Posted on 03/10/2006 8:28:15 AM PST by abb
NEW YORK The Washington Post plans to cut at least 80 newsroom jobs through attrition and buyouts, according to sources at the paper who said editors began giving staffers the bad news on Thursday in meetings and will continue today.
"My understanding is that the editors and managing editors brought this up with other issues of downsizing, but with no layoffs," said one source in the metro staff, which got first word of the news in a meeting Thursday. "It looks like through attrition and buyouts."
Another source in the national staff said a meeting was being held this morning to give them the bad news, with similar gatherings throughout the day. "Eighty through attrition and buyouts," the source said. "They are going staff by staff."
The paper has about 800 editorial employees, many represented by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. Rick Weiss, a Post reporter and Guild unit chair at the paper, could not be reached for comment this morning.
Other cost cuts also are being rumored, including the eventual closing of at least two foreign bureaus and changes to some other overseas bureaus that would have staffers working out of their homes.
Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and Publisher Bo Jones did not return calls seeking comment.
Post spokesman Eric Grant offered no comment when asked about the pending cuts or any official announcement, saying only, "not at this point." Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.
80 fired, 720 to go.
You're bad.
I hope the former employees were given life long health care benefits like they demand of every other capitalist enterprise.
Must see post 21!
Unfortunately, no. You would have to live in the Washington, DC area for awhile to see the number of liberals that infest that place. There's no way that a liberal bastion such as The Washington Post would ever go under. Unfortunately.
...I have no confidence that reducing staff will improve either the quality of their reporting or their objectivity.....
If it is like a distillstion process, the reporting will become less objective as the need to remain employed strikes fear into the hearts of those remaining.
LOL, love it!!
Thanks for the ping!
My daughter used to work in a newsroom in a small local paper. Most of what happened there involved formatting ads around the press releases.
WaPo COULD outsource a large part of their newsroom work to India
".........This will cause it to decline in quality."
There's always room for improvement, but I'm frankly stumped at exactly what WaPo could do to degrade their quality any further.
Really hard to visualize that there's anything lower than whale feces.
Great news! With an added bonus of all of the outstanding FReeper comments, cartoons, links, etc., !
Craigslist devastates newspapers, most of which are liberal.
Support Craigslist and help him gut their classified ads revenue.
where are those hands?
Good one.
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