- at Doubleday Broadway, at least 6 job cuts, including four people from the art department and one from marketing.
- that Crain's reports that the job losses at DB total 22.
- Big Random spokesman Stuart Applebaum reiterated that it's up to division heads to set head-count targets and make cuts (as I usually put it: "Bertelsmann doesn't care how they make budget, it just insists that they do.")
- Little Random spokeswoman Carol Schneider said that Knopf and Little Random sub-rights departments were not merging, but was slipperier on the subject of the two layoffs the Observer reported earlier in the week.
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Thursday, December 18, 2008
Random House Restructuring Blues
Publishers Lunch -- no link, sorry, it comes via e-mail -- reports the following:
2 comments:
You know what I've realized from these reports of job losses is that I have no idea how many people it takes to run a publishing company. Is 6 people a lot to lose from Random House? I've always had this image of Random House with tens of thousands of employees, just because it's such a huge publisher.
Or is turnover of any kind just really rare?
I'm not trying to be callous, but the big companies I've worked for wouldn't even notice the terminations of 6 people, because they're getting rid of so many more than that.
skottk: Well, according to Hoovers, Random House as a whole -- and this is probably world-wide -- employs less than six thousand people.
Doubleday Broadway, the group that's losing at least six and maybe as many as twenty-two people, is probably no more than two hundred, and possibly quite less.
Publishing companies are actually pretty small -- there aren't that many jobs to begin with.
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