NY Times to cut 100 newsroom jobs

New York, New York, Oct. 19 — The New York Times announced today that it will cut 100 jobs from its newsroom staff by the end of 2009 thanks to efficiencies resulting from publishing only stories dictated or approved by the Obama administration.

“With advertising revenues plummeting because we can’t figure out how to compete with sites like Craigslist,” Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told employees, “management has looked in vain for a new business model that would support our newsroom staff of 1250 persons — just 500 more than any other U.S. newspaper. We quickly rejected suggestions that we do things like original reporting on corrupt community organizing groups — that would be racist. Plus, our readers have never heard of groups like ACORN. We can’t investigate union corruption — we’re union workers, too. We can’t investigate Obama’s czars — that’s what Fox News did and look what happened to them — a 20 percent increase in viewers, but no one at the White House will speak to them. How can they live with themselves?

“But then we calculated the efficiencies we have been realizing since January by publishing only stories dictated to us by Obama’s press office,” Keller told the assembled workers, “and we saw that we could cut 100 jobs in our newsroom. Frankly, we could cut 1,000 jobs in the newsroom and still put out the same calibre of reporting we do now, but we don’t have the money to buy out all those union contracts.”