Film studios have run out of patience after recent big-budget star vehicles failed to deliver at the box office and are cutting salaries.

Top of the chop list are some of the highest-paid actors in the world.

An Entertainment Weekly source said a reduction of the huge amounts paid to A-list stars was inevitable.

He added: "Hollywood has always thrown ungodly sums of cash at top-tier actors. It was a strategy that worked well enough - until it didn't.

"Now studios are trying to add a new step to their budget calculations - common sense."

"The media industry is facing a huge challenge to its structure and working practices from the rapidly evolving demands of digital publishing," FT editor Lionel Barber told staff.

"The Financial Times must embrace and lead these changes."

The newspaper said the move was in part designed to simplify on operation that publishes four different regional editions -- for Britain, continental Europe, Asia and the United States -- and has expanded its Internet operations to reach 5.5 million unique monthly users.

Toronto Sun parent company Quebecor Inc. today told employees that 30 positions at the paper will be cut as part of a round of layoffs that will affect 120 employees across the media company?s newspaper chain.

Brad Honywill, president of the 3500-member Local 87M of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, said that 14 union positions will be cut at the Sun where 150 members of Local 87M work. Of the remaining 16 job losses at the paper, it's unclear how many will be managers or freelance writers.

Honywill said that eight full-time and five part-time positions will be culled, and one full-time reporting position currently vacant won't be filled, according to the company.

The newspaper will begin informing affected employees today, although Honywill said that the union may fight the company on some of those.

My concern is the seasoned police reporter in his mid-50s, the streetwise city-page columnist or the business writer who has covered the town's fat cats since before the savings-and-loan bust of the 1980s. Pruning news staffs has become a managerial routine, and shedding higher-earning - meaning, longer-serving - employees a mark of fiscal prudence. They're getting six months', maybe a year's pay, and they're gone. So are their Rolodexes, their intuition, the stories they did or meant to do and their deep familiarity with their communities.

With the growth in journalism positions concentrated in the burgeoning Internet sector - where the focus on attracting the youth demographic is at its most intense - the new jobs that are opening up are likely to be filled by people a generation or more younger than those being shown the door at old media operations.

So the overall picture is one of a profession that, for reasons of financial calculation and market repositioning, is deliberately being made prematurely young.

Does any of that matter? Does it matter that CBS' new chief diplomatic correspondent, Lara Logan, was 4 when Saigon fell? Isn't such a generational changeover an inevitability? Might it not be a good thing?

The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and scores of smaller papers have downsized their staffs in recent months. About 70 newsroom staffers and 100 non-newsroom employees are exiting the Post through the buyout door, according to the paper's June 1 account.

The physical product is shriveling as well. The Wall Street Journal will snip three inches from its width starting in 2007, adopting the liposuctioned profiles of the similarly slimmed-down Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. This week the New York Times looked in the mirror and contemplated a diet, saying it might reduce page width after having already switched to lighter-weight paper stock.