MediaFile

McClatchy Chief Executive Gary Pruitt shared some details of the newspaper publisher’s operations in his speech on Tuesday at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual meeting. Here’s what he said, based on a transcript posted at the NAA’s website:

At McClatchy, 15% of our advertising revenue today comes from online. McClatchy, a company founded before the advent of electric lights, will generate nearly $200 million dollars in digital revenue this year at a higher profit margin than our print business.

What significance is this?

Fifteen percent is above the average newspaper publisher’s take from digital $200 million would be almost enough to run The New York Times’s newsroom operations for a year. Not bad.

Higher profit margins than print? We know Gary is a big fan of pop music to highlight his industry presentations, and that he likes the Rolling Stones in particular. Maybe “Time Is on My Side” would be a decent choice for those kinds of numbers.

Actually, Gary *did* think of some Stones songs that would characterize the current state of newspapers: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Shattered” and “19th Nervous Breakdown” made the list. In the end he scrapped Mick and Keith and went with the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

These have been a couple of ugly weeks for the newspaper industry. First, EW Scripps pulled the plug on the Rocky Mountain News, and then, today, McClatchy said it was cutting about 1,600 jobs, representing 15 percent of its workforce.

For those who like to look at the bright side of things, McClatchy isn’t shutting down The Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee or Anchorage Daily News. But the staff cuts are deep and undoubtedly will hurt  the quality and depth of coverage at some of those newspapers. How couldn’t they? After all, they come on top of two other major rounds of layoffs at McClatchy.

The move isn’t really a surprise, given that McClatchy said back in early February that it had to come up with a plan to cuts more costs given the deterioration of the industry. Still, it seems job cuts at the company come as frequently as seasons change.

McClatchy Co, fresh off amending the terms on paying back its debt, is busy making some changes at its newspapers. The owner of the Miami Herald and Sacramento Bee has replaced three publishers in the past two days. We don’t yet know if this is coincidence or part of a coordinated move.

Here’s where we are so far:

The Tribune in San Luis Obispo, California: Bruce Ray takes over from Chip Visci, who is retiring, according to a press release. Ray previously was chief financial officer at the paper. Visci, according to McClatchy Chief Executive Gary Pruitt, is starting “the next chapter of his life.” Visci’s previous chapter was as a Knight Ridder guy before McClatchy ate up the chain and incurred all those billions of dollars in debt.

(Visci just called back and left a message, which is worth reporting for its humorous candor: “I can assure you that there’s no such shuffle underway… If there really were something up, I probably wouldn’t have called you back.”)

McClatchy Chief Executive Gary Pruitt is one of those newspaper executives a reporter can get along well with because of qualities that are not always common to your typical CEO:

He leaves the jargon behind at interviews. He is honest about bad news, making it easier to believe him when he delivers good news. He believes in the product — good journalism — as fervently as he does in his duty to please shareholders (which in McClatchy’s case includes the company’s namesake family and a bunch of other unhappy people).

Trouble is, there isn’t much good news to tell about the newspaper business. Pruitt has said as much to us and others, but in his latest interview in the Sacramento News & Review, (which we found on Romenesko) he shows us how much he feels his employees’ pain:

This has been the worst year of my life, by far.

That’s a pretty grim assessment. Then again, he’s presided over a 90 percent drop in McClatchy’s stock price, he’s cutting staff by 10 percent, and there appear to be few options open to the company to change the way it’s set up. The primary obstacle is $2 billion in debt from its acquisition of newspaper publisher Knight Ridder just before the key advertising struts supporting the company snapped.

You can say one thing for Gary Pruitt , McClatchy’s CEO and perhaps the most ardent defender of the newspaper business — he knows what we all want.

Here’s his comment from the analyst call he did today to discuss McClatchy’s first-quarter earnings :

We want to make sure we maintain our ability to generate revenue.

Who could ask for anything more?

Pruitt also showed off his lighter side in an exchange with Goldman Sachs’s Peter Appert. When the analyst said he was going to ask an unfair question, Pruitt responded, “That’s because I’m going to give you an unfair answer.”