To: TIME Edit staff
From: Rick Stengel
Date: Nov. 4, 2009

Time Inc continues to look at ways to reduce costs and lower operating
expenses. As a result, there will be an opportunity for a limited number
(up to 12) of Time Edit staffers to volunteer and depart with a severance
package. We will entertain volunteers from all Guild-covered categories in
all geographic locations. The call for volunteers will expire on the close
of business November 18th. Anyone interested in knowing more details and
having a confidential conversation about a severance package should contact
Peter Vincent at x7294. Let¹s all meet in the bullpen at 9:45 this morning
before the regular 10 o¹clock meeting. Thanks, Rick

And a rumor from Editorialiste on Twitter: "Top Time Inc. editors willing to take salary cuts to save jobs." Admirable.

The exact numbers of the NYT's departments aren't quite as cloaked in mystery as the New Yorker's masthead, for example, but it is hard to get up-to-date figures. Until now! The striking thing, of course, is just how many people it takes to put this paper out. ("Takes" is the wrong word. How many people they use). Some of the biggies:

Reporters at Metro: 50
Size of Business Desk: 85
Size of Washington Bureau: 45
Total size of Art Department: 113
Size of Metro: 103

The Metro desk appears to be the paper's biggest, as we've always heard. Fifty reporters. More than enough to put out an entire newspaper in a third-tier city. Think about that while also thinking about the meager size of Metro's space in the NYT Some of the paper's sections seem reasonable, or even shoestring—Dining and Week in Review both have staffs of five. So why does the Book Review—also a weekly section largely written by freelancers—need 14 editors?

It's a mystery. But we know 100 people will be gone from the newsroom by the end of the year. And we'll probably never see numbers this high at the NYT again.
[Full list at the NYO. Pic: AP]

We're guessing Hackett will be similarly concise and unrepentantly chipper in addressing the inevitable uproar that will greet his next big bribe to a celebrity, for an EXCLUSIVE baby cover or whatnot, amid economic and media-industry panic. It's what he gets paid to do, and we regret ever expecting better of him. That was clearly foolish.

See, over the weekend the FAS-FAX circulation numbers came out and basically everyone lost. Circ was down more than 5% for the LAT. Meanwhile, on our coast, the Newark Star-Ledger is slashing 40% of its newsroom staff. They are trying to sell the paper but no one wants it.

It is basically a bad time to enjoy getting a paycheck. Sadly, the Newspaper Industry is not too big to fail.

From: "Dixon, Bob"
To: [Numerous pe.com employees]
Subject: Sept. 15 issue of The Business Presss
Date: Sep 10, 2008 3:05 PM

All:

I am deeply saddened by the wholesale destruction of what was once the editorial credibility of The Business Press with the publication in the September 15 issue of a thinly-veiled advertising product labeled "Business Profiles." Please understand that I have no problem with the concept or the effort to generate revenue; it is the manner in which it was done, and the complete disregard for any semblance of editorial integrity, to which I object.

It is perhaps telling that the publishers chose to ignore all of the methods traditionally employed to separate advertising from editorial content. I offered my views on maintaining this distinction when the concept was first proposed several months ago.

1. The section uses a title, "profiles," that has been used for years to denote a regular feature in the editorial pages, including on the cover each week;
2. The only printed indication anywhere that the section contains advertising and not editorial content is in the text-sized page folio;
3. The light blue overhead banner created specifically to denote editorial content during the paper's last redesign is employed at the top of pages in the ad section containing advertising content; and
4. The same typeface used for editorial content has also been used for advertorial content, unlike the sans-serif face that has been one of the principal distinguishing factors employed in the paper's prior advertising or "banner" pages.

For those reasons, I have chosen to remove my name from the masthead of the Sept. 15 issue of The Business Press.

This is just the latest — although one of the more egregious — examples of the current administration's complete lack of regard for its editorial products. It is also one of the reasons that I have chosen to accept a buyout.

Robert F. Dixon

...............................

