Memo two from Sun Senior Editor Kim Guimarin

Memo one from Sun Senior Editor Kim Guimarin

May 9 Memo from Fred Hamilton

Dear Fellow Employees:

We are quickly approaching the end of our current fiscal year (June 30, 2011). Despite efforts to reduce our operating expenses to offset the decline in revenue, sustainable revenue growth continues to elude us. As a consequence, we are compelled to take further steps to meet our operating goals. Today, we are announcing the following actions:

1. Suspension of Vacation Accruals beginning this coming Sunday, May 15, 2011 and running through July 2, 2011. This action will not impact any vacation time that you have earned or vacation time that you have planned. Further details follow below.

2. Mandatory Five-Day Furloughs to begin May 16, 2011 and to be completed by July 2, 2011. The five-day furloughs may be taken weekly or daily increments as scheduled with your supervisor. However, exempt employees who chose to take unpaid furlough days rather than vacation, the unpaid furlough days must be taken as a full-week within the same pay (calendar) week period. If you have any available vacation time, you may use up to five earned vacation days to substitute for up to all five furlough days. Further details are provided below.

With respect to the temporary suspension of vacation accruals, please understand a few important
points:

1. During the 39 day period from May 15, 2011 through and June 30, 2011, you will be earning fewer vacation days than we all had anticipated during this fiscal year. As an illustration, those employees with an annual vacation benefit of two weeks will earn 1-1/2 fewer days. Those employees with a three-week benefit will earn 2-1/4 fewer days. Those employees with a four-week benefit will earn 3 fewer days.

2. You will not lose any vacation time already earned/accrued, but not used through May 14, 2011.

3. You are encouraged to use any vacation time you have already accrued, subject to advance request to and approval by your immediate supervisor. Any vacation time used between May 1, 2011 and June 30, 2011 can be credited toward any of the five furlough days.

4. Accommodations will be made for employees with pre-approved vacations whose vacations balances are adversely impacted by this change. Specifically, with supervisor approval, those employees may be permitted to incur a negative vacation balance.

With respect to the five-day furloughs, please note the following:

1. Furlough days may be taken in weekly and/or daily increments (see Mandatory Five-Day Furlough description presented above) and all days must be scheduled in advance with your supervisor. Exempt staffers must take their furlough days during the same pay week. Exempt employees may combine vacation days with his/her furlough BUT within the same pay (calendar week).

2. Up to five furlough days may be taken as vacation days but such an option is voluntary and must also be scheduled in advance.

3. Supervisors will be asked to extend every reasonable consideration as to when an employee would prefer his/her furlough days to be scheduled and taken.

4. As a modest offset for those employees who are included in this furlough action, we are offering those employees up to five, additional paid holidays to be used during the coming fiscal year. You will be provided a list of twelve additional paid holidays from which you may chose five (5) to be scheduled and taken. Any of the five days must be scheduled and approved by the employee’s supervisor in advance. Those “bonus” holidays must be taken on the specific holiday date. However, accommodations will be made for those employees for whom that date does not coincide with a regularly scheduled work day. Lastly, an employee must be actively employed on the specific holiday date to be paid for that day (excluded are persons who are absent from work due to an unpaid leave and those who have left the employ of the company). Further details will be forthcoming from our Human Resources staff.

Although the temporary suspension of vacation accruals and the furloughs are not welcomed, they are both the less disruptive means of reducing our operating expenses. We also continued freeze the hiring for some vacancies in an effort to avoid more painful actions and have already consolidated some jobs where it has been prudent to do so. However, today's action does not preclude other cost reduction measures including and not limited to reductions-in-force. At this time such actions will likely be limited and will continue to be an expense reduction alternative until the economy and our performance measurably improves.

As expressed in the past, we regret any inconvenience this action may cause you but until our financial challenges are clearly behind us, such actions are necessary.

Thank you for your understanding, continued hard work and dedication.

