New York Times plans to cut 7 percent of newsroom positions

<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/business/media/14cnd-times.html">That translates to 100 positions. Will the crappy news ever stop?</a>

 

And you have to skip through an ad to get to the story. Go figure.

 

With 1,332 newsroom employees -- the story says no other paper has more than 900 -- I don't think we'll see a significant decrease in quality. But in symbolic terms, this is the apocalypse.

 

Fatal blow?

 

Note this in fourth graph:

According to our sources, Keller also left the open the possibility of saving some jobs. He said that "The leadership of the newsroom will share in the sacrifice." Richard Perez-Pena, the publishing reporter, asked what he meant. "Apparently there is a pool of money made up of bonuses for the salaries for top editors that may be used to save top jobs," said one person present. "He said he hadn't decided if they would use that."


http://www.observer.com/2008/more-keller-meeting

 

Sure. There was good news just hours later.

Good to know that in these turbulent times, it's still possible to make money off the suffering of others.

 

Wall Street scheunfreude.

Keller could leave, and set up housekeeping with Wolfowitz. That would be a good place to start.

 

At my little shop out in flyover country, we lost 15 percent of the newsroom last summer in one fell swoop of buyouts. It was a swipe of the sword that took out 11 people and over 300 years of experience. None of them were replaced.

Since then, we've had four other departures -- one replacement. Another 60 years of experience out the window.

Suddenly, here I sit, a 30-year-old who's suddenly a newsroom veteran doing two people's jobs.

A lot of days, I feel like a pitcher who's standing on the mound in some random late-September game. I've already thrown way too many innings this season, but the manager's not coming to get me because there's no arms left in the bullpen.

If you want to think the "apocalypse" has shown up in the form of a 7 percent reduction at the New York Times, so be it.

For a lot of us, the "apocalypse" came a long time ago.

 

I was on a paper that lost nearly a third of its staff within about a year. But if you don't believe the NYT holds more symbolic significance than any other paper, I'm not sure what to say. They have by far the largest news staff, they do by far the most ambitious striving and they responded to the Jayson Blair scandal by ADDING bodies in order to better ensure it wouldn't happen again. They've been a rare shining beacon for the argument that spending money on the product is a good business decision.

 

Actually, it sounds like you could look over your shoulder and see that there's no one with a glove standing in center field, either. And a couple of grade schoolers as middle infielders.

 

The notion of allocating bonus money to save jobs is beyond a red herring, and despicable.

Maybe Sulzberger is fixing up the shanty for a sale.

 

I guess I understand why we'd take this news hard, symbolically.

However, a bloated newsroom at a publicly traded company slashing bodies is hardly shocking. I'd have been more shocked if it didn't happen, actually.