From the Feb. 15 NYT:

After years of resisting the newsroom cuts that have hit most of the industry, The New York Times will bow to growing financial strain and eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs this year, the executive editor said Thursday.

The cuts will be achieved “by not filling jobs that go vacant, by offering buyouts, and if necessary by layoffs,” the executive editor, Bill Keller, said. The more people who accept buyouts, he said, “the smaller the prospect of layoffs, but we should brace ourselves for the likelihood that there will be some layoffs.”

He said, “We intend to move quickly, to get any cuts past us so that we do not spend a year bleeding slowly.”

The Times has 1,332 newsroom employees, the largest number in its history; no other American newspaper has more than about 900. There were scattered buyouts and job eliminations in the newsroom in recent years, but the overall number continued to rise, largely from the growth of its Internet operations.

By the way, the NYT's share price circa 2002? US$52. In January? About US$15.

If you dare, go to this globeinvestor page on the New York Times Co. and and look at the five-year chart of the NYT's stock compared to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. One's going up. And one's going down. :(

From the Feb. 15 NYT:

The Los Angeles Times named a new top editor on Thursday, Russ Stanton, three weeks after the previous editor, James E. O’Shea, was forced out for resisting another in a series of staff cuts.

Mr. Stanton, who has been running The Times’s Web site, will take charge of an deeply unsettled newsroom that in less than three years has lost three chief editors, all of whom publicly protested the shrinking of the news staff.

I wrote the following on Thursday:

I wonder if this is more of a real-world opportunity to test some of the U.S.'s missile-shield technology than an effort to protect the world against the ravages of hydrazine. The Pentagon says no.

And if you ever needed proof the Kremlin reads this blog, observe this AP story via CTV.ca:

Russia said Saturday that U.S. military plans to shoot down a damaged spy satellite may be a veiled test of America's missile defence system.

The Pentagon failed to provide "enough arguments'' to back its plan to smash the satellite next week with a missile, Russia's Defence Ministry said in a statement.

"There is an impression that the United States is trying to use the accident with its satellite to test its national anti-missile defence system's capability to destroy other countries' satellites,'' the ministry said.