Daily News and The Signal announce layoffs and cut services to the Santa Clarita area.

While many will complain about the local Santa Clarita newspapers, they are really the only source of information on many topics and at times have presented some very well thought out articles on the goings-on in the Santa Clarita Valley.

Well, wave bye-bye to what little we’ve had up to now, because both The Signal and the Daily News have announced layoffs of the reporters for the Santa Clarita area. The Daily News will also be eliminating the separate section for the Santa Clarita Valley that they’ve included as part of our papers for so long.

At the Daily News, they used to have 3 reporters and 1 photographer for the Antelope Valley area, and there were 3 reporters, 1 clerk, 1 photographer and 1 bureau cheif in the Santa Clarita area. Now there will only be 1 reporter in each office, and these two offices will share 1 editor. There may be other related cutbacks as well, but The Paper Trail’s author (and source of this info) was not privvy to that information.

Some of the Daily News employees will be offered new positions in the Woodland Hills office, but that doesn’t help the news reporting in the Santa Clarita Valley area.

Meanwhile, The Signal has started layoffs as well, with reporter Kristopher Daams included as part of their casualties.

Both papers are of course citing decreased circulation revenues (or fewer paper deliveries) in their decisions. Seems the switch to online media is affecting more people and businesses than people thought, huh? Many people just read the online versions of the newspapers, or use Google Reader to filter the news from various sources for them instead of subscribing to the print versions these days. (For those who would assume I’m only online these days… I subscribe to the print versions of both of these newspapers.)

With these staff cuts at both newspapers, we can expect only cursory coverage of key events in the Santa Clarita Valley for awhile as the remaining staff scrambles to pick up as many of the pieces as they can. Meanwhile, check in with the various Santa Clarita blogs, including this one, for as many updates as we can provide you.

If you have news to report, feel free to contact any of the local bloggers to help get your story out there. We’re not reporters and we all have "real" jobs to do as well, but I’m sure everyone will do all they can to help fill in the gaps left by these newspaper layoffs. You can email me at Linda@SantaClaritaRealEstateBlog.com or just click on one of the Comment links at the bottom of any of the blog posts.

And thanks to Jeff at SCVTalk for the heads-up on these newspaper layoffs. 

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