From: Robert Dixon
To: [Several e-mail addresses]
Subject: Bob's gone...
Date: Sep 10, 2008 6:08 PM

I know tongues are wagging, so here's the scoop: [Business Press publisher] Frank [Escobedo] had me ejected from the building because of my earlier email. Starting my voluntary severance early.

We salute you, Bob Dixon. [UPDATE: Here's Bob's website, give him some work!]

[via Romenesko]

So anyway, the first gift presented – and the best – was scavenged from the 43rd Street building by Janet Higbie, an editor on the Foreign desk: a hardbound copy of The New York Times style manual, in PRISTINE condition, Janet emphasized. As in, NEVER used. So shiny. So pretty. And the name inscribed on the inside? (Drumroll…)

Jayson Blair.

Hah. That would explain so, so much. He never even read the part about how you're not supposed to lie and plagiarize! To be fair, it's way after the bit about the Oxford Comma, which is where most readers give up.

Conversations on why on Earth the Washington Post felt the need to explain what a "wingman" is in 2006. And also why so many girls are total sluts these days (she got a book out of that one, so she's not sweating this). Sad. Who will chronicle the terrible sexual habits of the youth at the Post now? We were so looking forward to learning the true meaning of a Facebook Poke, some time in 2010. [WP]

With competitive threats looming from The Wall Street Journal, which like The Post is owned by News Corp., sources said the business desk and national desk will be spared and will absorb only token cuts.

The Metro desk, headed by Joe Sexton, is headed toward a major reorganization and could absorb the brunt of the involuntary axings.

[Post]

I sort of think the joke doesn't work with Alex Kuczynski given that she's no longer on staff and hasn't been for a loooooong time. Deborah Solomon is obviously a contract writer with the magazine, not a member of the union. Hence neither of them belong in your poll. And Amanda Hesser did quit, already. A couple of weeks ago. Anyway, I don't mean ot be all high and mighty about it, but it just seems to me that in general, if you are going to be merciless cunts, it would help to know what you're talking about.

And regarding Alessandra Stanley, and the post from yesterday... She is exactly the kind of Times writer Gawker ought to be championing, and instead you guys have been relentlessly kicking the shit out of her for three years, for every correction she ever gets, for her style, writing today that she should be forced to take a buyout...Obviously, she gets too many corrections, but she churns out (sometimes) as many as five columns a week, and is funny and irreverent not in the maer roshan sense of the word, but in the real sense of the word...Are you guys jealous? Did you just arbitrarily decide to be malicious to her? I totally get it with useless Bill Carter but with her, I find it totally mystifying.

Just saying.

Good points all, except for the lame (five columns a week! presumably written while dodging sniper fire?) defense of Alessandra Stanley, who clearly just hates her job. Kelefa Sanneh has never, to our knowledge, accidentally mentioned the hit single "Totally Out-There" from hiphop duo Charles Barkley. Maybe the architecture critic accidentally mistakes perforated parapets for plain ones every week but we're not a nation of architects, we're a nation of television viewers, and we notice when someone calls it "All About Raymond."

We freely own up to malicious cuntiness, though.

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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

See, when writers stay in their jobs for decades, the papers lose their freshness and stop innovating. In the meantime, talented young reporters are having a hard time getting hired for top positions because no one ever leaves (sort of like when you're following in the car behind an old person and they're weaving all over the road and you can't get around them).

That's right — the boomer ceiling has been keeping us down, man! After all, if Michael Jordan had never left, there wouldn't have been room for Lebron James (we're pretending that we watch sports today). Besides stifling innovation, these old sea dogs of journalism also cost news organizations shitloads of money with their overinflated salaries. Young reporters, on the other hand, come cheap.

Recently, New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse
accepted a $300,000 farewell package and Newsweek's David Ansen and David Gates have taken deals as well. But it's not all "move bitch, get out the way"! Most of these graybeards wind up with a nice parting gift in the form of jobs in academia (Greenhouse is headed to Yale Law).

Shafer adds: "While I hold the 61-year-old Greenhouse in great esteem and will miss her coverage, it's worth noting that she had covered the Supremes for nearly 30 years. Disco was still big when she took the assignment. Starsky and Hutch was on television."