Sincerely,

Fred Hamilton
Chief Executive Officer

Memo from Fred Hamilton

Memo from Fred Hamilton

Memo from Frank Pine

Just a heads up that we’re planning to make a fairly significant change to all of our websites in the very near future: We’ll be switching our commenting functions from Topix to Facebook. BANG is already doing this on insidebayarea.com, and it’s a substantial improvement over what we have here in that it makes commenting much easier, and by linking the comments to users’ Facebook accounts, it cuts down the more objectionable anonymous comments. While the traditional thinking is that requiring registration or real names with comments reduces traffic, insidebayarea.com has actually seen an increase in traffic and referral traffic from Facebook.

We’re confident that we’ll also see an increase in traffic, especially since our structure pushes users off of our site to Topix, and we don’t accrue the value of that traffic at all.

I’ll provide more information as it comes in. We’re partnering with BANG on this and still working out some of the details and tracking mechanisms we’ll be using to implement this and measure the results.

ALSO: By the end of the day today, we will have submitted all mobile news apps to the app store for approval. In the coming week, we’ll be assigning control panel accounts to site managers and transferring control of the apps to each property. I’ll reach out separately to online editors to share more information about this as well as our preliminary work on tablet apps.

Any questions, let me know.

Memo from LANG

July 1, 2009
Colleagues,

In April we announced that LANG would be suspending the accrual of vacation benefits. This measure was taken in an effort to further reduce our operating expenses. That announcement stated that the vacation accrual suspension would be in effect until July 4, 2009.

While we have made progress, we continue to realize a decline in revenue. Subsequently, it has become necessary for us to extend the suspension of vacation benefits accrual through September 26, 2009 (the first quarter of the 2010 fiscal year), at which time we will re-evaluate our situation. In addition to this extension, we are requiring all employees to do one of the following: take five days of paid vacation by September 26, OR take five days of unpaid furlough by September 26. Below is a breakdown of what this means to most of you:

For those with 40 or more hours in their vacation bank, simply take a week of vacation. Because we are heading into the summer months when most people utilize their vacation time, this option should prove to have little or no impact on the majority of employees.

For those with less than 40 hours in their vacation bank, you can do a combination of both options. An example for a full-time employee who works 40 hours per week; you have 24 hours accrued vacation, you can use your three vacation days PLUS take two unpaid furlough days to equal the total five-day requirement.

For those with little or no vacation hours in their vacation bank, you will need to take unpaid furlough equaling five days. Non-exempt employees have the option of spreading their furlough days over several pay periods or they may take all of the time off within a one-week period. It is up to you, but the time must be taken by September 26.

Exempt employees who do not have the equivalent of five days’ vacation in their vacation bank do not have the option of combining vacation with furlough. If you are exempt, and do not have at least one week of vacation, you must take a week of furlough. Your week of furlough must be taken at one time (all within the same week), and you cannot perform any work during that week. This requirement may not apply to some sales positions, so if you are in advertising sales, please see your manager for guidance.

We regret the need to implement these changes in order to meet our financial challenges. It is our belief that this is the least painful way to work towards regaining our financial footing, while allowing us to mitigate mandated furloughs for most employees or, far worse, reducing staffing levels (layoffs).

If you have questions or need to further discuss how this pertains to you specifically, please see your manager, department head, or human resources department.

Thank you for your understanding. Your hard work and dedication have been instrumental in weathering this economic storm.

Memo from Steve Hunt

Good afternoon,

As you know, the copy desk from the San Bernardino Sun and the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin will be joining our copy desk on Monday, Jan. 26 as we create an Inland Division Universal Desk. This desk will be responsible for copy editing every story and designing and paginating every page in our three newspapers, as well as the Sun and the Bulletin. It is an enormous task, one that requires incredible cooperation and planning. That cooperation will involve every reporter and editor on our city desk, features desk, business desk and sports desk.

One of the challenges in this venture is that three papers now share the same off-the-floor deadlines. The Whittier Daily News, Sun and Bulletin all are due off the floor at 10 p.m. Experience tells us that won't work very well when we join our desks into one. So, we're going to adjust two of those deadlines to give our designers and copy editors enough of a gap to ensure we make deadline for all three papers every night. Beginning Jan. 26, the deadline for the Sun will be 9:30 p.m. and the deadline for Whittier will be 9:45 p.m. The Bulletin deadline will remain 10 p.m. Pasadena's deadline will remain 10:45 p.m., while Tribune's will change to 11:30 p.m.

