The Tribune in Oakland Slashes Staff : Publishing: Squeezed by competitors in San Francisco and suburbia, the city’s only daily is fighting for its life.

The financially strapped Oakland Tribune, which in April won a Pulitzer Prize for photo coverage of last October’s Bay Area Quake, will lay off 25% of its 725-member staff in an effort to stay afloat.

Robert C. Maynard, the owner, also told employees that he is instituting a massive revamping designed to save more than $10 million a year in a further effort to keep the morning newspaper going.

Interviewed Wednesday evening at UC Berkeley’s Faculty Club, where Maynard was to deliver a speech about the paper’s future, the Tribune’s publisher and president said the paper can survive. “The whole purpose of these changes is to assure the survival of the paper. For the last several years, we’ve been living from hand to mouth, on a wing and a prayer.”

When told by a consultant recently that the paper needed to take drastic steps, Maynard recalled: “We gulped, considered the alternatives and then went forward.”

The Tribune, with daily circulation of 130,000, has been beset by money woes and declining readership for several years.

“It gives me no pleasure to think of the Tribune losing a quarter of its employees,” he told employees earlier Wednesday. “We are, after all, a family.”

In his UC Berkeley speech to the University-Oakland Metropolitan Forum, on the topic “The Tribune in Transition: A Newspaper for the 21st Century,” Maynard noted that the paper, like other major dailies, has suffered because of cuts in advertising by debt-plagued retailers.

He also said the paper’s employee wages and benefits eat up 60 cents of every dollar in revenue, or roughly twice the national average for papers of the Tribune’s size. He noted that his paper spent more than $30 million on those costs in 1989, well above the $17 million to $18 million spent by comparable papers.

With the optimism that he has displayed during years of financial difficulties, Maynard implored his audience to help get the newspaper back on its feet.

“What can you do? First of all, of course, you can subscribe. . . . Please tell all your friends and neighbors how important the Tribune is. . . . Don’t forget advertisers. Compliment the good judgment of those who advertise in the Tribune when you patronize their places of business. . . .

“We are very much in need . . . of God’s grace and your help.”

In his message to employees, Maynard said a recent review of the paper’s operations by an outside consultant and a look at prospects for this year sent a clear message: “Efficiency or extinction.”

As part of a new operating plan developed with the help of Durkee/Sharlit, a Los Angeles-based consulting firm, Maynard said the Tribune’s various operating groups will be consolidated into four departments. In addition, spokeswoman Kate Coleman said, six of 15 executives have been let go, and the compensation of remaining executives is being reduced.

On Wednesday morning, 32 people in sales, marketing, computer systems and administration were given pink slips.

Top editors, consultants and union representatives met Wednesday in an effort to work out details of the layoffs. Seventy percent of the paper’s employees are represented by unions. The newspaper is also asking for 23 volunteers to take early retirement.

“Any time people’s jobs are in danger, people are kind of dejected and demoralized,” one city desk employee said. “There’s a lot of gallows humor. People are trying to get an idea of what this place will look like and how it will continue to function.”

Maynard, who in 1979 became the first black to direct editorial operations at a major metropolitan daily, bought the Tribune from media giant Gannett Corp. in 1983. For years, rumors of its sale or closure have circulated as the paper was squeezed by San Francisco-based dailies and East Bay suburban chains.

Founded in 1874, the Tribune is Oakland’s only metropolitan daily. Under Maynard’s leadership, the paper has been a strong voice on major social issues such as education, the environment and economic development.