Advertising slump during virus crisis hits media jobs

Media redundancies, partial layoffs and managerial wage cuts are on the rise as advertising markets implode, despite customers showing an ever stronger appetite for information on the coronavirus crisis.

In France, several newspapers, including Le Parisien, have placed staffers on partial unemployment, notably in services where the virus has forced coverage to be stripped right back.

Sports daily L'Equipe, which publishes a paper seven days a week as well as a website, has been particularly hard hit, furloughing staff as most of the world's sporting competitions lie idle.

Regional daily Paris-Normandie, already struggling to stay afloat, has been placed in judicial liquidation.

In Britain, The Economist magazine has said it is laying off 90 people in support roles while The Guardian is furloughing 100 non-editorial staff in response to tumbling ad revenues.

Staff with Italy's state news agency ANSA meanwhile held a 48-hour strike to protest at an emergency plan to make a string of cuts.

US media have likewise not been immune to the market consequences of the crisis.

Conde Nast, publisher of the likes of Vogue, Wired, or New Yorker, has announced it is laying off 100 of its 6,000 staff and furloughing another 100. Fortune magazine has laid off 35 staff - around

one in ten - while cutting managerial salaries by 30 percent.

According to a New York Times analysis, the pandemic has seen 36,000 media workers either laid off, furloughed or forced to take a wage cut in a sector which had already endured years of belt tightening.

The Los Angeles Times - which according to internal correspondence published by the New York Times, has lost more than one third of its advertising revenues and expects that soon to rise beyond half - is slimming its support payroll by around 40.