How thousands of employees were reduced to ???

During the big newspaper workforce reduction in December, two Gannett dailies each cut fewer than 75 jobs. But the consequences for one were far greater, a fact we understood right away because of a crucial piece of data that's no longer readily available -- total employment at each site.

The Des Moines Register cut 70 jobs, while Michigan's Battle Creek Enquirer cut 50. Those Register cuts were out of a workforce of 800 people, however. The Battle Creek paper employed just 105 it shuttered production, and moved printing to the Lansing State Journal.

You'll see a lot of ??? in lieu of workforce totals in our new list of paper-by-paper job reductions. That's because Corporate has now removed nearly all the workforce figures that were once listed on each paper's official profile page -- along with the publisher's name, a street address, and other vital information. (The workforce figures appear untouched on the TV station profile pages.)

Fact is, many of the newspaper employment figures were incorrect, because they weren't updated after the August layoffs. Maybe Corporate decided it was too much work to update pages after each round of cuts. Reflecting the reality of the situation, someone simply erased thousands of jobs from public view. Now n building our new list, I'll do my best to restore those numbers.

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[Image: screenshot of Enquirer homepage]