Sun.
There have also been about 50 layoffs at the Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald.
The job cuts come a month and a half after the company -- with about 5,500 employees -- emerged from creditor protection.
The chain is Canada's largest in terms of circulation and is made up of the former Canwest dailies.
Earlier this year, Postmedia bought the papers from Canwest in a $1.1-billion deal. The company now owns 11 dailies and 26 community newspapers as well as many Internet properties including Canada.com.
The new company, backed by New York hedge fund Golden Tree Asset Management, holds some of Canada's largest daily newspapers.
The publications were known for generations as the Southam newspaper chain and were sold to Canwest in 2000 by Conrad Black's Hollinger group for $3.2 billion in a blockbuster deal that reshaped Canada's media industry.
Postmedia hopes to complete an initial public offering on the stock market before the end of the year.
