AS THE PROJO TURNS Scribes ponder possible spending cut BY IAN DONNIS

It wouldn’t be surprising if newsroom managers at the Providence Journal were under orders to cut spending at the newspaper. The Belo Corporation’s flagship Dallas Morning News was buffeted last year by a scandal involving inflated circulation figures, after all, and the ProJo — like the scores of other newspapers owned by publicly held corporations — has far fewer reporters than once was the case. But despite internal chatter about the need to cut roughly $500,000 from the news budget, union officials don’t perceive a fresh belt-tightening trend.

"We haven’t seen it right now," says Tim Schick, administrator of the Providence Newspaper Guild. "The impression I get is that things right now aren’t as tight as late last year, when they were trying to meet certain budget goals." Although the budget reins loosened in February after a very constrained final quarter in 2004, Schick says, "That doesn’t mean they’ve opened the spigot wide, either."

The ProJo is expected to replace State House correspondent Liz Anderson, who just left for a job with Gannett in New York’s Westchester County, to be closer to her fiancé. The paper hasn’t filled a few prominent vacancies, including the section editor post held by Mimi Burkhardt, who died last year, and the reporting spot of Michael Corkery, who reported from Iraq, among other places, before moving to the Wall Street Journal. Schick, however, says the paper has been hiring, primarily on the advertising side, but also by resuming the taking on of two-year reporter-interns, and by having moved two former reporter-interns, Steve Peoples and Cynthia Needham, into full-fledged reporting jobs earlier this year.

Joel P. Rawson, the Journal’s executive editor, declined a request to be interviewed for this story.

Meanwhile, Schick says, Belo has notified people in the ProJo’s finance department that it is looking at the possibility of consolidating that department in Dallas, and, "They have just started their research on what can and can’t be done. My impression is that the local managers were caught by surprise by it." Most of the jobs that could be affected are nonunion positions.

On the plus side, in the time since a bitter and lengthy union-management contract dispute ended in December 2003. "Our relationship with them, I’ve got to say, has been pretty good," says Guild president John Hill. "We’ve had maybe one grievance, and we were able to settle it amicably. They said they were going to be more cooperative, and they have been."