[An Nahar] Spain's top daily newspaper El Pais began delivering redundancy notices on Monday to nearly one-third of its staff including some of the paper's best-known writers.Last month El Pais, part of heavily indebted Spanish media group Prisa, announced there would be 129 layoffs and 20 early retirements, bringing the total number of job cuts to 149 out of about 460 staff.
All remaining staff are being forced to take a 15-percent pay cut as the paper struggles against a slump in advertising and the rise of Internet news, where profits are hard to come by.
On Monday, the journalists began to hear who will be forced to depart the newspaper, born in 1976 during Spain's transition to democracy after the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.