Axes editing jobs in favor of 100 more reporters

US - New York Times journalists will be offered buyouts in order to reduce the number of editors, the newspaper has said, but newsroom staff could face compulsory layoffs if there are not enough takers. The paper will also eliminate the in-house watchdog position of public editor as it shifts focus to reader comments. “Today, our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be,” publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr said in a memo, which was seen by Reuters. The Times is opening up the majority of its articles to comments from readers, up from 10% currently, according to the memo. The latest round of buyouts will be mostly offered to editors as the Times seeks to shift the balance of editors to reporters, according to a memo filed with regulators from Dean Baquet, executive editor, and Joe Kahn, managing editor. “If we do not get enough takers to fund our ambitious plans to reduce the editing staff and hire more reporters, we will unfortunately have to turn to layoffs,” Baquet and Kahn said. They said that the savings generated by the cuts would be used to hire as many as 100 more journalists. The cuts to layers of editing were one of the main recommendations in an internal report published in January called 2020 examining how to transform the business for the digital age.

Although the Times now claims 2.2 million digital subscribers, it was suffering from the same decline in advertising revenues that is affecting the whole print media. Liz Spayd, the current public editor, will leave the paper on Friday, according to the memo from Sulzberger. “The one thing an ombud or public editor can almost always do is hold feet to the fire, and get a real answer out of management,” Margaret Sullivan, former public editor at The New York Times, said in a Twitter post in response to the news. (Theguardian.com)