Cut the talk.

Two companies in Little Rock have dropped communications staffers lately --attributable, both say, to the natural respiration of great big businesses.

Acxiom confirmed that it indeed shed some of its communications staff but declined to say how many. "This is nothing outside the normal realm of doing business," a spokesman said. "It was not anything significant, nothing across the board or something like that. Just some fine-tuning of our business."

Cranford Johnson Robinson Woods, the state's largest advertising agency, confirmed that it made cuts in Dallas. Spokesman Andy Moreau said, delicately: "We did have a Dallas office. We had two people in the office. They're not with us anymore."

CJRW made that decision, he said, because an affiliation with the veritably omnipresent Burston-Marsteller, an agency that claims firms in 81 countries, made a Dallas crew redundant.

Closing the Dallas office cost CJRW a Texas client, Moreau said, but otherwise 2009 has been just peachy, with 40 clients added. So it's not all doom and gloom for media workers, unless of course you happen to be the stiff getting pink-slipped.