ping
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/03/greenhouse_defect_tough_times.html
Does the Greenhouse Defect Signal a Times Brain Drain?
The problem with buyouts is that you can’t choose who leaves. So when New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced to the staff on February 28 that the paper would be mailing out buyout packages to every non-guild employee in the newsroom, it was hoped that some of the papers more redundant staffers might self-select. Theres so much deadwood at the paper, and everyone knows it, says one former Times reporter. There are editors who basically do nothing and writers who write 30 pieces a year.
Linda Greenhouse, the papers Pulitzer Prizewinning Supreme Court reporter, is not one of those. She has been tirelessly covering that beat for three decades, and although she has received her share of criticism (a speech she made at Harvard in 2006 slamming the Bush administration was perceived as crossing the line by the Times critics, some of its reporters, and even its public editor), she is widely considered to be in the handful of the paper’s elite reporters (The queen bee of Supreme Court reporters, the Columbia Journalism Review called her.)
snip