Laugh all you want but in 40 years, they'll be judging us for hip-hop trance mixes and Ghost Whisperer.

David Gates
Newsweek isn't known for its prose, but David Gates's style was the exception. His review of Colson Whitehead's novel Apex Hides the Hurt had intern Alexis at hello. His first novel Jernigan, received a rave from the hard-to-please Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, "The minute he starts talking, Peter Jernigan, the narrator of David Gates's astonishing first novel, grabs you by the lapels and compels you to listen to the sad-funny-tragic story of his life." Newsweek has few other writers with such style, and he will be missed.

David Ansen
Since January 26, 1958, Newsweek film critic David Ansen has been counting every movie he seen. By October 29, 2007, he was up to 7,714, and counting. A member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Society of Film Critics and New York Film Critics Circle, Ansen will have to reach 10,000 on his own.

Cathleen McGuigan
A graduate of Brown and Harvard, Cathleen McGuigan is an adjunct professor at the Columbia Journalism School. Her 1986 description of Soho artist as "America's last pioneers, urban nomads in search of wide open interior spaces" for Newsweek is a Bartleby notable quote.

Harold Shain
Harold Shain was a business man. The former president and chief operating officer of Newsweek in March 1998 left the position to become the chief executive of Newsweek Budget Travel just last October. He couldn't have known then that only a few months later he would be accepting a buyout from the Washington Post company.

Alexis Gelber
Alexis Gelber was literally married to Newsweek. That's an approximation of the headline of her Times wedding announcement to Mark Whitaker: "Alexis Gelber Married To Newsweek Writer. Gelber was also a judge on Barnard's annual writing contest for 11th-grade girls in New York City public high schools in 1999.

Nancy Cooper
Senior editor Nancy Cooper took us into Y2K, editing the Newsweek's news section on 2000 from 1997 until the aughts.

George Hackett
If there's one man who embodied the general interest spirit of Newsweek, it was George Hackett. The senior editor worked in the Science & Technology, oversaw the coverage of the Salt Lake City Games, edited Perspectives and My Turn sections. He also started 1994, he initiated Focus: On Technology, which ironically centered on the rise of the internet, which would be one cause of his buyout.

Crust, Kevin—Calendar Darling, Jill—poll Delson, Jennifer—Metro Doggrell, Glenn—Designer Fantazia, Joan—Features Furlong, Tom—National Green, Julie—Editorial pages Griggs, Greg—Ventura Hale, Liz—magazine designer Hunt, Don—Metro Kang, Connie—Metro Krikorian, Greg—Metro Kunitomi, Darrell—tour guide Levin, Myron—Metro Nazario, Sonia—project writer Neal, Ron—features designer Norwood, Robyn—Sports Piccalo, Gina—Features Pinkus, Susan—poll Rabin, Jeff—Metro

From Deidre Depke, Editor of Newsweek.com:

URGENT: PLEASE READ CAREFULLY

I regret to have to tell you that some of the funds collected during the
Tip Sheet Holiday Sale that took place on December 11, 2007, are
missing. We don't have a list of who wrote checks (each of which would
have been made payable to "The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund"), so
I'm reaching out to all of you who might have attended the Sale to alert
you to the situation — the immediate concern is for the security of
your bank account. I've spoken to my Newsweek colleagues and here's
what they suggest:

· you should review your past couple of bank statements, or check
with your bank, to see if your check was ever deposited. If it was
deposited, please let Maggie Buehler know immediately. If it wasn't
deposited, you should strongly consider putting a "Stop Payment" order
on the check (your bank can tell you how to do this). Newsweek has
agreed to reimburse you for any related bank fees.

· you should talk to your bank about whether, for security reasons,
it might be advisable to change your account number. Again, Newsweek
has agreed to reimburse you for any associated bank fees.

I'm aware that this situation may cause you some inconvenience — but
the primary and immediate concern is for the security of your checking
account.

If you're still interested in making a donation to The New York Times
Neediest Cases Fund, you can send your check to Maggie. Newsweek will
match your contribution (and it won't affect your matching gift limit
for 2008).

Again, I'm truly sorry for any inconvenience. If you have any questions
or concerns, please contact