'The Oklahoman' to cut positions

e only period more severe, Thompson said, was after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. All media are seeing softness in national advertising; for newspaper-based companies, recruitment, or employment, advertising also has been particularly sluggish.

•More readers, particularly younger ones, now go to the Internet for news and information, bringing a fundamental shift in reading habits that industry experts say will only accelerate.

•Costs in newsprint, a newspaper's second biggest expense after employment, will have increased 40 percent by the end of 2008 compared to the fourth quarter of last year.

•A rise in fuel costs, that affect transportation and distribution of the newspaper, hits papers with a geographic footprint as large as The Oklahoman's particularly hard.

"It really is a perfect storm,” Thompson said.

Still, The Oklahoman is moving forward with digital initiatives that "are quite exciting,” he said. They include more improvements to NewsOK.com, the company's award-winning news site, and wimgo.com, an events calendar launched last winter that has exceeded initial expectations.

And, despite the employee cutbacks, Thompson said The Oklahoman's "journalistic quality and integrity will be uncompromised” as the organization retools to meet changing demands for news, information and advertising.

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