He began at Times-Mirror six weeks ago.The speed at which the axe came down on Newsday, a Pulitzer Prize-winner with a circulation of 231,000, has created interest in a man with no previous experience in publishing but one with a keen eye on the bottom line of finances.”You need to be relentless in pursuing change. You can’t take small steps; you must take big, discontinuous steps,” he said recently. Mr Willes, media analysts point out, has no profile in the industry, which allows him to make drastic changes.”He’s by no means tied to the newspaper culture. I don’t think anything is sacred to him,” said a person close to the company.Times-Mirror’s stock has long lagged behind that of other media companies, partly because Wall Street has judged the company’s costs to be too high. After the cuts, estimated eventually to save the company $50m, shares in Times-Mirror rose 25 cents to a year’s high of $27.25.The company, which has cut its workforce from 8,500 to 6,200 since 1990, was once so plush that its journalists called it the “velvet coffin”.

In recent years, the once-acquisitive company has become the subject of numerous takeover rumours.The LA paper’s editor, Shelby Coffer, noted that the title still has the largest editorial staff in America with more than 1,100, complete with a news-gathering budget of $110m a year. At its peak in 1990, the paper enjoyed a revenue of $1.125bn. This slid to $992m in 1993 before rising slightly this year.”Publishing is a business, and journalism isn’t,” Mr Coffey said after the cuts, which he blamed on California’s still sluggish economic performance “We are inextricably tied. If we don’t succeed on the publishing side, we can’t be a journalistic success.”The changes at Times-Mirror reflect the trends in America’s newspaper industry, which started to retrench in 1991 during the recession and has been hit this year with a 30-40 per cent increase in the cost of newsprint.There are 1,538 daily papers in the US and print remains the primary news distribution source. According to the Newspaper Association of America, slightly more than 60 per cent, or 115 million adult Americans, read a daily paper.

Sunday editions reach 59 million, or 70 per cent of adults.Contrary to public perception, the $44bn newspaper industry is still the largest media business in the US. “The reality is that broadcast television news only has a 48 per cent share of the adult population. By any measure, newspapers are still the nation’s number one news source and advertising outlet,” says Paul Luthringer of the NAA.However, a glacially slow decline in readership and increased competition made it harder to sustain a second or third newspaper in any market. At the turn of the century, there were 15 papers in New York. There are now three, and only 23 cities in the US currently support more than one paper.”Evening papers have declined in circulation, and morning papers and Sunday editions have grown,” Mr Luthringer said. Industry analysts predict that, as a maturing industry, it will not be as profitable as it has been.There are more than 100 papers offering on-line editions as supplements or archive services.Other revenue streams, such as movie listings and sports scores are also being explored.

“It shows newspapers are offering news distribution in a different way,” Mr Luthringer said “This is how they will stay ahead.”. Francis Mackay has a problem. The normally thorough chief executive of Compass, the fast-expanding contract catering group, appears to have miscalculated on his latest acquisition across the Channel – particularly the defensive mood of Sodexho, its arch-rival in France. Few Anglo-French corporate ventures have ever run smoothly, so it comes as a surprise to Mr Mackay’s fan club in the City that he failed to spot the Maginot Line at Sodexho, which owns 33 per cent of the French associate of Eurest International that Compass is buying from Accor for pounds 589m.
Sodexho is not prepared to be toppled from top position in the world league of contract caterers lightly, and is refusing to let go of its shares. The problem is compounded because Eurest International only owns 33 per cent of the French business, in which the management controls 58 per cent of the voting rights.Failure to resolve the problem soon will undoubtedly take some gloss off the acquisition of Eurest. The saga could lead to some embarrassing questions for Mr Mackay when he asks Compass shareholders to approve the deal at tomorrow’s extraordinary meeting.He is philosophical about Sodexho’s refusal to toe the line, but his argument for pushing ahead with the deal at the current price is not likely to appease all shareholders.”If you base the price on historical results up to December 1994 then it does look expensive.