Faced with steep declines in advertising revenue, Dow Jones & Co., the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, is reorganizing some of its operations across Europe and Asia to further reduce costs, moves that will result in the layoffs of dozens of news staffers at the WSJ, according to people familiar with the matter. The Budapest office of the WSJ will also be closed.
“The Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones, is moving toward creating continentwide filing and reporting hubs in cities like London and Barcelona to deal with regional newswire operations previously handled by individual bureaus," the WSJ cited unnamed sources as saying.
As part of that effort, the U.S.-based newspaper will be closing some international offices and paring back in some coverage areas, they added.
The exact scope of the job cuts wasn’t immediately clear as the process is ongoing, but the cutbacks will affect bureaus in numerous countries, the people said.
A Dow Jones spokeswoman would not comment on specifics, but said the moves were part of a broader reorganization review the company announced in late 2016.
“This is ongoing work as part of WSJ2020 program announced last year. We remain committed to covering the regions and will continue to do so robustly," the company said in a statement.
Last year, Dow Jones, a unit of News Corp, announced plans for a substantial revamp of the print newspaper and offered buyouts to employees across the company, while warning of possible involuntary layoffs, the WSJ reminded.
The company also announced a review of operations, dubbed WSJ 2020, to come up with a plan for the next three years to rebalance revenue streams amid significant industrywide declines in print advertising.
The WSJ added that in the quarter that ended in September, News Corp said domestic print ad revenue at the Journal had fallen 21% year on year, stung by declines in financial and technology advertising. News Corp is scheduled to announce earnings for the quarter that ended in December on 9 February.
Dow Jones, which includes the Journal, Dow Jones Newswires, Barron’s, MarketWatch, Factiva, Financial News and a number of professional business units, has 4,400 employees in total, of which nearly 1,400 are news staffers.
In 2015, the company cut over 100 jobs and closed a number of bureaus in Europe and editorial products around the globe amid a shift of resources toward digital initiatives and core coverage areas.
Dow Jones &Co., the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is closing its Budapest bureau as part of its downsizing in Europe and Asia. We are very sad about this but will always be proud to have been part of the DJ/WSJ family
, WSJ’s Budapest staffer Margit Fehér said in a Facebook post.
The building of the parent company, News Corporation in New York in 2016.
