Five newspapers owned by Tribune Co., including the company's two flagship papers in Chicago and Los Angeles, said Wednesday they will cut jobs amid declining circulation and revenue.

The cuts come one week after another Tribune paper, The (Baltimore) Sun, and Knight Ridder Inc.'s San Jose Mercury News both announced similar cost-cutting moves.

The Los Angeles Times said Wednesday it is eliminating about 85 newsroom positions, or approximately 8 percent of its editorial staff.

Some of the cuts already have come through attrition and some will come through a voluntary separation program, editor Dean Baquet wrote in an e-mail to staff. The balance will come through layoffs by year's end.

"We are now pursuing a more focused strategy of building upon our company's considerable core assets, including the TV Guide brand, to achieve the goal of being the leading consumer brand for video guidance and enabling transactions across multiple platforms. Inside TV is not central to this strategy, and it has not been performing as well as we had initially expected."

"With the positive feedback that we are receiving following the re-launch of TV Guide magazine as a full-size, television entertainment and guidance magazine, we have determined that our publishing unit would be best served by focusing its efforts and resources on this product, the leading publication in the television category."

The magazine has been published since the newspaper's first issue appeared June 29, 1919. The last edition will be Dec. 18, The Plain Dealer said in its Wednesday edition.

The magazine is a forum for the newspaper's longer stories, lifestyle question-and-answer columns and other features. The Plain Dealer said it will move some of the magazine's features to other sections of the newspaper and will reassign magazine staff members to other newsroom positions.

The San Jose Mercury News will avoid layoffs as it cuts 16 percent of its newsroom staff through buyouts and attrition, the newspaper said Friday.

The Knight Ridder-owned newspaper notified employees that 52 reporters, copy editors, photographers and newsroom support staff had accepted buyout offers or agreed to retire, said Executive Editor Susan Goldberg.

"I don't think it will affect the quality of the reporting we do," Goldberg said. "There are going to be some things we're not going to do, but we're going to focus just as deeply on technology coverage and telling the story of this diverse community."

Last Tuesday, Warner laid off 260 employees, or about 6 percent of its staff of 4,500 in Burbank, California, with more job cuts expected in its overseas offices. And the studio is starting to re-evaluate everything from when and where it markets movies to how and what itpays its stars. Warner executives met recently with agents at Creative Artists Agency and warned that top-tier actors, directors and producers would have to be flexible on upfront fees or else movies would beharder to make.?

What makes the upheaval so remarkable is that it is happening at a studio that has long been considered one of the most stable television and movie businesses around. But the challenges facing the division,particularly its movie production unit, Warner Brothers Pictures, reflect a bleak new reality in Hollywood. Film lovers are starting to shun theaters, the threat of digital piracy is growing, and the industry is only beginning to grapple with how to deliver new content for cellphones, video games and other portable devices, like the new video iPod.?

The Post-Dispatch said 130 employees, including 40 newsroom staffers, volunteered to retire early in exchange for better pension and insurance benefits and lump-sum cash payments. The company said, however, that some of those jobs will be replaced by others, making the net staff reduction less than 130, which represents 7 percent of the paper's local work force.

"There's an uneven local advertising environment right now, which we have to deal with, but we've seen these things before," Terrance C.Z. Egger, publisher of the Post-Dispatch and a vice president at Lee Enterprises, said in a statement. "The real headline is that our business model is shifting a bit and we have to adjust with it.