San Francisco  - US newspaper giant McClatchy said Monday that it plans to eliminate 1,600 jobs, or 15 per cent of its workforce, in yet another indication of how the recession is deepening problems in the already troubled newspaper business.

The Sacramento, California-based company which owns the Miami Herald, San Jose Mercury News and Sacramento Bee among dozens of other papers, said it would incur a 30-million-dollar charge on the job cuts, which would be achieved through a mixture of "severance programmes, attrition and further consolidations and outsourcing of some business functions."

The company is considered to be the third-largest newspaper chain in the US and has been hard hit by the plunge in advertising revenues at a time when readers are also deserting print newspapers to get their news online.

The publisher's chief executive Gary Pruitt said he was taking a 15-per-cent pay cut and would forego bonuses for 2008 and 2009 along with other senior executives.