As many as 700 — almost ten-percent of the overall staff — are on the chopping block at Time Magazine. According to New York Magazine, a whole herd of top-level sacred cows at the New York Times will be given the non-choice of a buyout or a forced layoff within the next few weeks.
Back in April of 2009, only a couple of months after Mr. Obama took office, Megan McCardle, then with Atlantic magazine, wrote:
Conde laid off Julian Sanchez yesterday amid more cuts in its digital properties. Conde is in an especially bad place with the web: their core competency is selling beautiful, glossy ad pages that readers enjoy looking at. This does not translate well to a digital format, and it’s hard to make your company over overnight.
A bunch of my journalist friends and I have decided that our new toast is “to 2010?. 2009 has so far been pretty disappointing for almost everyone I know, not to mention the country for which we all have great affection.
One year later, in April of 2010, Newsweek told the nation that America’s Back! Time to Barack and roll all night and party every day!
I thought everything was green grass and high tides forever after that. (Well, other than Obama’s ocean reset.) Recovery Summer, the Obama economy is in full steam, Happy Days Are Here Again! (To borrow from the refrain of another “Progressive” president who carried with him his own perma-Depression.)
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