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.

...

 

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.

Christine Quinn Plays The Victim Card

Quinn is clearly getting desperate:

A comment by Bill de Blasio’s wife that appeared to imply Christine Quinn could not relate to woman voters because she doesn’t have children drew ire from Quinn Wednesday - but the de Blasio campaign produced an audio tape showing she was misquoted.

The original article by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, which has since been corrected, quotes Chirlane McCray saying of Quinn, "She’s not the kind of person I feel I can go up to and talk to about issues like taking care of children at a young age and paid sick leave."

An incensed Quinn this morning released a statement blasting McCray - a mother of two - for criticizing her for being childless.

“There are women all across the City who don’t have children for any number of reasons, whether they simply can’t, choose not to, or circumstances don’t afford them the possibility,” Quinn said.

“I have taken a number of shots in this race from the men running against me, and I accept that as par for the course in a political campaign. But to criticize me as not understanding what young families go through because I might not have children, is over the line and I take great personal offense to the comment, as does my wife.”

Shortly after, the de Blasio campaign released a statement of their own, saying the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist got the quote wrong.

They included a transcript of the interview -- and tape to back it up.

Dowd: "What do you think the problem is with women voters, why hasn't she been able to get that Hillary kind of thing going where whatever flaws are involved they're excited to break that barrier?"

McCray: "Well I am a woman, and she is not speaking to the issues I care about and I think a lot of women feel the same way. I don’t see her speaking to the concerns of women who have to take care of children at a young age or send them to school and after school, paid sick days, workplace, she is not speaking to any of those issues. What can I say?  And she is not accessible, she is not the kind of person that I feel that you can go up and talk to and have a conversation with about those things, and I suspect that other women feel the same thing I’m feeling."

The Times posted a correction, but the Quinn campaign insisted it stood by its original statement because the essential meaning of the remarks was the same and continued to blast out criticism from surrogates.

Times spokesman Danielle Rhoads said: "Maureen Dowd realized she had truncated the quote and immediately asked her editors to fix it.”

McCray was misquoted, the full transcript proves that she didn't say what the Quinn campaign is saying she said, both the New York Times as an organization and Maureen Dowd as an individual have backed McCray up - but that's not stopping Quinn from playing the victim here.

Clearly desperate to stop de Blasio's momentum, the Quinn campaign will grasp at anything at this point.

But this is just a b.s. gambit by Quinn - especially because McCray's comments are so accurate.

Quinn and her office people have been inaccessible to New Yorkers.

I know, I've called and left messages on education issues and never gotten any response.

Not once.

Inaccessible indeed.