Sam Zell To Slash LA Times Staff

HOLDING TIGHT Zell Sam Zell, the 52nd-richest man in America and the sometimes-fun crazy man who owns Tribune Company (in partnership with his employees, except they don't have much say!), has introduced an exciting new metric in evaluating newspaper performance. The company's C.O.O. announced yesterday that they had begun to measure journalist's output in pages produced per year. Reporters at the Los Angeles Times, he told analysts, produce on average 51 pages a year. Why, that's just one page a week. So! I hear that layoffs in the LA Times editorial department will number around 120. This comes after last year's buyouts, which took the editorial staff down to about 850 people.