This week, former LAT publisher Tom Johnson added his voice to the chorus with a letter to Beutner thanking him for his “splendid leadership”, calling the firing “tragic and very sad”, and echoing the call for Tribune to sell the newspaper: “If Tribune implements another round of severe expense cuts, that action likely will weaken rather than strengthen The Times“.

Los Angeles Occasions staff would initially have the choice to take part in buyouts based mostly on a suggestion of 1 week for an worker’s first ten years of service, two weeks for the subsequent ten years, and three weeks for having between 20 and 30 years.

The Board of Supervisors weighed in Tuesday on the fate of the Los Angeles Times, approving a resolution to urge the newspaper’s parent company to restore local leadership or consider selling the paper to Los Angeles-based business leaders. It was unclear how the cuts would impact other Tribune properties.

Los Angeles County Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas and Michael Antonovich recommended the unanimously approved resolution, standing in opposition to the Tribune Publishing Co.’s September 8 dismissal of publisher Austin Beutner after a year on the job. The board joins a group of influential business and civic leaders who last week signed an open letter to Tribune CEO Jack Griffin, owner of the Times, expressing disappointment over Beutner’s dismissal.

If buyouts don’t generate the cost savings desired, the company would turn to layoffs. There were also frictions over Beutner’s preference to reinvest in a variety of editorial experiments and use potential personnel savings for those projects.

In 2013, Tribune introduced a “restructuring” that sought to remove nearly 700 jobs on the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Occasions and 6 different day by day newspapers. More recently, Ryan has been the publisher of the Baltimore Sun, where he oversaw huge cost reductions.

The Times would see the bulk of those reductions, though other newspapers would also get cuts.

The Beutner era heralded the hiring of famed undocumented journalist Jose Antonio Vargas and former New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones.

The planned cuts were apparently involved in the dispute between Beutner and Tribune/s corporate management that led to his firing. Here’s her interview, published yesterday.