Shafer: Buyouts R good, old folks gotta go

Jack Shafer of Slate goes all "Logan's Run" on newspaper industry and veteran staffers. He says buyouts are good because they open up jobs for youngsters who can be paid less and work harder. In other words, he caters to every stereotype about age/experience in this business. At the same time, he dishonestly suggests that the typical buyout is approximately two years worth of salary and that those who accept buyouts can easily find teaching jobs at big-name universities.

(Oh, wait, he does include one parenthetical sentence about how some people are not so fortunate. Nice of him.)

Still, this is riddled with false premises about what is going on in newsroom downsizings, and blatantly ignores the sort of six-weeks-pay "buyouts" doled out in L.A.:

http://www.slate.com/id/2188417/pagenum/all/#page_start

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not like they're rehiring these bought out positions. Correct?

 

Wonder what he'll think if someday Mr. Shafer gets bought out?

 

He addresses it:

"I may be risking self-extermination."

 

He's right, though. It's good that Yale Law graduate and former New York Times columnist Adam Liptak finally caught a break in life :

 

Great to see Shafer go all Andy Grove on us.

You're next, Jack.

 

Kill the institutional memory.

Hire malleable young suckers, who think the early '90's are barely-relevant ancient history.

That's the ticket.

Perspective, baby.

 

What the hell. When you get to be 55 or so, you're just taking up valuable air and resources that younger, harder-working people could use.

You may as well slash your wrists and save the company the buyout cost. But don't do your typical half-assed job or that will just drive up health insurance rates for the hard-working folks.

 

Thanks, Frankie.

 

Good point. And it has been my experience (first-hand and bystander) that 1 out of every 2 "reassignments" gets done to piss off the person in the hopes that he or she will leave. Sans buyout or severance money. Chicken-bleep managers don't have the guts to just whack someone and pay up, so they make them suffer professional death of a thousand cuts.

(Boy, just re-read that, and I sound a little cranky. Wonder why.)

 

I know I already said this, but I can't get it out of my head: I can't believe he uses Andy Fucking Liptak as the example of someone whose career was being repressed by all the dead weight. Yale Law-educated, New York Times-employed Andy Liptak.

Meanwhile, no one from 22-30 can get a job for more than $35K a year, and that's considered good money.

But Andy Fucking Liptak is finally getting his just due.

I hate when people like O'Reilly say the media is full of "elites."

But this, friends, is an elitist piece, lacking all perspective on what's killing the soul of this business. It's not that Andy Fucking Liptak is stuck writing his column at the New York Times, sitting on the nest egg he acquired while working at a big fancy NYC law firm.

It's that thousands of kids are walking off college campuses with $100K in debt and absolutely no jobs available, no future, no matter how hard they work and persevere.

But, fuck, at least these buyouts and layoffs are giving the Andy Liptaks of the world their fair shot.

 

I love how he uses Linda Greenhouse as an example -- like having 30 years of experience in law is a bad thing, because as we know the legal system has changed so dramatically in the last few years. Maybe you could make that argument about a science or tech writer, but come on! And what about all the geezers on the Supreme Court itself? They got their degrees like half a century ago. Wouldn't his logic transfer to every other field?

Shafer should just walk quietly to the nearest iceberg and set himself afloat.