But those aren't the only changes. Because many of our copy editors and designers will be working 1:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. shifts, we also are going to change the copy deadlines for reporters at all five papers. Beginning Monday, Jan. 19, all inside A section copy for the three SGVN papers will be due at 1:30 p.m. A1 copy for Whittier and Pasadena will be due at 5 p.m., while A1 copy for the Tribune will be due at 5:30 p.m. This will provide us with the necessary copy flow so copy editors and designers can meet their page flow deadlines. For those of you who have never worked on a copy desk, what this does is prevent a logjam of pages on deadline, which would inevitably lead to late press starts and late delivery of papers. Of course, we realize there will be live and late stories from time to time. Special allowances will be made for those, as well as breaking news. But the hope here is to set up a system that provides for greater copy flow earlier in the day to ensure every paper in the Inland Division makes deadline and every reader gets his or her paper on time.

Naturally, those of you making photo assignments will want to try to line those up as early as you can too. We have more leeway on A1 than inside the A section, but it greatly helps designers to have art early in their shifts. Again, exceptions will be made for live events and breaking news.

Also next week, we will have one-hour earlier deadlines on Tuesday because of the inauguration. Circulation plans to print several thousand extra copies to sell on the street and wants to make sure those papers get to delivery people earlier. So on Tuesday night, Whittier's deadline is 9 p.m., Pasadena's is 9:45 p.m. and Tribune's is 10:45 p.m. For that night only, we'll want normal inside A copy by 2 p.m. and everything else by 4 p.m.

Thanks very much for your help. And while I am at it, I will echo Frank's comments about the good work you have all done recently. The Rose, our Jan. 2 parade wrap and the other special sections we've done recently were exceptional. But I am most proud that we had incredibly strong papers throughout that busy period and have kept that going. These are trying times for newspapers and most other businesses. But I am so proud of all of you and the papers we publish every day.

Thanks very much,

Steve

Memo from Jim Janiga

Dear Fellow Employees,

Today our company is announcing the suspension of all annual merit increases to be effective February 1, 2009. We are not certain how long this suspension will last but are hopeful that the coming 2010 Fiscal Year operating budget will allow the suspension to be lifted. The new fiscal year begins July 1, 2009. No guarantees but that is our goal. In the meantime, all merit increases earned and due before February 1, 2009 will be processed.

Under this suspension all increases earned and due on and after February 1, will be suspended for at least five months. For example, and based on that anticipated time period, if you are due a merit increase this coming March 2009, that merit increase will be delayed five months to August 2009. If you just receive a merit increase this past December 2008, your next merit increase would be due May 2010. Your Human Resources representatives can assist with any questions or concerns you may have.

Suspending merit increases will not reduce our current expenses but it does help us contain our expenses for a period of time. So obviously more needs to be considered and implemented, if warranted. To this end we are asking everyone to share with us any suggestions you might have regarding cuts in our operating expenses that are measurable, timely and sensible; cuts that can help us avoid more layoffs and are cuts you may be willing to accept. We need your input.

Unfortunately we cannot promise there will not be layoffs in the future but we should always endeavor to do what we can to prevent as many as possible. Obviously, growing revenue is our best option but until revenue streams stabilize and grow, reducing our expenses will continue to be a painful but necessary focus. Some early suggestions have included mandatory furloughs, cuts in our vacation benefits, pay cuts (temporary and/or permanent), reduced work schedules, allowing volunteer reduction in hours while retaining most full-time benefits, and more.

No one has THE answer and no one should naively speculate what others may not be willing to do to help save a co-worker's job... even where there are no guarantees. We would be foolish not to ask for your support, ideas, focus and commitment.

Everyone needs to be engaged. We need to support each other. We can and will make a difference. Times are tough but we are tougher. Your ideas are important to all of us.

Thank you for your attention and thank you for your continuing input and loyalty.

Sincerely,
Jim Janiga
Senior Vice President - Human Resources