Saturday, April 26, 2008

NYT Readies Ax for Dozens of more Editorial Staff & Jouralists as Circulation & Ad Revenues Plummet

The New York Times has persuaded many dozens of it long-term staff to take a separation package giving three weeks pay for every year of employment in the ink-stained confines of the old Gray Lady. Jayson Blair got an early heave-ho, but the old-timers may have to be wrenched out of their comfortable cubicles with crowbars of a green-slip variety.

Obviously, this sad denouement to careers in what used to be the "Newspaper of Record" hurts serious journalists, oxymoronic as that term is beginning to sound under the editorial supervision of Managing Editor King Kong Billy Keller. And the Big Brother Pinch continues to play the role of a Gorbachev with ideological fixations. His front page has become the plaything of quixotic crusades, though the windmill of Augusta National which Pinch & King Kong's predecessor assaulted in hundreds of feminist rodomontades no longer is the main fixed idea in Pinch's meth-fried brain.

Pinch has become an Obama-niac in the last couple of months, shortly after he imprudently endorsed Hillary. His need for psychiatric help becomes more manifest every day and many readers simply have decided to cancel their subscriptions rather than follow the bouncing ball of Pinch's obsessions. Other reasons impinge on the slow degringolade of the NYT into mediocrity and fiscal jeopardy, but Rupert Murdoch proves that journalism can still be produced in Babylon-on-the-Hudson.

The WSJ might even hire some of the refugees from Pinch's slowly sinking Titanic.

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