The Buzz On Business
NEWSPAPER OFFERS BUYOUTS: The Sacramento Bee is offering voluntary buyouts to a majority of its full-time employees in the latest round of cost-cutting at the newspaper. Publisher Cheryl Dell said buyouts are being offered to 55 percent of the paper's full-time employees and a smaller number of part-timers, including most newsroom employees. Dell said ad revenue is down more than 22 percent this year at The McClatchy Co.'s papers in California and Florida. Sacramento-based McClatchy, which announced a wage freeze almost two weeks ago, owns 30 daily newspapers nationwide. The Modesto Bee offered all its full-time employees buyouts last week, and the Sacramento paper's move Monday comes on top of the elimination of 86 jobs there in June. The Fresno Bee on Monday offered buyouts to employees. The offer is open to most of The Bee's full-time workers. It includes severance pay and extended medical coverage. The move comes after a June layoff of 44 workers in Fresno. Also, the company closed the Clovis Independent and South Valley Bee weekly publications.
MGM 'NOT FOR SALE': Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. said Monday it is "not for sale" after a report appeared in BusinessWeek that MGM's owners wanted to sell the movie company for $5.2 billion. The studio was taken private for nearly $5 billion in 2005 by Providence Equity Partners, TPG, Sony Corp. of America and Comcast Corp. The company said its owners were committed to growing the studio and denied there was an asking price. MGM did say, however, that it has retained Goldman Sachs to enhance its long-term capital structure, primarily because some $3.7 billion in debt needs to be repaid in 2012, said MGM spokesman Jeff Pryor. That debt begins amortizing in 2011, which means that the amount owed will begin to increase, he said. Last year, it made $558 million from its 4,000-title film library, but has yet to deliver a big hit.
NETFLIX VICTIM OF BAD HARDWARE: Netflix Inc. is blaming a faulty piece of computer hardware for a breakdown that delayed millions of shipments to the online DVD rental service's customers earlier this month. "We've taken steps to fortify our shipping system with the acquisition of additional equipment and worked with our vendors to verify we're in good shape elsewhere," Mike Osier, Netflix's technology chief, wrote on the company's Web site. The explanation, posted late last week, marked the first time Netflix identified the cause of an outage that prevented the Los Gatos-based company's 55 shipping centers from processing rental requests from Aug. 12-14. The worst outage in Netflix's nine-year history affected about one-third of the service's 8.4 million subscribers.
BEE NEWS SERVICES
Figuratively Speaking
50: Percentage of advertising and marketing executives who said a colleague has tried to make them look bad on the job, according to a poll by The Creative Group.
70: Percentage of professionals sabotaged by a co-worker who said it's best to confront the offender directly.
JOHN MacINTYRE, UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
This story was originally published August 26, 2008 at 12:31 AM with the headline "The Buzz On Business."