Times: 'We Expect' Layoffs
The New York Times announced that it's all but a done deal that the paper will have to layoff staffers in the newsroom.
The drop-dead deadline is fast approaching for the staffers in The New York Times newsroom to raise their hand and volunteer for a buyout. An internal memo from the paper's assistant managing editor, Bill Schmidt, just went out and said that "we expect" that the buyout numbers aren't looking good and that for the first time the paper will be forced to cut the newsroom through layoffs.
"While layoffs have become all too common across our industry, this is the first time the newsroom as a whole has confronted that blunt reality, and we approach it with a heavy heart," he said in the e-mail.
The entire memo is below:
To the staff
About six weeks ago Bill Keller announced that the newsroom would need to reduce its head count by about 100 jobs, as a result of the worsening financial picture facing this newspaper and the rest of our industry. To that end, we put on the table a round of buyouts, and began seeking volunteers among both our Guild and excluded employees.
The window for those voluntary buyouts closes officially next week -- on Monday, April 21, for excluded members of the staff, and on that day and the next (Tuesday, April 22), for Guild applicants.
While we will not know the hard count until that time, every effort to handicap the outcome suggests that we are almost certain to fall short of the number of volunteers we will need. If that is indeed the case, as we expect it will be, we will -- regrettably -- be forced resort to some limited number of layoffs within the core newsroom.
While layoffs have become all too common across our industry, this is the first time the newsroom as a whole has confronted that blunt reality, and we approach it with a heavy heart. Even as people and jobs go away, the reductions will have a continuing impact across the newsroom, as we regroup and reorganize departments and even juggle some assignments to ensure we are able to continue to produce the kind of quality journalism that is our hallmark.
I wish I could offer some clearer sense of scale. An effort by the Guild to predict the outcome a few weeks back, based on what they knew from the people who had asked to get a buyout package, concluded it was too soon to tell if there would be enough volunteers, across the staff. Their own estimate, at that time, fell short of the mark, and the basic calculus has not changed.
Because the voluntary buyout window is still open for a few more days, and because we know many of you might still be contemplating what to do, we urge you to give the offer serious consideration, if you believe there is some financial advantage in it for you and your family. Each buyout we record before next Tuesday reduces the number of layoffs we will have to seek.
If any of you have any questions, or seek further information in the coming days, please do not hesitate to reach out to me.
Bill Schmidt
Tell Keller/Sulzberger to open up the buy out to the craft unions.......he'll get plenty of takers........Drivers, pressmen, mailers....we all make 70-90k+ a year and a lot are ready to go......
Bye, Bye Old York Times. This is great news.
This paper will cease to exist within the next five years.
Hurrah!!
Hey Lil 'Pinch',
"...as we regroup and reorganize departments and even juggle some assignments to ensure we are able to continue to produce the kind of quality journalism [circulating liberal tripe, giving away classified war secrets during a war, anti-America / Freedom, ad-infinitum...] that is our hallmark."
Hey, great 'quality journalism' N.Y. Times. If you keep up that 'quality journalism' maybe your subscription base and ad revenue can drop even faster!
Please keep doing what you are doing, so you can keep getting what you are getting...
Hopefully the whole paper gets the axe. I've heard state-run media organs in Venezuela have open positions. Also, according to their reporting, Cuba has "free" health care and a 99% literacy rate; another great option for relocation.
File this all under the Walter Duranty Karmic Payback booby prize.
"Tell Keller/Sulzberger to open up the buy out to the craft unions.......he'll get plenty of takers........Drivers, pressmen, mailers....we all make 70-90k+ a year and a lot are ready to go......"
How about he just fires the lot of you and puts you on the street, and then ransacks your pension for shits and giggles. Good luck making $90k driving a truck, you putz!
Offer buyouts to everybody! But first fire Bob Herbert, Maureen Dowd, and Paul Krugman. Then fire Bob Herbert again, just to make sure.
The New York Times -- America's answer to Pravda
The National Enquirer is more reputable than the New York Times.
Good riddance. When it folds, all the old lefties will have to read the New York Post.
Ha ha
The NYT has been the Apparatus of Record for Treason and Sedition since the 1860s, when the owner's great-great-great grandpa bought it. Copperheads in the Civil War, now they are full blown stalinists. That's quite a legacy, comparable only to the treason of Joe and Ted Kennedy and the empty headed leftard litter the Kennedy's spawned.
Gee, wonder if they're going to print an ad with the headline "I Lost My Job Through the New York Times".
The old saying is "Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas." For the New York Times, it's more like "Lie like dogs, go down when your customers flee."
All you Red-baiting, slack-jawed yahoos moaning about the lefties and socialists are conveniently forgetting that the Times, by trumpeting the "reporting" of Judith Miller, was complicit in the administration's run-up to the Iraq War.
...and the drivers and pressmen better suck at the corporate teat while they can. Fewer and fewer people need paper trucked from here to there and dropped at their doorstep. The dead-tree editions will die, but journalism won't.
Oh, now I've got it: the NYT staffers who'll be laid off are precisely the kind of "bitter" people mentioned by Obama in his recent comments.
