NY Times To Lay Off/Eliminate 7.5% Of Newsroom Staff - How Come Opinion Page Columnists Are Immune From Cuts?

From the NY Times:

The New York Times plans to eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs, as well as a smaller number of positions from its editorial and business operations, offering buyouts and resorting to layoffs if enough people do not leave voluntarily, the newspaper announced on Wednesday. 

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the newspaper’s publisher, and Mark Thompson, its chief executive, said that in addition to the job cuts, NYT Opinion, a new mobile app dedicated to opinion content, was shutting down because it was not attracting enough subscribers.

The reductions, they said, were intended to safeguard the newspaper’s long-term profitability.

“The job losses are necessary to control our costs and to allow us to continue to invest in the digital future of The New York Times, but we know that they will be painful both for the individuals affected and for their colleagues,” the note said.

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The Times has made cuts to its newsroom staff several times over the last six years. The paper eliminated 100 newsroom jobs in 2008, another 100 in 2009, and 30 more senior newsroom jobs at the beginning of last year.

It's interesting to me that every time layoffs are announced, the high paid columnists on the opinion pages are never part of the cuts.

How much are Brooks, Friedman, Dowd, and Kristoff making between them?

I bet you could save a couple of newsroom jobs by sending just one of them packing.

But it's never the high-priced neo-liberal whores on the opinion pages who get shown the door when cuts get announced.

How come that is?

Not saying I want to see the columnists lose their jobs (unlike some of those same columnists, who love the idea of firing teachers), but if it's between newsroom staff who are actually working for a living and these columnists who parrot neo-liberal talking points for a living, I'd rather see the columnists go.

Oh, and just to show you how warm and fuzzy capitalism is, the Times stock was up nearly 10% after the cutbacks were announced:

The announcements were welcomed by investors, with the company’s stock closing at $12.30, up $1.08, or 9.6 percent, after closing Tuesday at a 52-week low.

Lay people off, stock goes up.

The American Dream in a nutshell.