The move will reduce management positions, the company announced today. Twenty jobs will be eliminated resulting in an estimated cost savings of roughly $8 million per year. The company will incur one-time costs of approximately $14 million to cover severance; $2.8 million was recorded in Q4 2005 and the remainder will be recorded as a special item in Q1.

"This new structure and leadership team is a major first step in transforming Dow Jones from a channel-focused publishing company to a franchise, market, and customer-focused media company," said Richard F. Zannino, chief executive officer of Dow Jones, in a statement. "It will better align Dow Jones' organizational structure, leadership team, and franchises with our strategic vision, which is to be everywhere our customers want us to be with high-quality, differentiated, indispensable and conveniently accessible news, information and insight, profitably monetizing it in all media channels, and consistently generating above-market earnings growth and total shareholder returns."

Activision Inc. today announced as part of their financial report that the company would be forced to let go about 7 percent of its global workforce. This follows in the footsteps of mega-publisher Electronic Arts who only recently announced a similar percentage of employee layoffs worldwide.

A company spokesperson stated that the cuts which began last week as still "in process." He added that "We are doing a strategic, targeted reduction to better align our headcount against strategic targets." Activision's global workforce totals around 2200 employees, a 7 percent cut would translate into a loss of about 150 employees.

Fritz Nelson, senior VP in charge of CMP's Business Technology Group, said the content from Security Enterprise will be integrated into a new CMP Web site launching in April. The site, darkreading.com, will also feature content from securitypipeline.com, which is part of CMP's TechWeb division. IT Architect's content will have its own dedicated Web site.

Nelson stressed that CMP was not shutting down the print products simply because marketers are shifting more of their ad budgets online. He pointed to the January launch of Global Outsourcing (41,000 circ.), a new monthly print product that CMP launched with CyberMedia. Advanced Trading (25,000 circ.), which launched as a quarterly in March 2005 and is polybagged with Wall Street & Technology, will be expanded to eight issues this year.

"As a media company we have to recognize when it's a good time to launch magazines and when it's a good time to take that content online," Nelson said. "Marketing budgets are shrinking and marketers want to spend where they can get the best return."

Joseph Rouse, publisher of the alternative weekly publication in Fort Collins, said in an e-mailed statement that he made the tough decision to cease operations after he learned that a merger would not go through after six months of negotiations. Rouse did not return phone calls Wednesday.

"I was devastated by the unexpected, unsuccessful negotiations," Rouse said in the statement. "We'd been working on the details of this deal for months with much optimism, so the unfortunate nature of their conclusion took me by surprise. Ultimately, that forced the decision to cease publishing."

Rouse did not specify which alternative weekly considered merging with the Bullhorn.

"We're very sorry about it. We're not happy campers at all," said David Lauer, the Bullhorn's advertising account executive. "We've had a steep pitch with this attempted merger the past couple of months."

Time: Up to 13 jobs to be cut (correspondents, writers, editorial assistants).

Fortune: Up to nine jobs to be cut (senior writers, writers, are staff).

Sports Illustrated: Up to seven jobs to be cut.

Money: Four jobs to be cut (writers, editorial assistants, editorial operations coordinator).

Picture Collection: Seven jobs to be cut.

FSB: One job to be cut (designer).

People: No cuts.

Life: "Any job announcement at Life will be made at a later time."

Both moves and perhaps more in upcoming months appear to be part of a companywide "investment program" being led by new CEO Tad Smith to refocus its growth. Company spokeswoman Salina Le Bris would not confirm how many employees were laid off, an anonymous tip to the New York media blog Gawker put the number at 30, including at least one veteran of the company, with more to come.

"We, like other b2b companies, have laid off a group of employees to fund the company's investment program," Salina Le Bris, an RBI spokesperson, wrote in an e-mail to FOLIO:. A "large percentage" of those were HR, IT and finance support staff, according to Le Bris.

Paramount, which this week finalized its acquisition of privately-held DreamWorks, said the positions being cut are inhuman resources, finance, information systems and marketing and distribution departments.

DreamWorks also plans to cut about 120 more staff members in in the coming week, Paramount said. The combined companies have about 2,500 employees.

Last week, Tribune Co. said auto-classified revenue at its newspapers plunged 16% in December. Also last week, Lee Enterprises Inc., publisher of papers such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reported a 15.2% drop in auto advertising for the fourth quarter. On Wednesday, McClatchy Co. reported a 20% decline for December, saying the downturn in car ads had finally reached its West Coast papers, the biggest of which is the Sacramento Bee, in the heart of California's car culture.

"Our California papers had held up well in automotive advertising," said McClatchy Chief Executive and Chairman Gary Pruitt. "But the industry-wide decline in this category reached them in the fourth quarter as well."

The decline adds to the woes of the newspaper industry, already losing circulation to the Internet. For years, fat sections of car ads were a dependable source of business for newspaper publishers, accounting for 30% of the industry's total classified ad revenue of $16.6 billion in 2004, the last full year for which figures are available. Even as a migration of job ads to the Internet took a big bite out of newspaper employment classifieds from 2000 to 2003, auto ads held up.