A visual depiction of newspaper layoffs, starting from 2007 through to 2010.  It appears as though 2008 and 2009 were not good years for newspaper employees!

Maps taken from Paper Cuts

The debt crisis of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News and their lengthy sale attempts has been in the news quite a bit of late, and today we learn that the open auction scheduled tomorrow for the newspapers, will go on with two bidders.

The auction follows a failed attempt to buy the newspapers earlier this month, when the union refused to come to terms with the potential buyer, regarding wages and proposed pension changes.  Now the newspaper group is going up for auction tomorrow and one of the bids is less than half the value of the deal that fell through just this month.  All this in the wake of learning that the Detroit Daily Newspapers are also going into negotiations with their related union to propose a 12 per cent wage cut.  It will be interesting to see how the Detroit negotiations pan out and if they’ll learn anything about the looming closures the Philadelphia newspaper face if an agreement at auction cannot be met.

The Philadelphia Newspapers LLC group filed for bankruptcy in February 2009.