Next thing you know, they'll apply for lifetime membership in the NRA, join an Assemblies of God church, and spend all their free time at bowling alleys drinking boilermakers.
Good for them! ;)
I'm laughing as I read this.
Good riddance to bad rubbish!
"Clown Car Driver (not verified) says:
All you Red-baiting, slack-jawed yahoos moaning about the lefties and socialists are conveniently forgetting that the Times, by trumpeting the "reporting" of Judith Miller, was complicit in the administration's run-up to the Iraq War."
Yeah, that explains the Times's decline: LIBERALS angry with it for publishing Miller's pieces have left it in droves.
Riiiiiiight.
BWAAAahahahahahahahahaaa!
Okay, people, you heard Mr. Keller.
For those of you who remain after the layoffs, you're going to have to lie a lot faster and a lot more often if you expect to keep pace with expectations.
The comments here are rich with shadenfreude, which the NYT leadership fully deserves. Unfortunately some decent journalists will suffer, but the one-sided and biased news coverage from the NYT has driven away many former readers like myself. I grew up reading the NYT daily, now I wouldn't pick up a free copy. The one advantage the MSM inherited in the competition with on-line media was their reputation for reliability. But in numerous episodes (such as the Sixty Minutes TANG forgeries) their current leaders have chosen to destroy that legacy in order to pursue their current political agenda.
Okay the next poster who uses the word "schadenfreude" will be banned from the site. Even those of you who misspell the word.
By the way, good riddance to the New York Times; die already Pinch Sulzsucker.
Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch. I am patiently waiting for the entire industry to die. The death throes are mildly amusing, though.
Bring back Jayson Blaire. You'll certainly save big bucks on the T&E budget.
The agenda driven lefties at the NYT's would rather fall on their swords than make money. When you alienate half of the voters, ignore reporting events in a fair and balanced manner, and drag the editorial page through all parts of the paper, this is what happens. The WSJ isn't going down because content counts.
The NYT's can't disappear fast enough.
Maybe Sulzberger can sell the Times building to a growing newspaper like the New York Post and start selling papers at the magazine and cigar kiosk on the corner.
What a bunch of hate.
The folks writing these comments obviously have no idea what goes into writing and publishing the NYT, or any other paper for that matter.
I don't think it's clear that the NYT has a news section, which tries to report as objectively as possible, and an editorial section, which is pro-Isaeli/center-left, for all its range of opinion.
And the mainstream media, by the way, don't exist. You take the news writer by writer and piece by piece. Some of it's good, some bad, almost all of it's better than the noise in the blogosphere or radio talkshows.
The people breaking news for the NYT are working hard to fact-check and write a good story -- and for the most part, they're doing a damn good job. It's those people who are going to lose their jobs.
So laugh it up.
None of the Drudgers who have posted here have ever read the Times. Leftist? What a joke.
But why is the Times devoting three full pages of the front section to a table of contents? Those of us who read the Times have never needed a table of contents. The money the Times could save on newsprint wasted for this could keep those 100 reporters on the job.
MikeM - no sympathy for a few decent journalists who lose their jobs at the NYT. Any reporter not sufficiently observant enough not to see this crash coming has serious reality-grasp issues. And too, decent journalists would have left in revulsion years ago rather than eat from the same trough as the stars of the Paper of Record.
And where precisely would they go? Newspapers are tanking left and right, leaving good journalists without options. Right now, journalists are clinging to the jobs that they have.
The Propaganda Media is not going to survive.
@Village:
If so, then I eagerly anticipate the tyranny of Fox to come to a swift end.
The journalists should check out this thing called the Internets. The demise of newsprint has been coming for the past 5 years. I agree that anyone taken aback by this fact is an idiot.
I do know that the NYT is a union shop ("Guild", as it is called), so I can only imagine the pay and perks there. Probably why not enough people took the buyouts.
Print media is dying. No question. But this isn't just about death of a format, because The NYT has the same opportunity to publish to the internet as everybody else.
I also grant that blogs and other "new media" outlets, conservative or liberal (full disclosure: I am the former) don't make the news as much as audit, re-report and editorialize content already available. Yes, they dodge a lot of the financial barrier to entry in journalism by making their business model "watchdog to the media" and mostly covering news already reported.
Having said all that, what has made this a freefall instead of a painful transition to a new format is that newspapers have given new media oh-so-much to work with. New media has become to old media what old media became to politicians beginning in the 60's. Which is to say, the aggressor in an unending game of "gotcha".
As a result, attitudes towards Print, TV, and now Cable news have become cynical. This tracks to the same attitudes towards old media targets that began 40 years ago. It's hard to feel a great deal of sympathy for the NYT, inasmuch as they and their peers created the game in the first place. I don't think they ever really expected to be in front of the harsh light instead of behind it. They still have no clue about any of this and live in denial, so I see no end in sight.
But for those ready to dance gleefully on the grave, what will happen to the blogs that we all read (right and left) when the old guard is gone? Reporting on source material is cheap. Gathering it is expensive.