Wielding the Ax   

"This is like Ross Perot going to the federal government," one Wall Street analyst told AJR when Mark H. Willes moved from General Mills to become Times Mirror's president and CEO (see "General Mills' Gift to Journalism," July/August). Perhaps he was onto something.

Willes moved quickly to show just how much he doesn't like those nonperforming assets. Six weeks after taking the helm on June 1, he buried the highly regarded but money-losing New York Newsday (see page 56), eliminating 800 jobs. Willes, known to non-fans as the "cereal killer," has also ordered the elimination of as many as 160 editing and reporting positions at Times Mirror's flagship paper, the Los Angeles Times .

In addition to the personnel cutbacks, several sections of the paper have been eliminated. Casualties include the Westside section, the World Report, Nuestro Tiempo, a Spanish-language section, and a new inner-city zone section launched in the wake of the L.A. riots. Also history is the 2,600-circulation Washington edition, started in 1992 to boost the Times' profile inside the Beltway.

The company will stop funding the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press, known for its polling on attitudes about the media (see page 16), at the end of the year. And Times Mirror's Hartford Courant is offering buyouts to 150 employees, including 40 in editorial. If the buyouts don't reduce the staff by 13 percent, the paper will consider the first layoffs in its 231-year history.

It was Times Mirror's poor management and low profit margins, and the resulting sagging stock price, that ushered in the Willes era. And Wall Street is now as happy as journalists are dismayed. The stock price is moving upward. Analyst Kenneth Berents , director of research for Wheat First Butcher Singer, says Willes' dramatic downsizing is not at all surprising given the fact that the company "was bloated for years, from a Wall Street perspective."

Conceding that the massive cutbacks were "a bad dose of medicine," Berents says the carnage could have been worse if the company had been acquired by more draconian owners. Berents says he expects no "perceptible diminution in the Times Mirror journalistic product," which should cheer up those New York Newsday staffers and readers immensely.

Beleaguered L.A. Times Editor Shelby Coffey III is accentuating the positive. "We must concentrate on building..positives for the paper," he wrote in a memo to his shellshocked staff, "even as we undergo surgery without anesthesia." Coffey says that while he and his staff were surprised by the severity and immediacy of the cuts, he understands the harsh economic realities behind Willes' decisions. "Publishing is a business and journalism isn't," he says, "and if the publishing side isn't succeeding, then the journalism side can't either."