Fox's NY Duop Cuts 20

Twenty staffers at WNYW/WWOR New York lost their jobs Friday, reports the NY Daily News. The paper says the cuts came in the production, sales, facilities, finance and public affairs departments, and were not unexpected.

Richard Huff reports:

The reductions…come after months of talks with unions and buyout offers to off-camera workers.

The word is that 15 of those let go were at Ch. 5, the rest at Ch. 9.

For Ch. 9, the reductions come in advance of possible programming changes that could include trimming the 10 p.m. newscast to a half-hour and moving it to 11 o’clock.

There’s also been talk that the station could cut weekend newscasts as well.

A big theme in our new cover story on the perils (and the benefits) of stations pooling content is whether such alliances lead to layoffs. Execs from the Fox-NBC Local News Service pool told me layoffs have been going on for some time, thanks to the economy, and have not been a direct result of LNS as of yet.